Pricing Your Wildlife Prints
“I love your photos. You should sell them!”
"Have you ever thought about selling your photos? They're just beautiful!"
"You're so talented, you really should be selling your photos!"
Raise your hand if you’ve heard any of these, or a version of them, before. This kind of proclamation from well-meaning friends and family is so common, that it's almost considered a wildlife photographer's rite of passage.
But it's exciting, isn't it — the idea that people connect with you and your art enough that they'd like to purchase a print or two for their walls?
So you choose a website like Zenfolio or SmugMug, putting some of your favorite images online. You share the launch of your website with your Facebook friends, all of whom are really excited for you. And then the sales come rolling in, right?
Wrong.
Selling prints of your photography is one of the most difficult (but not impossible) ways to break into making money from your work, especially if you're not a recognized name in the business just yet.
If you have Googled anything about how to sell your photography, you've seen that all of the advice is truly generic:
Create an Etsy shop
Display your work in a coffee shop
Start a print-on-demand (Art Storefronts, Fine Art America, Society6, etc.) store
Show your work at art fairs
When was the last time you walked into a coffee shop and dropped $500 or more on a photo for your home? Do you think interior designers or commercial art buyers spend their time perusing Etsy when they're shopping for their clients? When you picture the people who will buy your work, do you think they want to wade through tens of thousands of products from tens of thousands of photographers on Fine Art America?
Nope.
Any business requires a considerable investment of time and effort to find success. You certainly can spend a few dozen hours carefully setting up an Etsy shop that can sit there with all of the others. You can also pound the pavement to see if a coffee shop has some available wall space and hope for the best.
Or, you can take a hard look at what you're trying to accomplish and decide if selling prints is really the best way to get there. Only you can decide if this. For my work and my professional goals, I find that my time is better invested in reaching out to photo editors to develop a long-term relationship, taking an interior designer out to lunch to discuss collaborating on a custom piece, or taking the time to carefully keyword and craft captions for my stock photography archive.
Even though I don't spend any time marketing or promoting prints, I do sell a fair amount of fine art prints each year. Most of the time, someone saw one of my photos in a magazine or posted to my Instagram and emailed me to see if I had them for sale.
Jared’s experience in selling his photography is similar. Once, a commercial interior designer saw one of his photos in a magazine and purchased a 40-inch by 60-inch canvas to hang in the lobby of her client's building. Not only did that create a sale, but it also created a professional connection for future work. Now, high-end buyers or their representatives just reach out to him directly.
The reason neither of us put a lot of effort into selling our prints is that it's incredibly time-consuming work. It's both our experiences that other avenues for earning income—licensing photos, selling stock photography, or taking assignment work—not only take less time, but they also yield long-term results that go beyond the instant gratification of one sale.
While selling prints is one of the more difficult ways to earn any sort of consistent income (and it certainly isn't passive income), it isn't impossible. It does take more than just throwing up a website and hoping for the best, however.
I know it seems like I just used 650 words to try and talk you out of selling your prints. I definitely do not want to discourage you from going that route. Every photographer I know who has wanted to make money from selling their prints has done so and you can, too.
But, unlike the generic photo blogs and listicles out there, it’s important that you have a realistic picture of the industry, how it works, and what you’re getting yourself into. So many photographers I know start out their business with print sales and burn out or abandon their business because it’s so much more work than they bargained for.
In talking with other working wildlife photographers, their point-of-view is similar to mine: selling prints is great, but get some of the more passive options (stock sales or licensing photos, for example) working in the background first.
What is Your Photography Worth?
We’d all love to be Tom Mangelson, with four brick-and-mortar galleries in the United States, an online private stock agency, and a suite of art consultants who sell his photography to collectors. He understands something that many photographers do not: you do not determine the value of your prints. Your clients do. He nurtured his clients and future clients over time and paved the way for his own success.
Price and value are not one and the same, though they do go hand-in-hand. You set your price, but everything from the quality of the print to how it is presented all impact the perceived value of the actual product.
