You can't sell your art unless people can see it. This might seem like an obvious statement but the fact is that very many artists love to create their work, and they produce one beautiful painting after another, and then stack them carefully against the wall in their studio. The canvases just mount up and many of them scarcely get to see the light of day again. This happens because so many artists are creatively immersed in their imaginative process and hardly give a thought to selling at all.
Despite the fact that many artists would prefer to forget about selling and just keep on creating artwork, most of them do actually want to sell their art and, if it was possible, they would like to make a living from their art so that they could concentrate on it full-time.
In order to be able to sell your art work you have to make sure that it has a chance of being seen by lots of people who are interested in art, only then will you have an opportunity of finding a buyer, because it's very unlikely that an art lover will seek you out to buy your work unless you are very famous, or unless you advertise that you accept commissions.
So to sell your artwork you need to display it in the places where potential buyers will be looking, and basically this means you need to find an agent, or an art gallery website, to display and sell your art. Any artist who doesn't have gallery representation, whether on or off line, or a good art agent, is likely to find the task of selling their art particularly difficult.
The internet provides many opportunities for displaying and selling your artwork, but bear in mind that the wrong website can actually damage your reputation, because if the venue looks like a ‘car boot sale’ or an amateurish back-room job, no one will take you or your work seriously and you will fail to get the right price for your creative efforts. Beware of getting tied down into an expensive contract that is not doing you any favours.
Probably the best way of finding an agent who can promote your work offline is to talk to other artists who are selling their work and see who they recommend. Unless you have a lot of experience in exhibiting nationally, it's usually better to work with an agent who is local to you and who is prepared to promote your work in your local community. You will often find that the most successful artists began building their reputation in the area where they live first, before becoming more widely known. A good agent should have contacts with all the local galleries and be able to place you in the best position for exhibiting to the right audience. They should also be able to advise you on the presentation of your work and help you with your artist's statement, and even advise you on pricing your individual pieces of artwork if you ask them.
Quite often an agent will want you to sign a contract with them, so that they represent you for a given length of time. They prefer this because when they have put a lot of work into promoting you they naturally want you to stay around long enough so that they will see a return on their efforts. Although, quite commonly, these contracts would last for twelve months or longer, it is better if you can keep it to a six-month contract, initially, and see how you go. At the end of the day an agent might be very good, and have worked very well for someone else, but is perhaps just not the right one for your work, so it's better to keep the contract shorter rather than find you are obliged to stay with them when for some reason you're not really getting on. Once you know that an agent is working well for you, you can talk with them about extending the contract. It’s at that point that you may also want to discuss more favourable commission terms as well. Agents, like most galleries, do tend to like to charge high commission on sales.
Finding a website where you can display and sell your artwork online is a different matter. When your artwork is displayed on a website, you automatically have a national and international audience for your work and a massive market place of potential buyers right from the start. There's no such thing as a free lunch, so they say, and it's very true to say that the odds of you being successful in selling your artwork on a free website are very poor indeed.
If you think about it for a moment, and put yourself in the website owner's shoes, you can understand that the person who owns the website has to get something out of it to help pay for hosting the site and for running it. If the website allows you to display your artwork for no charge then they are probably making money from the site by displaying advertising banners all over it, or using it primarily as a publicity tool for their own work, their art supplies, or some other such venture.
This doesn’t sound promising for you and doesn’t bode well for them helping you to promote and sell your artwork on their site. This is because, in truth, they are not very interested in you, you are just one more person helping to increase their page numbers and their rankings. So don't get caught up in the 'selling it for free' notion, you might get to display your art for free, but do you really think you will sell it for free and get the price it deserves?
On the other hand, art gallery websites that charge large sums of money for you to display and sell your artwork may not necessarily be worth it either, because sometimes they charge large sums of money just because they can and not because they are great at what they do.
Some people sign up with them just because their charges are high, thinking that high fees equal high successes, but this isn’t actually true for the most part. So it can be a bit of a minefield for the uninitiated when you're trying to find the right website to display and sell your art.
Some artists have told me that they had been advised to find out how many hits or visitors a gallery website is getting, and how many art sales the website has made, before signing up to sell their artwork on that site. When you think about it, this really is a nonsense, because it's quite common practice for some unscrupulous webmasters to be very over optimistic when quoting visitor statistics. In fact, in some cases it seems as though a few of the worst offenders just think of a number and double or even treble it! How can you know what the real statistics actually are? You can't - but one thing you can say for sure is that if you found the website quite easily then other people will certainly be doing so as well.
As far as asking about the number of sales that a website has made, it doesn't always follow that a website having made the most sales would necessarily be able to sell your work. If a website has made a great deal of sales how many of the artists were getting a good price for the work, or were the paintings being sold off at very low prices to anyone willing to pay just a few pounds or dollars for all your creativity, imagination and hard work.
If you exhibited your artwork alongside ten other artists work, and each piece was within the same genre and the same price, no one could guarantee that your art would be the one sold. Art is a lot like beauty, it is very much in the eye of the beholder, and just as each artist produces different work so each art buyer is looking for something different.
An art buyer might prefer to collect oil paintings, for example, or watercolours, but quite often they do like to browse other styles and mediums first before deciding to purchase. This means that to display your artwork on a website that accepts a variety of different mediums is a good idea, the variety creates interest, wets the collector’s appetite and draws a greater number of people to the website.
Probably it is better to display your artwork among that of other artists, whether it is a small group of people or a larger number on the website, rather than on a site where you are by yourself, unless you are very well known. It's good to remember that it's not a competition between all the artists, but a marketplace where potential art buyers will like to browse and find the pieces that they like the best.
The most important things to remember when choosing a gallery website to display and sell your artwork online, is to find one that has been professionally built and professionally optimised for search engines, so that you know the website and your work will be found. Find out whether the site owners use internet technology to promote your work in a wider market place, for instance with RSS and other means, as well as displaying your work on the main site. Does the site you are considering have a 'featured art’ section or put links to your work from other pages? In short, how hard do they really work to promote YOUR art?
The website where you choose to display your work needs to look professional, so that you will be taken seriously as an artist and so that you can get the price you want to your art. If the website makes a visitor think of a bargain basement when they visit it, they are unlikely to want to pay a realistic price of your work, and that’s if they decide to buy anything at all. Web sites that are cluttered with banner advertisements, polls to vote in, and a conglomeration of distracting links and unrelated images, do nothing to increase your credibility as an artist or to persuade the visitor to purchase.
Lastly, when seeking a website to display and sell your artwork online, you need to ask yourself whether the website exists just to make money from you and just to promote itself, or whether it has been built and is being run to promote you and help you to sell your artwork. Look around for a website where the owners are easy to contact and communicate with, that looks professional so it will display your artwork to its best, and where you will be made to feel a valued member of the art gallery collective rather than just a name among many who have been gathered to swell the ranks.
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