Hi Martin looks like you're another one of those late-night workers. That's me all over, I tend to keep some stupid hours. Anyway yes you make a very good point there, and it just so happened that on Friday I was going through a handover former mates company as he's going on holiday well actually years now in South Africa and I'm looking after his callouts related to IT. Anyway I met a guy at one of the companies he looks after who specialises in marketing on the Internet and we were discussing this exact same problem. One of the problems with art is that it tends to be I'm searching for the word but is a personal thing whether it's disliked or liked. Oh yes subjective. So market response to showing people your work often lets you know the types of people that like it, and those that don't really give you much feedback because it's not their kind of art. So for instance , the girl next door she is in her early 30s and thought that the figure carving was brilliant whereas her husband was indifferent, so I'm starting to realise my audience. Getting back to the marketing guy he did have some quite interesting things to say such as if you sell a piece on eBay for say £50 then you'll be lucky if your sell any piece again over that cost because there is ability in eBay to trace back what people are selling products for. And as you said mass production is a different ball game compared to what I do. So we spent a coffee talking about similar types of products that his company worked with. One of the suggestions is like a lot of artists to sell limited amounts of prints copies of your work. In my case I have the opportunity to sell castings of my carvings and I can limit them to a certain number. Although none of this is set in stone, there's a chance that you can make money out of the original and therefore make the original worth more. There's also product placement, an example of which he was saying someone had sent some baby clothes to the Princess of Wales which she was photographed looking at and admiring them, there was a big search to find out who had produced them and it turned out to be some old woman who had handmade them. But if it had been an up-and-coming small business they would probably have been swamped by orders. Also entering art into competitions and hopefully getting positive criticism through the competitions can help. There was an artist who was unknown who had entered the Turner prize and was in a small section of the BBC's culture show, those that didn't quite make it. But to not quite make it is a massive achievement when it comes to something like the Turner prize and can be seen as may be an up-and-coming artist that is collectable. He was also talking about the fact that even in harsh economic times people still speculate on things like art. The logic being that it can be quite cheap to invest in especially if you buy something because you actually like it but it could turn out to be worth a hell of a lot more later on when people have much more money to spend on acquiring pieces of art. He's put me in contact with one of his clients that specialise in local arts and crafts website he's working on at the moment to help them sell online so when I have a few more pieces because I am try to vary the types of work I'm doing I will show them my work and hopefully they may have people who will buy this type of art and also they have been doing it for 25 years so they may also be able to tell me what I could reasonably expect to sell things for.
So it was good meeting the guy and him sharing his ideas, just like on the forums.