Comment on Is Anyone Making Money? by MasterOfPointillism

Oh, I forgot "sell" in my post above. *lol*

Ok, I joined a few days ago and so, of course, didn´t sell anything yet.

But I hope I´ll some of this one for example:

[link]

I guess it´s all about popularity.

Hello everyone.

I would love someone to buy a print or card, but when you can get them at 1/4 of the price else where who's going to want to buy here? eg: 7 cards with a pic on £20 artist gets 20-25%max royalty. If I made them at home: 10p for the image to be made, 10p per sheet for the A4 paper say £1 per card for ink = 70p+ 70p+ £7 =£8.40. (Call it £10 for ease) You could go even cheeper. I make photo cards and sell at £1 -1.50 each and still make a profit. They are good quality to. Uk "Boots" do prints A3 and above starting at £7, High pro qualtiy on thick backed paper.

I think the artists should be able to get more for there work without making the customer pay a fortune 50/50 or 60/40 would be much fairer. after all the artist has cost to make up work does not magicly appear via fairy on the pc.... at least i dont think it does.

I make mad money and I save mad money... Here's the secret: Buy your own prints. It's like a freakin' mail in rebate.

They are probably only making money if they are popular and people are looking for something specific, but I don't know, that would just be my guess.

Hmm. Well this is disappointing. I have read most every comment in this thread and although I had plans to upload some of my artwork here on dA and sell them as prints, I now feel discouraged in doing so. I guess I could just use this site to enter competitions and continue collecting artwork, but besides that, I have no hope of selling anything here. Oh well. I will search for other alternatives then.

Thanks for the info everybody!

Don't expect to make piles on DA, You can still use other websites to sell your stuff. I'm currently doing so on Zazzle and planning to do prints on ebay, etc...

It is easier to earn money through commissions honestly

I dont understand... where are they sending the money in case someone sells anything, if they don't even have the bank account number???? :S

I had a premium prints account. I sold nothing because I was new and didn't know how to promote and photos don't compete well with anime food with faces on them. yeah they are cute though. I do't deny them a place as art.
Anyhow I was sick and busy with school. My prints account expired but DA said you keep the price you set for your prints you uploaded while you had the premium account. Only new prints will be subject to the regular screw the artist pricing. Ok that's fine and fair. I left my gallery alone and didn't upload any new prints.

Then I look and find in like August I sold a 4x6 of my most popular deviation. I had only priced it at like two dollars anyhow because the size was small. They had changed the pricing to the screw you pricing and sold my print for fortynine cents! I only got a ten cent profit!

While I was flattered someone bought the print I was pissed at DA for not informing me of this change of policy,
I was also feeling bad for the poor person who bought the print because unless they bought other prints along with mine DA would have charged them way more in shipping than they paid for the print!
So I guess they wanted it pretty bad.

To answer your question most of us make nothing. There are so many people we get lost in t he sea of thousands.

The really good fantasy artists like Marta Dahlig, Juige, Heise, YueIceal, Yumix, Deland-Fox, Phoenixlu, and many more how have good fantasy characters that are cute boys and girls probably make a good amount. They have good fan bases though.

If none of us here is making money at all then there is no reason in staying. Would you agree?

I think people only buying the prints in terms of interest and the value of ART.

Ill take it a shot, because i know my work has alot of potential in digital Art..

People should learn to look at the value of their work before selling it on Prints.

I can't see anyone making serious money on DA.
If they want to make a living selling prints, it would probably be more profitable to make and sell them themselves.
I'm still an amature but I hope to sell a print on here someday. Not for the money, but for the satisfaction of knowing that someone out there thought my art was good enough to spend money on.

Why don't they let you sell pictures to download, like stock-photo's, instead of making you click the button "not to download" every time. Must work better then selling a print.

I think use DA as a site for advertising your works and sell them elsewhere is a good idea.

Sadly not yet.

But I try to look at it more as something I enjoy, whenever it's photography, photo-manip or etc, rather than a money bringer. I take a lot of my photography and are now on sale as prints, just incase....


Here's a quote I'd like to share to you(thought of it and don't know if someone else did already before me):

Dreamjob: something you do, and you love it so much, that if you don't get any money for it, you'd still have a huge smile on your face, and your heart wanted to keep doing it...

most artists put up low rez images anyway. Not good enough for the standard 8x10 for 300 ppi print.
If anyone is dumb enough to buy from here, they should email the artist and have him sell whatever client the full rez print to whatever outsource printing company in his choosing. Unless he showcases the hi rez in this site. He prob doesn't really care for it as much as his other pieces.

