I finally put real prices on my work at the last fair and it changed the conversations
I've been doing the fall craft fair in my town for three years now and I always did the thing where you write "reasonable offers" or just leave the small tags off half of it because I hate the moment someone asks and I have to say a number out loud.
This year I priced everything properly. No "DM for pricing." Little handwritten tags on the back of each one with actual numbers. My 8x10s at $65, the 16x20 landscape at $240, and the two I was scared to price at $400.
What happened is I sold less. Four pieces instead of the six I moved last year. But I also spent the whole day talking to people about the paintings instead of apologizing for them, and one woman told me the $400 one was worth more than that and I should be charging by size and not by how nervous I am. She didn't buy it. But she was right and now I can't stop thinking about it.
The other thing, and this is the part that bugs me. A guy picked up the $240 one, said "nice," put it down, came back twice, and bought it. I don't think he would've come back twice if I'd had a "make me an offer" sign up. Maybe? I don't know. I'm not good at this part.
Anyway if you're like me and you price low because it feels rude to ask, that's the conversation I'm having with myself this week.
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Four instead of six is a small price for not having to perform the apology. The "reasonable offers" thing always reads as the maker being unsure of their own work, and people pick that up faster than any number.
I price everything now, and honestly the tags did more for me than any amount of talking. The number on the back does the difficult part so I can just stand there and answer questions about the paper instead of defending a figure.
The number on the back does the difficult part, c'est ça. What I notice is that the price also tells you something about yourself. When I finally wrote real figures on the frames I stopped painting for the imagined buyer and started painting for the thing itself. The four you sold were probably the four that deserved it.
"The four that deserved it" is a nice way to put it, though I'm not sure I'm that noble. Two of them went to people I'd talked to for twenty minutes first, which never happened when I had no prices on anything. Those conversations just didn't start before. So maybe they sold because of the talking, not the price.
"The number on the back does the difficult part" is exactly it. I spent so much energy bracing for the haggling that I never actually got to the part where you just talk to somebody about the painting.
And the paper thing made me laugh because that's literally what I did all day. Somebody asked about the big one and instead of defending $240 I ended up explaining why I stretch my own canvases and now I have her email for a commission in the spring. Would not have happened with a blank tag.