THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: How much art do you need to sell to make a living? Artists love imagining what it would feel like to completely sell out. But have you ever stopped to ask whether you can even afford to sell out? In other words, if every available piece of art you have sold tomorrow, how much money would you actually make? And would that number support the income goal you keep talking about? Or would you discover that even your dream scenario falls short? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
Speaker 2: It’s The Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place podcast. An art World Insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Hey there. I’m Miriam Schulman, I’m your curator of inspiration, author of the book Artpreneur, founder of the Artist Incubator program and your host of The Inspiration Place podcast, Welcome back. So many times artists believe that they have a marketing problem or a manifestation problem or a sales problem, but really the problem is they have an inventory problem. And today we’re doing the math. How much art do you need to sell to make a living? So how much art do you need to produce and how much art should be on your website? And how much art should you bring to an art fair? And is your pricing capable of supporting your goal? But more specifically, we’re talking less about pricing today and more about your capacity. Now one year, I want to say this was 2015 or so. My good friend Glenda and I went to an artist conference in Colorado. And then we were so into law of attraction and manifestation and the secret. And we were doing all the aspirational exercises, like sorting the dollar bills and our wallet to make sure we were attracting growth, thinking bigger. And we sat down and we said, wait a minute, do we actually have enough art that if we sold everything, it would support this goal? And suddenly that house of cards completely fell apart. So we had this uncomfortable realization. We didn’t have enough inventory to support the amount of money we wanted to make. So even if our manifestation worked perfectly, even if we completely sold out, we still wouldn’t hit our goal.
Miriam Schulman: So we didn’t need a better vision board. We needed to produce more artwork. We also needed to make sure that the pricing made sense for the amount of artwork we could realistically produce. So the dream wasn’t wrong. The business didn’t have the capacity to hold the dream. Now your available inventory places a ceiling on your revenue. Marketing can help you sell the inventory, but marketing can’t sell artwork that doesn’t exist yet. And a revenue goal without an inventory plan is just a wish. So here’s how you’re going to do the math today. And you can go back to your seventh grade algebra teacher and say, hey, guess what? I used algebra today. I want you to make a list of every piece you can sell today. Some of you have that on your website, some don’t. But I don’t want you to count work that’s not finished, work that isn’t dry, work that you can’t sell because it’s whatever, um, or work you aren’t willing to sell, just work that is available to sell right now. That’s your salable inventory. I want you to look at all that and the price that all that art is worth. That is your inventory ceiling. So available inventory ceiling equals total value of salable artwork. Period. If you have 12 paintings available with an average price of $1,500, your total inventory is worth $18,000.
Miriam Schulman: Now, if your sales goal is $100,000, your $82,000 short. Now, the gap can’t be solved by improving your Instagram captions because there simply isn’t enough available art to create that revenue. Now, for those of you who are supported by galleries, or you work with decorators who take a commission, that number is a little more jarring because if you have a $5,000 painting and the gallery sells it and they take 50%, you only have $2,500. Now, you may be doing this math right along with me, and realizing the number itself isn’t the hardest part. The hard part is figuring out what to do with what the numbers reveal. Do you need to make more art? Do you need to raise your prices? Can you create more expensive art? Larger work? Can you take something off your plate? Should you hire help? Or maybe stop spending time on the parts of your business that aren’t actually making money and moving you forward? These are exactly the kinds of questions that we’re going to untangle during my two day Chelsea experience in New York City. I created this experience because artists rarely give themselves enough spaciousness to step out of reaction mode and make the decisions that will actually change the direction of their entire art business. That was the spaciousness I gave myself the year I went to Colorado. This is an intimate room so we can look at what’s really going on in your art and your business, and identify the decisions that will create the greatest expansion for you.
Miriam Schulman: You can learn more about it and see if you qualify over at SchulmanArt.com/Chelsea. That’s SchulmanArt.com/Chelsea. So let’s get back to our original questions. How many pieces must you sell? This is a basic calculation. Number of artworks equal your revenue goal divided by the average revenue per sale. So let’s assume you want to make $100,000 in direct art sale, but your average price is only $500. You have to make 200 sales. If it’s an average price of $1,000 100 sales, an average price of 2540 sales. An average price of $5,000. 20 sales. And if you have an average price of ten 000, you only need ten sales. A lower price doesn’t merely mean the work might be easier to buy. It means you need more customers, more transactions, more opportunities to sell it. Every transaction requires a customer, an invitation, a conversion, or a checkout, a payment, processing, packing, and delivery, and follow up. So selling 200 artworks to earn $100,000 is radically different kind of business from an artwork that only has to sell 20 artworks. Now, before deciding what your prices should be, look at how many pieces you’re physically capable of producing. This is one of the things that I ask artists all the time who go through my Artpreneur boot camp is to look at their production capacity, and the way I define production capacity is on a scale of 1 to 10, not.