... I don't remember registering... so idk if they have a Credit Card numbah or sumthin... SO HOW THE HELL DO THEY KNOW WHERE TO SEND THE MONEHZ?!

Culpeo Fox

[link]

He makes his living off his art (Or so he says) Along with his other 4 "foxes" (Partners).

But look how many views he has.

But then again, look how long he's been a Deviant and how many Deviations he has.

My point being is it's takes lots of time and support before you make money. Also you need really good art.

Commissions are 7000% better than using dA's print services to sell prints.

This is because you will make all of the money yourself and if you're good, you can even sell at exorbitant prices. I've seen people here sell plenty of commissions for 50 duckets or more.

Thanks for this thread. XD I now know not to sell some of my prints on here. I'm a starving university artists, I definitely need more then 2.50 per print. i.i

Must find a new way then... *sigh*

i wanna start doing commissions and prints and i have no idea where to start x'D are they worth doing for just a bit of extra income?

I guess the key to your success on dA is just simply to get yourself known. If more and more people know about you, and you make decent artwork, then they may pass on your name to somebody else. Also, that way, you have a great chance of somebody reccommending you to a potential buyer, so when someone wants to buy any artwork, they will come to you. Also, besides getting known, creativity. If you make your artwork stand out from the crowd, make it unique enough, people will be interested. In response to the person who said you can simply print it, well, it is possible to add watermarks.

I have made $0 from all the prints I have. Whether its just the quality or the lack of interest, I don't know. But there is a chance someone can make money off their art if they are advertised elsewhere. Art galleries only get you so much viewers. But there are other websites people can use for making money of their artwork.

I have made $0 from all the prints I have. Whether its just the quality or the lack of interest, I don't know. But there is a chance someone can make money off their art if they are advertised elsewhere. Art galleries only get you so much viewers. But there are other websites people can use for making money of their artwork.

Back when I was more active on DA, I sold quite a few prints and had enough money to buy plenty of alcohol. HAhahaha true story.
They send out the money every quarter if you have over a $25 balance, I believe.

It works... as long as you do, if you get my drift. Work hard and it will be well rewarded.

The quality of DA´s prints is excellent specially canvas that I use a lot. But I don´t sell nothing (and I have a LOT of images) - when I make some comissioned work (rarely also), I include the price of the image printed...

Well, I've sold 3 postcards plus 1 box of greeting cards and "earned" $1.68
Unfortunately DA only pays you, if your quarter balance is $20 or above. So technically I haven't made any money, although I sold something
Nevertheless I'm happy that people bought something, it's a huge motivation boost to know that someone was willing to pay money for the art you created, even if it's "only" a postcard

Prints don't make people money so someone who was SO smart invented the 'comission available here' idea. It's true, though the quality of the original work, which is sent to the buyer via whatever ways, is based on what the buyer sees in the artist's gallery. The better the gallery suggests the better the peice of art the customer requested. Seeing as artists here won't be getting paid a lot for sell his and her artworks off a site, well, this idea was the way around DA Prints.

hey iim a newbie and i already sold some of my prints

To be honest. I get more profit printing and selling them myself than through DA.

Ive made nothing here but i still hope to one day make a sale here

I also sell in zazzle and i have found that to be my best bet to date on zazzle i have made $14

so if you make nothing here you could allways try there.

[link]

I read through the whole first page, but it seems to be more than I have time for to read every post. So, if it's already been said, I apologize, but you could probably get your work printed at Fedex for a couple of bucks at the most. I'm not a really good artist... working on that. But, I was designing something for an art show for a friend of mine, and I went to Fedex to get it printed. Frames could go anywhere from 5 to 10 bucks... more if you want something bigger or better looking. It seems like it's more than it's worth to be spending hours on hours just to see pennies for your work, and then having to spend twice as much to get a physical copy of your own work from DA than if you just printed it out yourself.

However, DeviantArt IS a business. They do the distribution, advertising, printing, shipping, and all that other tedious stuff, not to mention the costs in maintaining the servers and keeping this business alive. Good luck finding another service that's going to save you time or take care of all the mind-numbing tasks for a cheaper price. They also do the promoting. Unfortunately, because there's so much art on this site, how much publicity your art gets depends mostly on how much you can plug it, and how good you really are. Granted, it's ridiculous that certain types of perverted or just downright hacky displays get more status than something that's genuinely creative and inspiring, but it's one obstacle to overcome versus doing everything yourself, and then trying to find a way to promote your work, acquire the web space to display it for a cheap price, set up the means to handle transfers electronically, and generate enough income to make all of it worth while. I'm not saying that DeviantArt is the only way. Just saying that if you want to get more for your work, it's going to take more work.

