Perhaps this isn't exactly the best place to ask this, but here I go. This is more targeted to the fractalists that sell/have sold their works: what's a reasonable price for a printed image? I've seen several different price ranges, some quite surprising - one person on Ebay was offering images for as low as $0.01, and all he was doing was sending the images (supposedly with an acceptable quality for print, but who knows) by e-mail to the bidders, and they would take care of the printing and framing themselves. Others were selling prints for around $20, and you could easily notice that some of them were done probably at home (due to the 8" x 11" print sizes), and therefore with a much lower cost (but is the quality good enough?). I'm asking this because I've been through several different situations, and I really can't see how I can set a "standard" price range, and be "competitive" at the same time (read: have no money loss in the process). One of the most complicated issues I've been through is if one wants to buy one framed work, but the buyer lives in North America/Europe (I live in South America). If I send it by regular mail (therefore cheaper), there will be LOTS of risks, be prepared for some damage. If I send it using some company like DHL/Fedex, it gets way too expensive - they've asked me US$400 to ship one framed image to Europe, and if it wasn't enough, the guy on the phone said that I would have the same risks as if sending them by regular mail - "you know, a turbulence can broke the glass, and we can't be responsible for that". Of course, selling the images unframed fixes most of these problems, but still I can't find what's a good price range for this kind of work.

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What a nice reply it was.

I think that DreamWarrior is interested in the answers you are hoping to get marcusbacus and that she simply bookmarked this thread :) I honestly don't think she intended any slight to you. I'm also interested in the questions you've posted as they are ones I surely don't have answers to. Good luck in your information gathering.

Yes, marcusbacus. I'm sorry if it seemed harsh. This is a common way to bookmark a thread you don't want to miss here at Renderosity. So, if you see it again around here, don't worry: it's nothing personal. Cheers!

Attached Link: http://markch1.home.mindspring.com

You might check out using PrintRoom or Zazzle. I use PrintRoom. They do all the printing, on high quality photo paper, and they will do the shipping for you. As I understand it they ship worldwide. The buyer pays the S/H. You can have a non-professional account and just print images, or for $99/year you can set up a professional account, upload images into a gallery, set prices and have them do all the accounting for you. http://www.printroom.com I've been more than satisfied with the prints I've gotten from them. I can't say how much you should charge, that's highly variable with art, and mostly dependant on how much someone likes a particular image and how much they can and are willing to spend. The person selling an image on EBAY for .01 was probably selling their print in auction format, and that was only the starting bid.

About the places to print: I've seen a lot of these (another one recommended is ophoto.com), some seem to be more professional than others, and some seem to be there just to help you printing your holiday pictures taken with your digital camera, while others can offer larger sizes and better quality papers and prints. I found it very strange that some work with JPEG only though.

I didn't use any of them because I could do some good prints with local print houses - not extremely perfect (a protective finish could've been applied), but good enough - for a reasonably smaller cost if I had to send a CD to them to be printed (since some of the images can't be sent by e-mail due to their sizes), pay the shipping back to me, then ship it again to the buyer.

One of the images being sold on Ebay is this one. Of course if you set a starting bid as $0.01 you can attract more people to your auctions, but there's the risk of selling it for that price. A somehow evil remark: if I had permanent collections being shown at MoMA and other known places (as it's said he has), I wouldn't be selling my stuff for just $0.01.

Attached Link: http://markch1.home.mindspring.com

I took a look at his pictures on EBAY. I have to say I wasn't that impressed. If I'm going to bid on a picture on EBAY, I'm going to want the printed picture. He's selling a .jpg file and then telling the buyer they have to print it out themselves. What kind of a deal is that? So you pay $0.01 for the jpg and then $30+ for a nice sized print and s/h, for an image that isn't even as good as what I've seen here or on the UF mailing list. Uh uh. In my not so humble opinion, it ain't gonna fly. I've been thinking of putting a few images on EBAY, just for a lark. I would just start the bidding at a little below my cost. If it sells, and I lose a couple of dollars, big deal. All I have to do once the buyer pays, is go on to printroom and tell them to print it and send it to the buyer. No hassles. Just some ideas.

I was thinking about offering some of my stuff too, but not using Ebay at all, or any other kind of site. I would prefer to offer them directly on my site - I'm still thinking what's the best way to do it. So far I just have a message like "do you want to buy a print of any of these images? Contact me" etc. This way, the possible buyer would have an option to get things in a way he wants - as much as possible - like different sizes, framed/not framed, different papers, etc. I have ideas of selling not only printed stuff, but also other "multimedia" items (I shouldn't tell you my business secrets :P ).

Adding a virtual store to our sites isn't a good idea - it takes a lot of effort and costs a lot too, if you want to implement all the security measures (a SSL license is very expensive). You would have to have big average sales to maintain that.

A difficult point to sell "ready-to-hang" images would be that not everybody has the same tastes as us, a wonderful framing for you could look awful in other people's bedrooms/kitchens (sometimes they choose their artworks according to the colours of their sofas...), so I'm guessing that offering just the printed images is the best way to do it with the less ammount of annoyances.

But... I still don't know how much to charge... back to the first question...

Yes, that's what I'll do, even though I can't perform withdrawals from where I live, I need a valid bank account in USA or in some other European countries. I can use the money to buy more toys though. If I ever sell something.

Attached Link: Ebay

You know I have actually posted this question on Ebay. I too was thinking of offering some of my art/graphics and just wanted to avoid the whole headache of sending it by snailmail. I was thinking of offering it as screensavers/wallpaper and such.

The general consensus of answers I got were that most of them were against it but some of them did suggest that I could send it on disk as another option.