Yesterdays Meeting!
I was incredibly excited yesterday after my meeting with Nicole (the “Store Team Leader”) she was very excited and enthusiastic about having my photographs hung in Whole Foods Market Princeton. Not only did she love my photographs but she was even possibly interested in purchasing one! It would be the first since Steph (my wife) is the only one who knows about this yet. I hope that having works displayed at Whole Foods Market will be a good start to a healthy display resume for my pictures.
As I come closer and closer to printing, framing (and hanging!) my photographs I am debating more and more the format that I will offer them to the public. The things that I particularly wobble over is edition size, and price. I definitely want to offer the public high quality photographs at a great value but at a price that is fair to me. The profit margin on photographs is around 30-40% if you don’t include any expenses or time incurred taking the photograph. I don’t want to charge any more than my cost for framing. I may even encourage people to buy just the print and head a couple shops over to the “Frame Smith” which is owned by my neighbor Paul (Smith).
I know there are a lot of arguments for and against edition size or whether or not to even have editions! I am set on having editions. Perhaps the most powerful argument for me is that by limiting the number of prints I will make of a particular photograph I am forcing myself not to develop a crutch or get stuck in a rut of living on my laurels. So I think I will limit my editions right now to 550 which will cover all possible sizes of prints but will not restrict the negative from being printed in books, periodicals and such. I hope this does not deter people… I think it will not since exposure of an image will only serve to increase the perceived market value. Eventually I will write out the exact terms of my editions in the interest of full disclosure. That will all come with the website.
I do plan to tier the price of any given photograph within an edition however I do not plan do aggressively increase the price of photographs. For instance I might start selling 13×19 prints (sans frame) for $85 for prints 001-110 $100 for 111-221 $120 for 222-332 $145 for prints 333-443 and $975 for the remaining hundred prints. Actually I’m just kidding I was really thinking of $175.
I figure prints will sell slowly enough that an edition may take a decade to sell out completely. So if you factor in inflation then it is not really a dramatic increase at all. However, Should I become famous I plan to bleed the world for as much as I can get! Again, I kid:)
Jeremiah