Miriam Schulman: How much do you enjoy creating the art, but what is your capacity to actually make it so? If you have a full time job, a part time job, if you are taking care of kids, or you have aging parents or an ailing spouse, or you yourself have some sort of disability that limits you, then your capacity to produce your art is not a ten. The other thing you need to look at is how long your art process actually takes. So I was working once with an artist who was a colored pencil artist, and she told me it took all week long to make a nine by 12 inch artwork. So when you look at your income goal, look at whether your current prices and your production, your production capacity can actually support it. Can you produce a $2,000 artwork or $2,000 worth of artwork each week? If there’s only 52 weeks in the year and you’re not working every single week. Say it’s 50 weeks in a year. Can you realistically create $2,000 worth of artwork in a week so that 2000 times 50 equals 100,000? That’s assuming you sell everything you make. Okay, let’s talk about your production capacity. How many finished salable pieces can you create in one month? How many can you create in one year? Now use your real production history, not the fantasy version of you who never get sick, never travels, doesn’t teach, doesn’t need a day off.
Miriam Schulman: And of course, you do need time for drying, varnishing, framing, photographing your artwork, packaging, delivering to galleries, all that stuff. That’s your production capacity. So your annual production capacity times the average revenue per piece, that’s your maximum income. Let me give you an example. If you can realistically only finish two paintings per month or two artworks per month, that gives you 24 new artworks per year. If your average direct selling price is 2500, that creates $60,000 of retail inventory. So even if every new artwork sells, that production model does not support a six figure income. And most artists shouldn’t build a plant that requires 100% sell through rate. If the math doesn’t work, something must change. So you could produce more artwork. You could raise the average selling price. You could create a different mix of sizes. You could produce larger or more valuable work. That is my favorite method. You can improve the percentage of work that does sell. You can add carefully chosen revenue streams. Although I’ll caution you with this, sometimes that dilutes everything. Or you can change the income goal or the timeline. So make more art does not mean less quality or rush. Um, it means treating production as a deliberate business activity. If your quality declines when you increase volume, volume is not the correct answer. Pricing, size, product mix, or timeline may need to change instead. Okay. And this is true if you’re a commission artist as well.
Miriam Schulman: So assume how many commissions you can accept and can you complete them in the time that you are given. Use that as your capacity. Can you only do one commission a month? You’re only making $2,000 per commission fully booked for all 12 months. Well, congratulations. Your revenue now is capped at $24,000 a year. If the goal is to become a six figure artist, Becoming fully booked. If you’re only charging $2,000 a portrait that you can only produce one a month, it’s not going to solve your problem. You’re already at capacity. So the only way forward is either you raise your commission prices, you increase your capacity, you sell finished work alongside commissions, you change the offer, mix, something like that. So being fully booked sounds successful, but fully booked at the wrong prices can become an exhausting income trap. Let’s get to now. One of the other commonly asked questions I get and how much art should be on your website. So it depends. There isn’t one magic number for every artist, but the website needs to do two things. It needs to demonstrate a substantial, coherent artistic point of view, and it needs to give collectors enough meaningful choice. So let’s talk about a useful starting point. If I have to give you number 12 to 20 strong available originals in the primary collection is a good anchor amount now. Yes, fewer can work if your artwork is large, the prices are high, the collection feels intentional and new work is released regularly.
Miriam Schulman: Now you can have more if the work is easy to navigate, collections are clearly organized and the quality remains consistent. However, the more choice you give, the less likely you are to make a sale because choices can become overwhelming. Think about how hard it is for you to make decisions. I know for me personally, I don’t even like going to the grocery store because I get completely overwhelmed. So let me give you some guardrails that will help you. You don’t want to upload every artwork you’ve ever made merely to make the website look full. You don’t want to combine five unrelated bodies of work on one shop page. You don’t want to let weaker work dilute the strongest work. Imagine if a collector lands on a random artwork, and that’s the only thing that he or she sees. Do you want them to base all your artwork based on that one? If it’s something you don’t believe in anymore, does not representative of your style, or it’s a size that’s hard to sell, then it’s time to cull that from your website and not present it as the main body of work. So a sold archive can provide credibility, but collectors need to understand what’s actually available, which is why when artists have too many red dots on the page, I tell them to move it off because it’s hard for the collector to see what’s actually available.
