Priced a 12-print riso edition at €45 each and the math only worked because I didn't count my own time

Just finished pricing a risograph edition, 12 prints, two colors, and I landed on €45 each. The math is fine if you count paper, ink, the masters, the studio time. But I didn't count my time in it at all. I never do. I put "artist labor" in the spreadsheet as if it's a line item I can just leave blank and come back to later, and I never come back to it.

It's a weird thing with editioned work specifically. With a single painting I can at least pretend the hours are the point. With a run of 12 copies the whole logic is that it's reproducible, and somehow that makes me feel like I'm not allowed to charge for the making of it. Like the edition is supposed to be cheap because it's a multiple, and that's the entire trap, because the original is dead expensive and the edition should be the accessible gateway, except then I've made something that costs me 12 hours and pays me zero per hour.

A friend put it well once: you're not selling the object, you're selling the permission to own a thing that came out of your head. The paper is nearly free. I should try actually believing that before the next one.

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Margaret Hsu·1w

I recognize that spreadsheet habit intimately, though I suspect we come at it from opposite directions. I price a lot of my work as one-offs, so the labor is at least somewhat visible in the final number. But editions have always struck me as the harder problem precisely because of what you said, that reproducibility makes the time feel illegitimate somehow.

I'd offer one small reframe that's helped me. The labor isn't in the twelve prints sitting in front of you; it's in the one that taught you how to make the other eleven. The wasted paper, the failed plates, the years of learning the press. Those hours are real and they're spread across every copy you'll ever sell, but they don't show up in a single run's spreadsheet. So it's not that your time isn't countable, it's that you're looking for it in the wrong column.

Not sure that makes €45 feel any more fair, but it might make the blank line a little less damning.

Giulia BrunoOP·1w

That reframe landed, honestly. "The one that taught you how to make the other eleven." That's the real labor and I think I know it deep down, I just don't know how to put a number on it. A failed plate doesn't have a receipt. The years don't fit in a line item.

Maybe the issue is that I keep pricing the object and not the capability. The twelve prints are cheap because they're the last iteration of something expensive. But my spreadsheet doesn't have a column for "everything that made this possible," so I leave it blank and pretend the blank is humble instead of just incomplete.

Niall Doherty·1w

Ah sure, that spreadsheet line got me. "Leave it blank and come back later", I've had that same cell staring at me for a decade now, the way it just sits there empty and you get to the end and tell yourself you'll sort it out on the next one. The next one never comes.

But here's the thing I've landed on after all these years, and it took me a long time to get here. Your time is not a line item, it's the whole bleedin' thing. The paper and ink are the cheap part. Somebody could buy the same four sheets of paper in an art shop for a fiver. What they're paying for is the forty hours you spent carving the block and the twenty proofing it and the fact that your eye is in it, that's the product. The print's just the receipt.

And with editions, I think we do ourselves dirty with the word "reproducible." It's not a photocopy. You're pulling twelve prints by hand, each one has its own tiny life to it. You're not removing your labor by making twelve, you're offering twelve chances for people to own the thing you made. The hours didn't split twelve ways. They're in every single one of them.

Charge for the time, love. Not the full studio rate if that hurts to look at, but something. Even €15 an hour on the carving is honest, and it'll stop you resenting the work. Resentment kills the making far faster than a high price ever will.

Giulia BrunoOP·1w

The blank cell thing, yeah. It's almost worse that the spreadsheet is perfectly fine next to it, all the other numbers lined up and accounted for. Like the software is politely waiting for the one row I'm never going to fill in.

I hear you on the time being the whole thing, though. I know you're right. But with a run of 12 I keep circling the same logic: if I can make 12 of these, why does it cost the same as the one-off painting that took the same hours? The reproducibility is supposed to be the point of the medium, the whole democracy of the multiple, and then I go and price it like a luxury object anyway. And the labour question just gets tangled up in that.

I wonder if the real issue is that I don't trust my own hours to be worth the same as a painter's. Which is a whole other conversation about the hierarchy of mediums and probably some internalised nonsense I should have dealt with in my MFA and clearly didn't.