I raised my screenprint edition from 120 to 190 and lost exactly nobody
The price of a 5-colour screenprint of mine sat at 120 euro for over three years. Not because I did the maths and it came out at 120. Because 120 was the first number I said out loud to someone at a group show in Kreuzberg and after that it felt like a fact about the work.
Meanwhile each impression takes me about forty minutes of actual printing, plus the screens, plus the paper which is Fabriano and not cheap, plus the ones I ruin. If I count properly it was maybe 110 euro of my time per print before anything goes wrong. So I was charging people roughly the cost of the paper and a coffee.
In January I changed it to 190. I wrote the new price in the spreadsheet, told the two galleries, and waited for the small humiliating email. Nothing happened. One person bought two instead of one. That is the part that disturbs me more than the money.
I think what was actually keeping the price down was not the market. It was me deciding in advance that the work was worth less than what I was asking, and then politely making sure everyone else agreed. Which is its own kind of conceptual problem, and not the interesting one I wanted to be working on.
Still haven't raised the etchings. Those are at 260 and I know they should be 340 and I have the email drafted. It's been in the drafts since February.
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"120 was the first number I said out loud and after that it felt like a fact about the work." Child, that is the truest thing I've read all week. I did the same with my quilts for years, quoted a price at a church bazaar in 1998 and then treated it like scripture ever since. Still working my way out from under it.
Only thing I'd say back to you: don't be too hard on your younger self for the underpricing. A lot of us were raised to think asking for the money is the rude part. It ain't. Forty minutes a print plus the paper plus the ones that go in the scrap pile, you were basically gifting them and calling it a sale.
190 sounds honest to me. Glad nobody flinched.
Mm, "treated it like scripture." I know that one too well.
1998 church bazaar is about right for me too. I quilted through every wedding and funeral and new baby in this family and never once put a number on it, because putting a number on it felt like charging kin. Then a woman at a show asked me what a quilt costs and I heard myself say four hundred dollars and wanted to apologize for it.
Four hundred. Honey, that's the fabric and a Sunday dinner.
What I finally understood, and it took me a long time, is that underpricing ain't humility. It's just telling yourself your hours don't count. And they count. Nobody's going to hand you that back later.
Glad you're working out from under it. We all are, seems like.
"Four hundred. Honey, that's the fabric and a Sunday dinner." I laughed and then sat with it a minute, because that is exactly the shape of the thing. We price from the materials up because the materials are the only part we've been taught is allowed to have a number.
But here's the part I keep turning over since I wrote the post: with a quilt, there IS no edition. You quilted through every wedding and funeral and new baby, and each one is the only one, it can't be printed again. I have the opposite problem and I think it gave me a different flinch. The multiple is the whole point of my medium, so somewhere in my head "there are 120 of these, so they can't be worth much" got fused together. As if the fact of the copy should show up as a discount. The quilt is singular and underpriced for love. My print is plural and underpriced for shame. Different disease.
The "putting a number on it felt like charging kin" line is the one that will stay with me. I don't have that exact grammar, my family would have found money frank and slightly vulgar in the other direction, but the reflex is the same reflex. We were both taught that the moment you name a price you have made a claim about the work, and a claim about yourself, and the safe move was to never make it.
"Asking for the money is the rude part", that one landed. I think in my family it was slightly different: money was never rude exactly, but the work was supposed to justify itself on its own, as if the price were a verdict that came down from somewhere rather than a number two people agree on. Same paralysis, different accent.
1998 to now is a long time to carry a number around. But honestly the longer it sits the more it calcifies, so the fact you're digging out from under it at all is the hard part done.
The scrap pile is the bit nobody wants to hear about. I keep a box of the ruined ones and I've started to think of it as part of the edition, almost. Every impression carries a little of the ones that didn't make it.