If your clients perceive the value of your photos to be worth paying $700, then you can sell them for that price. If they feel like the value of your photos is only $50, then that is what they are worth and what you can sell them for. You'll have to play around a bit with your pricing to see what you're selling the most and at what price.
This is also a good time to tell you two things that most photographers never learn:
Your friends and family are not your clients.
You are not your client.
We all have those friends and family members who want to support us and buy our work. But when you tell them the price, they balk and say, “No one is going to pay that much for your photo.”
That family member is not your client.
Similarly, you may think “I can’t charge $1000 for that print! I’d never spend that on a photo of a bird!” You are also not your client. Just because you wouldn’t buy one of your photos for that price doesn’t mean someone else won’t.
This is where you have to set aside your photographer ego and look at your work objectively. Imagine you’re walking down the street and you see one of your photos in the window of a shop. How much would you pay for it? Realistically?
When I do sell my prints, I prefer to sell them already matted and preferably framed. I like to sell my photos as custom art that is ready to hang. I made this decision after someone bought just the print alone and I didn’t care for how flimsy and cheap it looked. Sure, it was a gorgeous print. But presenting a single piece of paper to someone who paid me $800 for it didn't really create an experience I want one of my buyers to have.
How you present your photos greatly impacts the perceived value of your work, which determines how much you can charge for your work. There is a reason that, while both discount department stores, people view Target very differently than they view Wal-Mart.
Years ago, one of my photos was juried into a show at a gallery. Each accepted photographer was responsible for presenting their own photos according to the specs provided by the gallery - the print was to be 16x20 inches, surrounded by a 2-inch white mat and a 1-inch black frame. We also set our own prices for the piece, taking into consideration the industry standard 30-50% commission the gallery would receive for the sale.
It was my first juried show, and as an emerging photographer, I really wanted my piece to sell, but I also wanted it to be profitable. I used my favorite boutique photo lab, as they hand-cut their 4-ply and 8-ply cotton mats and their frames are truly exquisite. It cost considerably more than having my photo mounted to foam core board and thrown in a cheap plastic-composite frame like most of the bigger labs provide, but next to the rest of the photos in the show, my presentation of my photograph stood out and easily justified my $1500 price tag. It was the only piece priced at more than $250, and one of just two pieces that sold in the entire show.
I’ve never subscribed to the idea that newer, less experienced photographers should charge less for their work. As artists, our years of experience are not what dictates what we are paid. Charge what you are worth. Always.
Before you even begin thinking about what you would like to charge for your photos, you must think through how you will present your work and what value you are communicating with that presentation.
Even Tom Mangelson ships prints only rolled up in a cardboard mailing tube. But, he’s Tom Mangelson and that is his way of providing an option for the customer who doesn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a framed print. Plus, having that lower-priced option gets more buyers in the door and helps him market and sell to those buyers in the future.
Open Edition, Limited Edition, and Artist's Proofs
Generally speaking, there are three categories that prints fall into in the photography and art world: open edition, limited edition, and artist’s proofs.
Open edition prints are what you’ll find in most of the big print-on-demand shops. Someone can just go online and buy a copy of that image. Think of these as copies of your work that are mass-produced. These are sold at your lowest price point and are typically made with a lustre or satin paper, which is lower in quality than an archival paper or fine art paper.
There is nothing wrong with selling open edition prints. They can still sell for $500+ per photograph.
Limited editions are exactly what they sound like. These prints are only available in a limited quantity. Once you sell through that quantity, they’ll never be produced in that same size or method again. Limited editions are usually signed and numbered (e.g., 17/150) to show which copy that person has purchased. Because these are limited in number, these are priced appropriately higher than the open editions and are printed on premium, archival papers.
Artist’s Proofs are the prints that you, as the photographer, receive when you’re reviewing test prints of photos that are going to be part of a limited edition. For limited editions, it’s important to make sure that you have all of the colors and printing the way you want it. After all, you will never sell those again. So you’ll order samples from your photo lab, tweak the color profile a bit so it looks like you want it to, and then order more samples until you get the print exactly right.