Frankly, regardless of which path you take, you have a lot working against you. It's hard to make money as an artist. I know quite a few people who tried to make it in that field, and they're struggling. If I were to give you just one bit of advice, it would be to do this stuff on the side, and make sure you have a stable job. In this economy, people are not eager to spend money to fill a gap on their wall. I hate to be negative, and I likely don't know everything about opportunities open for artists. I've just seen enough of what my friends have had to put up with to know that it's not easy.

Don't let this discourage you from putting forth a genuine effort in expressing your artistic talents. If you ever try to land a job with a company or organization that can use artistic talent, it's always good to have something to point to and say, "That's what I'm capable of."

In the end, we can at least be grateful that we have a website where we can promote our work and communicate and collaborate with other artists with ease for free.

I'm STILL FUCKING BROKE. :C

I've had prints since 2007, and only made about 4 $. But I don't expect to make a lot of money on DA either, I just have the option in case anyone stumbles by and wants a print.

well i really don't think they will..... they seam to only help the ones bringing in the money. its tradjic that they don't really care about us small people. its best to get the artwork framed and sale it at a flee market and put the prices yourself. and make each one original people enjoy that. i usually make any where from 50$ to 500$ in a one day session at my local flee market. i'm going to start uploading my work when i get my scanner fixed

i have been here for 4 weeks and have sold 2 prints

None of mine are selling....

The one thing i reallyt hope right now is that someone from DA would read this thread, i mean, DA also makes money with every sold print. When they read ppl sell their stuff outside of DA better then they do on DA, may be they'll get the brilliant idea of making some changes. DA plz read this! It's better for everyone ^^

I was thinking of putting prints up once I got better, guess I won't now XDD
Another thing that might be possible (I don't know if it is) is maybe selling the IDEA of a character or something?
Cause if you make some amazing breath takingly gorgeous dragon, maybe someone would be interested in buying him
I know that game art can make money, for like flash games, and most of that seems fairly easy to make, also very fun!

Well, I've bought prints, so somebody made some money *lol*

I bought some of my own prints and got .44 cents >.>

For me ive made nothing on here would love to sell a print. Ive tried outside as well and had some joy only two sales and a total of $0.23

im going to try to dispel the myth that you cant sell prints or make money from the DA prints account...because you CAN. I think a healthy mix of decent artwork and enough watchers is the key to actually selling stuff.

i wont say how much money but i will say that thus far i've sold:

1,621 prints

so yes, DA prints isn't useless, have hope.

Ive seen many people ask this question w/ very few if any answers....

I'm a first-timer at this prints function. But wanted to ask if it's worth to create prints. If I change my mind about using prints, can I remove it later?

Another deviant-artist told me it wasn't worth using the function, but I'm curious about it. Meanwhile, I got to go look for more FAQs...

I've made a total of $125 off print sales ...sounds good at first, but when you consider I've been here for over 3 and a half years and during all that time have been on an endless artmaking streak rarely going any longer than a couple of weeks without submitting something new - well, it proves that Print sales could maybe buy you a pizza a month at best unless your'e super-popular

To me, the dA prints system is a major fail. D: Hence why I don't use it. You make so little money off a print it's not worth it. That's why I opened my own site.

And dA only sends you your pay quarterly. Really, who wants to wait 3 months to get paid?

I've made a couple of dollars but not much. I've heard other sites are better for selling prints, I'm interested to know which. But unfortunately a lot of stockers limit prints to dA

i just uploaded a piece of my work...and its automatically letting people ' buy my prints' which i dont want to do...i only wanted to upload my work for people to see and not to buy yet.....how do i change it?


if that makes any sense?

x

I've had my account for about 5 years, thus I never have to pay the annual fee anymore, which is the bees knees. I've sold probably 70 or 80 prints in those years and have made something like 2 or 300 in profit. However, it's pretty rare and you have to sell a big size piece to even get a profit of 10 dollars. The real reason I think to have an account is to buy your own prints, which is extremely discounted in all regards, I can buy a 20 x 30 for around $15 which is amazing. Then frame and show them off and sell them yourself at what they really should be priced at, which I have done for years and have made a much greater profit tripling my online one.

very interesting..

i've been wondering the very same thing about prints for a while now.
can't help but wonder about them, since it seems so many artists here on dA have prints available..

i'll continue to watch this forum

I've sold two in about 4 years, and even then the profit was so little, I've never seen any of it!

I've been asked for prints from friends and family and I have never sold one on DA.
I think I will use my Facebook to sell them, as people I know are more likely to buy them rather than people I don't.

I got a question, do people pay for downloads? i put up my files in quick high resolution in order to sale prints in larger file. but in this way i believe people can just download them print them and print them in a decent result by themselves. i chose watermark but i don't see it on my computer. wonder if people can see it from their computer.
thanks for any answer.