Miriam Schulman: So let me give you some keys for this. A small, cohesive collection looks intentional, but a nearly empty website can look inactive. A huge collection of unrelated work will make you look unfocused and frankly, less professional. So the goal is not a number. The goal is strong inventory to support choice sales and replenishment and be cohesive. Now, if you were listening to my last section about the website and thinking, fine, but I don’t know which art should actually stay on my website. That’s exactly the kind of question that’s almost impossible to answer when you’re staring at your own work by yourself. You are just too close to it. And that’s why, at my two day Chelsea experience, we’ll have the time and spaciousness to look at those questions that keep you up at night. Like, which work is the strongest? Which art is the most marketable? What should I lead with? What’s confusing collectors? What is it that I can’t see? What should you stop doing? And are you at the point where you need to hire somebody to increase your capacity? And if so, what? Should they actually take off your plate? You don’t need another pile of ideas, but you do need clarity about the decisions that matter most for your next level. And that’s why I kept this experience intentionally intimate. It’s in Chelsea, New York, and attendance is by application to see if you qualify.
Miriam Schulman: Get the details over at SchulmanArt.com/Chelsea. That’s SchulmanArt.com/Chelsea. So how much art should you bring to an art fair? Oh, this is another one that’s hard for me to answer because it’s going to depend on the size of your art. But let’s assume that you’re a 2D artist and you’re planning for a standard three wall booth, and you don’t have the extra panels. You need enough art to create impact from across the room, and you also need enough replacement inventory so that if you do make sales, the booth doesn’t look depleted. So here’s what I tell artists to do In the center panel, you want one of your largest artworks. If your painter. Hopefully you have something that’s three by five feet or four by six feet, a showcase piece that they can see from many feet away. This is going to anchor the entire booth. And yes, artists do sell this size on the regular somewhere between 5 and $7000. My artists who live in California and Missouri and Montana are regularly selling art in those prices. The job of that centerpiece is not only to sell, but it’s to establish the scale and ambition and price ceiling for everything else in the booth. So assuming you’ve got that middle one taken care of, and if you don’t have that one trophy artwork, you could put 330 by 30 inch paintings there, or three vertical 30 by 40 inch paintings.
Miriam Schulman: But if your largest painting is like a 24 by 30, that’s going to get swallowed up by a ten foot booth. One way you can plan your booth is with graph paper. I had one client. I’ll give her a shout out Cindy Mall and she made she made a graph paper and then put little artworks around on the graph paper to help her plan her booth. All right. We established the center. One is for the showcase. Now let’s talk about the two walls. So if you’re going to have six medium sized, or perhaps you’re going to have six on even six on each side. So if you have a ten foot wall, 30, a 30 inch by 30 inch painting, you could probably fit three or maybe even six paintings on each wall. So that’s going to give you minimum another six. So now we’re talking about seven artworks up to 10 or 12, I recommend you have 12 to 14 and then replacement artworks because if that trophy showcase one sells. What are you going to put there? An empty wall. So you want to plan for success. Don’t plan for failure. Plan for success. Now you don’t have to rent a minivan for this. If you do have an SUV that is helpful to pack your art, put the seats down. You can put your entire tent and your artwork in an SUV. You can tie artwork to your ceiling.
Miriam Schulman: All that is going to ceiling of the car. All that will work fine. Now, in addition to your original art, you do need to supplement with prints. I have artists who are charging $300 for a 16 by 20 inch print on the regular $300. Did you hear that? And then an 11 by 14 matted. It could be 100. But I have artists who are selling them for one, 50, even 200. Okay. You want to bring a minimum of 12 to 24 prints. Ideally, you have a multiple of each of the prints that you have on your booth wall. However, let me give you some key points here. You only want to put one of each of those prints in your print rack. If you have multiples of the print in the print rack, that’s a turn off. That’s a big turnoff to collectors. It’s not that you’re lying and saying it’s a one of a kind. They just don’t need to see it. High end clothing boutiques do the same thing all the time. Low end. Don’t like target? You’ll have three size sixes, three size eights. If you go into Bergdorf Goodman or some very high end Madison Avenue boutique in New York City, sometimes they won’t even put all the sizes out. They’ll only have the sample size out. And then you have to ask, do you have an eight? Do you have a six? It’s a little embarrassing. Like, no, I’m not a size two.