The only thing that makes them artist’s proofs is that they are “test run” photographs that you keep. Often, these are the photographer’s personal copies that are used if they have a gallery show.
If you’d like to sell them, it’s usually only after you’ve sold out the limited edition prints. Then, you sign and date them, mark them with “AP” to denote the copy is one of your proofs, and number them in accordance with how many proofs you have. Because these are your personal proofs and the limited editions are completely sold out, you can charge significantly more for selling one of these.
Most photographers sell their work as open editions, especially when first starting out and trying to build up their client list. You don’t have to do it that way, but it’s the most common. Some photographers, myself included, will do a limited edition run of a special series or personal project.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I did a series of time-lapse photos of a dandelion as each of its seeds started blowing away. I decided to release them as a limited edition series because it was a bit different from my usual work. I printed only ten sets of the five final photographs, and now that they are sold out, all that remains of that project are my artist’s proofs and my digital negatives.
Getting Into The Details
Nothing raises my hackles faster than the oft-repeated pricing advice to just “take your cost of the print and multiply it by four..."
We are in the business of selling our photography, not the business of selling ink and paper.
The problem with whittling down pricing to a standardized formula is that it doesn't leave any room to consider some of the nuances within various genres of photography. It also fails to consider our cost of doing business, which is unique to each photographer and their own set of circumstances.
Now that we have some of the more conceptual aspects of selling your prints out of the way, it’s time to look at the typical business models for print sales:
You have a lower price point, but sell at a high volume
You have a higher price point, but sell fewer of your pieces
Neither one of these options is right nor wrong. How you make the money you’ve laid out in your cost of doing business is up to you. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples to illustrate the difference in approach, using a hypothetical set of numbers.
I’ve got my eye on a 400mm f/2.8 lens and I would like to make $15,000 from my print sales this year so I can buy that lens. The first thing I need to know is my cost of goods (COGS). This is what it will actually cost me to buy and create the physical product. And again, these are hypothetical numbers.
Option One: Sell a lot of photos at a lower price
Print: $20.00
Mat: $15.00
Packaging: $5
Shipping to Client: $10
Total: $50
This is just the tangible cost of fulfilling the order. It doesn’t take into consideration any of the other costs associated with the work - the time to prepare and order the product, my time in the field creating the photo, etc.
If I sell this print for $150, I have to sell 150 of them to get to the $15,000 profit goal. And, I’d probably want to shoot a little higher, because I have to factor in other things that decrease my profit, like income tax on that money earned or credit card processing fees.
Option Two: Selling fewer photos at a higher price
To justify the higher price, I bump up the size of my photo and the quality of my presentation of the photo to increase the perceived value of my work. My costs go up as a result.
Print: $30
Mat: $20
Packaging: $10
Shipping: $10
Total: $70
If I sell these prints for $500 each, I only have to sell 35 of them to cross the $15,000 threshold. Two very different options, but they both get you to the goal.
Again, how you approach sales is up to you. It’s been my experience that it’s easier to sell a lower quantity at a higher price. That said, you may have a nice-sized client roster or you’re selling at art fairs or another retail avenue where higher volume sales work.
Now that you have a baseline idea of what goes into pricing your work, I recommend starting at your end goal (like our $15,000 for the lens example) and working backward. That will help you determine how much you need to sell. From there, you can decide which route (store, website, etc.) is the best for achieving that goal.
No matter what you decide, you also need to consider how you plan on marketing and promoting your photographs. Write down all of the realistic things you can do to get the word out so that you have a go-to list of ideas to get started.
Remember, selling prints is like anything else in your business - it takes an investment of time and a thoughtful approach to marketing. I’ll never forget the first time a client sent me a picture of my photograph hanging above her fireplace. Or when one of my photos of a former president was hung in his presidential library. It’s an incredibly rewarding feeling that every photographer should experience, and hopefully many times over.