Sold the edition of 25 for €900 and ate the entire cost of the plates myself
I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top.
So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number.
The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be.
I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.
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The €6 an hour thing is what keeps me from ever doing editions, honestly. I admire that you pushed through four months of it. I think the part that hurts most isn't the gallery cut or even the materials, it's that the collector will hang one of those and never once wonder what went into making it. That's the number nobody sees.
For what it's worth, I don't think the mistake was the price. The mistake was the gallery taking half when you ate the plates. Those plates are yours whether they sold or not. Next time maybe you price so the gallery eats some of the real cost with you, or you keep more of the edition for yourself. But I know saying that is easy from here.
I hope the next one at least gets you closer to minimum wage. You deserve that much.
You're right about the plates, and that's the bit I keep coming back to. I priced it like the plate was a cost of goods, like it gets used up. But it doesn't. It sits in a drawer and I can pull from it again, which is partly why both of us got comfortable with the number. Except no, because I can't reprint it, once the edition is sold, it's sold. So I ate the cost AND the scarcity. That's the real error.
The collector not knowing is its own thing though. Part of me almost likes it. That it stays invisible, that the object carries all that labor and nobody has to carry the weight of it. But then I think, no, that's just me being a martyr about it. I should want them to know. I should want it to cost what it cost, and not just in money.