Miriam Schulman: I’m not a size zero, but they never, ever put more than one of each size out. Only the lower end stores do that. So you’re doing the same thing with your merchandizing. The other key point that I want to give you is that if you work mostly square. So I had said, oh, 30 by 30 inch, you could fit three of them on a ten foot wall. However, squares do not sell well as prints. This has been my experience and this is the experience of my clients. Rectangle prints sell the best. So if you can crop your original art that is square as a rectangle, that’s great. Or you only produce art that can be created as prints, as rectangles. Okay. These prints should be matted. They should have acetate or clear bag over them. They should have a foam backing. They basically need to be ready for a collector to go home and stick it in a ready made frame to make something very easy for them. Don’t bring loose prints and try to sell them like posters. That is a huge turnoff. And the plastic is also very important for you because at these fairs, sometimes there’s food, sometimes people have sticky hands, sometimes they have germs. So after somebody has poured through your prints, you’re going to want to take a wet wipe and clean that all up. Okay, so your booth is working on three levels showcase artwork, um, medium largish originals that aren’t the showcase and matted prints.
Miriam Schulman: So the showcase artwork stops someone from across the room. The medium to large ish originals give serious collectors meaningful choices, and the matted prints give interested buyers an accessible way to collect something and take it home. So again, the direct answer for a standard three wall art show booth and you’re selling 2D artwork, you’re going to want 13 to 14 original artworks, including one large showcase piece that can command a ten foot wall and 6 to 12 medium pieces that can fill up the walls on the two side panels. And again, use some graph paper to help you figure this out. After the fair. How much inventory remains for your website? Do you have another exhibition coming? Can you replenish the sold work before the next event? One successful fair shouldn’t leave the rest of your sales channels empty for the next three months, and I want to give you one more piece of advice here, because I get this question a lot. Should you save your strong work to spread across fairs? Absolutely not. Always bring your strongest work every single time. Saving and hoarding artwork for later. That’s artists hoarder mentality. That’s a scarcity mindset that you think that your best work is yet to come. Assume that if you’re going to sell your strongest work today, that any artwork you make in the future will be even stronger than the artwork you just sold.
Miriam Schulman: Let’s start wrapping up. You cannot solve a production limitation with positive thinking, and you can’t solve every production limitation simply by raising prices. So price still has to be supported by the quality of the work, the strength of the collection, the artist positioning, collector experience, and consistent invitations and follow up. But here’s what I want you to leave with my friend. Don’t confuse an inventory problem with a sales problem. You probably have an inventory capacity problem when selling everything. Still wouldn’t reach your goal. Your website empties after a handful of purchases. You routinely have nothing available. After an exhibition, your commission calendar is full, but the income is still too low. You can’t replenish your art fast enough, or your annual production multiplied by your average price still falls short. Now you probably have a sales problem if you have more than enough strong inventory. The total value comfortably supports the goal. The website is well stocked. You’re producing consistently. Very few qualified people are seeing or being personally invited to see the artwork. Inquiries aren’t being followed up. Collectors aren’t receiving regular invitations to buy. Those are sales problems. Now you have a pricing problem. If you would need an unrealistic number of transactions, you’re fully booked but still under earning. Your prices haven’t kept pace with the strengths of the work or the marketplace, and gallery commissions make the net revenue unsustainable, or your smallest work is consuming too much time for too little return.
Miriam Schulman: So here’s what I want you to do. Do an inventory audit. Write down the annual revenue goal. Decide whether that number means gross sales or personal income. List every finished artwork you have and write down the price and expected proceeds from each one. Add it all up. That’s how much you have. How many pieces can you realistically produce each year, and compare your production capacity with the number that must be sold? Then you can find what your real constraints are. Is it inventory? Is it a production problem? Is it a pricing problem? Is it an audience problem, a prospecting problem? What is it? Don’t automatically assume the answer is market more. Find the actual bottleneck before prescribing the solution. Manifestation help blend. And I imagine, a larger possibility. But the math showed us we needed to build to support it. And the revelation was not stop dreaming. It was build enough capacity to hold the dream. If you want to sell more art, make sure there’s enough art available to sell and make sure the prices support your goal. Make sure your production schedule supports your prices, and make sure that selling out would actually create the success you’re imagining. So before you ask yourself, how can you sell out? Ask yourself whether you can afford to sell out. All right, my friend, it’s Miriam Schulman here signing off. I will see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram at @SchulmanArt, and of course on SchulmanArt.Com
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