Over 4 years I've sold about 32 prints and have 100 wishes, that says a lot about how well (not) the system works. I suggest looking elsewhere for selling your prints

I'm considering selling prints, but not through DA's system. instaproofs.com only wants a 15% commission, and is free to set up and maintain. (The 90 day thing is annoying, though...)
If that works out for me, I might consider zenfolio, or something of the sort...

I am new to DA and have been wondering if people actually do sell very many prints on here, I was very sad to see that the artist make so little off of their prints, to make only $2.50 a print is just sad. So is it really work upgrading your account to set your own prices? I am new to the whole photography thing and am just trying to get some exposure, any ideas?

I have been wondering the same thing. I was really trying to find a way to make some money by selling my art. Its summer and its harder to sell art when im not around people. Plus my mom doesn't want me to get a job unless its in the house or I have a ride. So I was trying to get art supply money in a reasonable way. T__TWhat to do then!! omg!

I tried sell my pics by DA and I think is just waisting time . Of course might say my pics are not good enough.

If you want money, do something else - not art. Most people that make art are not primarily concerned about making money - they do for hobby and have other primary jobs.

Besides, nobody cares about art nowadays. Best you get is "That is nice," yet extremely few actually buy.

So that is what you have to work with - all "artists" do - esp. unknown ones.

Regards.

They have no overheads so they must make, ive sold 1 and still made profits.

Not a cent.

But that's because I don't have anything setup

i haven't been able to get people, besides my friends or the people that i've faved to actually look at artwork/prints. there should free advertising somewhere on the site. ((cries))

I don't sell here because there is a lot of overhead pricing to be dealt with, so I think its better when I sell prints at conventions. I can sell for cheaper, make more money off the print, and there is no shipping fee so the sale is easier to make.

I've made about ten bucks, all within 1.5 years or so. I bought the Prints account for no particular reason before they changed the system, so I have a Print account 'till hell freezes over. I'm hoping this will benefit me in the future...

I've sold 5 prints in a year through this site, and three of those I KNOW were to people I know in some capacity -- a former co-worker who saw my art, someone I know from science fiction conventions, and someone I know online through a common interest. If you want to sell anything, advertise elsewhere. A large amount of people on this site are 13-year-olds with no concept of rent who want something for nothing, and a large amount of adults out there in the Real World who want something for nothing so they can have money for their $300 purses and shoes.

i've not sell any art work of mine till now
how wud i sell my artwork is there any other way
or m jst nt knowing to sell my work

I have both bought & sold prints

People who have posted have said it all really. You can always direct friends, family, and fellow photographers (in my case), and deviants to your shop here. They can then leisurely view, and buy anything they like the look of. You could do some shoots specifically for people, and put them up on dA for them to buy.
Otherwise, you could sell directly to the customers, and find many, many other ways to sell your work.

"I've noticed a lot of the ones I like, aren't available as prints, or isn't available in the size I want... "

i totally agree nuvonova. most of what i want to buy is not printable, and when i search similar, it's just not the same.

it is true, that people would far more readily buy art they can see and touch, yet in terms of photography (and most visual art) if you have any idea of what matte versus glossy looks like, or can envision size... it's not a world of difference when it is in your hands.

perhaps it is our job as deviants to get out there and promote the entire site to designers, television and movie designers, collectors... anyone who does and can but art ~

DeviantArt does a great job of promoting the site to Artists, but poor job getting potential print customers to the site.

There is only so much cross purchasing the artistic community here can do.

But, DA gets their huge margins on the prints that do sell, have subscription fees that flow in, as well as banner ads, so, they make good money.

There is no real incentive for them to spend the time and money to drive customers to the site.

I almost made $0.20 but there seems to be a sizing issue LOL so I made $0.00 so far...not that it matter ...

The most effective way to sell 'em is to buy 'em at cost with your artist discount (premium accounts only), then sell 'em in person. It's a lot easier to get someone to take some art home with them if they can see it & touch it than via the intarwebz.

I'd love to sell at least one!

I haven't made a cent, wouldn't mind it though!

nope

Well, I've actually only joined DA to buy prints...I'm on another site where I buy art but DA offers a lot more of what I like... however, I've noticed a lot of the ones I like, aren't available as prints, or isn't available in the size I want... (and yes, I do ask!)

I've been checking the shop everyday since I joined, and it looks the same to me all the time.. I wish I could choose what page to look at, rather then 'next page'.. because I tend to get tiresome after 4 pages.

I've made about $30, from selling my older vector art.
I think photography is more marketable, if you sell it yourself, never tried it though!