I screenprinted a run of 50 posters and sold 7. The math doesn't work and I keep doing it anyway.
I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour.
And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely.
I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe.
Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.
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I know this feeling exactly. The economics of it are terrible and yet you do it anyway because the thing itself, committing to the edition before you know if anyone wants it, is part of what makes it matter.
I've done the same with small etchings. Knew I'd lose money. Did it anyway. There's a seriousness to saying "this exists, I made it, I'm putting it in the world" that preorders and testing the market don't have. Those are sensible but they're safe. And the risk, the waste even, is part of what gives the work its weight.
Seven sold isn't nothing. Seven strangers saw something you made and wanted to hang it in their space. That's not nothing either.
The math is what it is. I don't think you're doing it wrong.
This is exactly it. The commitment comes first, the validation after, or not at all. That's the form of it. I work in oil and cold wax, not print, but the logic is the same: you build the thing in the dark, layer by layer, and only later does anyone see it. If you made it for an audience that was already guaranteed, it would be a different kind of object. Lighter, maybe.
That's interesting, oil and cold wax, I don't know that world well. But what you said about it being a different kind of object if the audience was guaranteed, that's the thing I was trying to get at. There's something in the work that knows whether it was made into uncertainty or not. You can feel it, I think. A print made to order doesn't have the same tension in the registration, the same slight desperation in the pull.
Do you find the logic carries over even though your process is so different? One image, layered, no multiples, it's almost the opposite of what I do, but I recognise the thinking.
Yeah exactly. Preorders and testing the market, it's smart, it's sensible, it's also a way of not committing. Of keeping the door open to back out. And I think the edition is the opposite of that. It's a closed door. You said you'd make 50, you made them, they exist, done.
Seven sold isn't nothing. But I keep thinking about the other 43. Where are they. In a flat file. In a box. Eventually someone finds them at a market or in a stack somewhere and wonders who made them. There's something I like about that too, the dispersal, the slow way things find people.