Priced an edition of 40 at 45 each and I don't know if that's a real number
I have a screenprint edition of 40 sitting here, three colors, on Fabriano Rosaspina, and I put 45 euro on each one.
The math is not the problem. Paper, ink, the screens, the hours pulling them, all of that I can count. The problem is the 40. If I print 40 and sell 12, I have 28 in a flat file and I've effectively priced the 12 at 150 each, only nobody paid that and I can't say it out loud.
There's a whole historical logic to this, the print as the democratic multiple, the cheap image for the many. I believe in it. I also believe the rent in Kreuzberg does not care about my beliefs. So I keep the price low to honor the idea and then I quietly resent every person who buys one, which is a strange way to run a practice.
What I actually want to know is whether any of you price the edition as a whole and not the single sheet. Like, the edition is one object with 40 faces, and the price should carry the unsold ones. I've never seen anybody say this in a way I could use. Maybe because it sounds like an excuse.
45 feels either honest or cowardly and I genuinely cannot tell which. It's been three weeks.
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The 28 in the flat file aren't a failure, they're the edition. If you print 40 and sell 12, you didn't price 12 at 150, you made 40 things at 45 and kept 28 of them. A screenprint doesn't spoil. I work with paper for a living and the flat file is the honest part of the economics, the part the democratic-multiple story keeps quiet about. Raise the price before you lower the edition, though. 45 for three colors on Rosaspina is close to giving it away, and the people who'd pay 80 are not the ones you're worried about pricing out.
"A screenprint doesn't spoil" is going to live in my head for a while, thank you. You're right and I was doing a bad piece of accounting, dividing the fixed cost of the whole edition over only the part that sold. That's not what a price is.
But I want to push on the flat file being "the edition." If 28 sit there for ten years and then I'm dead and someone sells them, that's a different object than the one I sold in 2026 for 45. Not better, just different, and I don't fully know how to price that difference. Maybe that's exactly what the multiple is about and I've been pretending otherwise.
The 80 thing I'll take. I priced at 45 out of a fear of who I'd be excluding, which is a slightly dishonest way to make a decision about my own rent.