World Printmakers
Newsletter, No. 10 January, 2002

A New Member of the Family
The news this month is all about "Fine Art Print Sales," a new World Printmakers offspin. It's a new website dedicated uniquely and exclusively to the sale of fine-art prints. You can have a look at it at: http://www.fine-art-print-sales.com . It has no feature stories on techniques, no workshop interviews, nothing to distract the art buyer from his mission: to buy art.

So how did this new, strictly-commercial initiative come about? Remember Art Avery, the digital printmaker who curated the recent Digital Fine-Art Challenge? I received an email from Art last month with an interesting critical analysis of the World Printmakers site. He starts out with the usual soothing music one hears before the hammer falls: "You've created a wonderful site, Mike, loaded with beautiful images and useful information for printmakers."

He goes on, "And that is precisely the problem." Here comes the hammer. "There is so much information on the homepage that it's not clear whether you're even selling prints or not. My immediate guess is no, that this is a site whose mission is to attend and inform artists, a sort of a trade magazine. In fact, if I did want to buy a print, based on what I see on the homepage, I wouldn't know how to go about it."

It was a very timely message. The question of how to get World Printmakers reoriented towards sales was something that had been bothering me for some months. But I wasn't quite sure how to go about it. "What do you suggest, Art?" Art Avery, who is not only a bright guy with a fine critical sense, but also a kind and helpful person, proceeded to lay out a step-by-step plan, the upshot of which is this new site with a new focus and a new philosophy of search-engine promotion. Art has clear ideas on this subject, and we're following his advice to the letter.

Participating Artists
The new site is not so new, really. As you will see, all we have done has been to collect all the sales-related material off the World Printmakers site and present it in a more orderly and convincing fashion. As for artists, we have selected all of the World Printmakers Gold Participants to be on the new site, and we won't be asking them for an additional fee. In the future, any printmaker who pays for a World Printmakers Gold Participation will automatically be added to the list of artists with work for sale on the Fine Art Print Sales site at no extra cost.

If you navigate around the new site, you'll find that it's not finished yet. There are still links which need upgrading. We're working on them. The main thing is that the site is up and running in record time and it has given World Printmakers a fresh impulse in the all-important area of sales.And this thanks to Art Avery, whose site-promotion legerdemain on behalf of artists we'll be hearing more about in the near future.

New from China
World Printmakers is also pleased to welcome this month four fine new Chinese artists. We're doubly delighted, in fact. Not only do Chu Teh-Chen, Yu Chengyou, Zhang Minjie and Shi Yu bring to our sites the extraordinary quality of their work but, as our first artists from China, they make a nice contribution to World Printmakers' growing universality. See you next month. Have an invigorating winter!

Regards,

Mike & Maureen Booth
Editors & Publishers
World Printmakers
The Worldwide Showcase for Contemporary Fine-Art Printmakers
URL: http://www.worldprintmakers.com
Email: miguel@worldprintmakers.com
New site: http://www.fine-art-print-sales.com