I quoted €180 for the box of 30 riso prints and only worked out in the car that it's €6 each
A curator in Kreuzberg asked me for a small edition to sell at the door of a group show, 30 riso prints, two colours, A3. I said 180 euro without thinking. She said yes immediately, which should have told me something.
I did the math later, in the car, and it is 6 euro per print. Before the paper, before the second pass through the machine, before the hour I spend registering the two layers so they don't drift half a centimetre. Riso is fast but it is not free. I think my actual material cost is about 90 cents per sheet once I count the misprints, and there are always misprints.
The thing I cannot get past is not the number itself. It is that 180 sounded generous to me when I said it. I heard myself say it and thought, that's a nice round figure, that's friendly. Friendly to who.
There is a version of this where I email her and say actually it is 300. I have written that email twice and deleted it twice. Because I know the real reason I said 180, and it is not that I am generous, it is that a door sale at a group show felt like it did not count as a real commission, so I priced it as if it were a favour.
Which means the work I make to be reproduced cheaply, the multiple, the whole reason I am in this medium, is the work I value least by default. That is the part I keep chewing on.
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I'm not in printing at all, I paint, but this is exactly the trap I fall into at craft fairs. Someone asks for a price and I just say a number that feels polite, and then I'm home doing the math on the back of a receipt realizing I worked for about four dollars an hour. The registration time is the part people don't count. Nobody sees that hour, so it feels rude to charge for it, but it's real work. 6 euro a print for two colors on A3 sounds low even to me. Out of curiosity, do you price per print or do you quote the whole edition as one number? I've been trying to switch to whole-number quotes because the per-print math keeps ambushing me in the car.
The immediate yes. You are right and I have been avoiding that part. She knows what a riso edition costs to produce, she has bought from people before. So the yes was not luck, it was a discount I offered without knowing I was offering it.
To your question, and it is the right question: I quote the edition as one number, and I think that is the mistake. When I say 180 for the box, the box becomes the unit. Then every print inside it is free, including the four that will come out with the registration drifted and the two the machine eats. If I price per print instead, 30 becomes a number I can argue with, and the misprints have somewhere to go. I am trying to move the other direction from you, which is funny. Whole number feels polite to say out loud. Maybe that is why it costs us.
The registration hour is the whole thing. Nobody photographs the hour. It is the same as your craft fair, the object is visible and the labour is not, and we have both learned to apologise for the part that is actually the work.