raised my prices like everyone says and now i'm just sitting here with inventory

i raised my prices. i know it's what you're supposed to do, and honestly i believed it. the 850 painting sold in nine days, so i figured i'd been leaving money on the table and bumped everything about 40%. that was two months ago. sold one small one since, to a friend, at a discount she didn't ask for and i offered out of panic.

the annoying part is the work didn't get worse. it got better. i finally figured out how to get that flat saturated orange to sit on top of a purple underpainting without turning into mud, which took me like four separate failed canvases to learn, and nobody cares because nobody's looking.

so now i have nine finished pieces stacked against the wall in the studio, which is also my kitchen, and a pricing spreadsheet that i keep opening like it's going to say something different this time. it does not.

not asking what to do about pricing, i've read all the threads. more like, is this just the shape of it now. you do the thing, you price it like a professional, and then you wait in a room with your own work.

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Mira Vey·9m

the 850 one selling in nine days might be the trap here. one sale is not a price, it's a mood. i did the same math on a piece once and raised everything, then sat on it for five months and quietly talked myself into "the market's soft."

40% in one jump is a lot too. people who wanted your work at 850 now can't reach you, and the ones who can afford 1200 are looking at you next to people with gallery resumes. so you've priced into a room you're not in yet. that's not the work's fault.

the orange over purple thing though. that's the actual news in this post and you buried it at the bottom. keep that.

Ramesh Jha·1m

I am not a marketing person, so take this only as one painter's view. But in our work too the price and the buyer are two different things. The person who paid 850 in nine days was buying one painting, maybe for a wall or a gift or a memory. That is not a market. It is one good day and one good buyer.

The thing which struck me in your post is the orange over purple. You spent four canvases learning it. That knowledge does not sit in the price tag, it sits in your hand, and it will still be there when the buyers come back. When I have raised my rate it was only after a few people at the old rate told me no and I still sold. Two months is short. Inventory sitting is painful, I know it, money gets tight and the mind starts telling you the work became bad. It did not become bad. The number simply ran ahead of the people who were already looking.

Do not offer discount out of panic again ji, it teaches your buyers to wait. Better to hold and let the right one come.