End of the Mystery
Shall I Tell You How It's Done?
I know what works. It's taken a few years of banging my head against that virtual wall, but I now know how to sell fine-art prints over Internet. Shall I tell you how it's done?

First of all, the basics: you'll need a website. If you're a visual artist you need a website in any case. It's your virtual calling card, catalog and studio visit. I am fond of saying that if an artist doesn't have a website she doesn't exist, and that's only a slight exaggeration. You need your own domain; don't settle for free hosting and a Hotmail account. If you do your clients won't take you seriously. So pay for your own domain (www.marysprints.com) and e-mail account (mary@marysprints.com). It's cheap and it will help you to achieve the credibility you need to get strangers in far off places to send you money for your prints. All business is about credibility, but online business moreso, as your whole operation is somewhere out there in the ether with no tangible office, store nor parking lot, nor smiling sales clerks, and clients are naturally wary. Virtually everything you do online will be designed to build the credibility necessary to overcome your potential clients' natural reticence.

To Flash or Not to Flash
Your website needs to be tasteful and professional. There are different schools of thought on site design. Some people prefer their sites to reflect advanced design and technology concepts, with ornate presentation pages, Flash animations, etc. I'm of the other school: plain vanilla with text links. You can go either way, but if you opt for the former you'd better do it well, as highly "designed" pages take significantly longer to download. If you've navigated the Web much you know that speed is of the essence. Just as in the real world, clients are put off if you make them wait. The question of colors and layouts we'll leave to you. You are, after all, an artist. Having said that, I'll confess that I prefer combinations of black, white and greys. That way the background colors don't clash with or distract from those of the prints you display.

All the images you put on your site should be of professional quality, of course. You are selling images. That's not too complicated in these days of digital cameras. Even if you don't have a digital camera you can still make excellent images of your prints with your old SLR camera and color negative film (yes, the same kit you've taken on vacation all these years!) When you drop the film off at the photo lab for developing, tell them you want the strips of negatives scanned onto a Kodak Photo CD. This procedure gives excellent image quality and saves you an infinite amount of time and frustration scanning prints. Whether you opt for digital or film, the absolutely essential element is the tripod, without which your images will be deficient. Of course, if you're a digital artist, you can forget this entire paragraph; your images are already digitized.

Content is King
Content is king. People don't log onto the WWW to see flaming whirligigs. They go to find useful, interesting information and, in your case, beautiful images. Make sure your site has some of each, whether it's notes about techniques, articles on printmaking history or art criticism, a thoughtful collection of links and, of course, your prints. Information - relevant, interesting, attractive and timely information - is the cheese in the trap. If you've gotten this far with your site, all that remains to do before publishing it online is to fine tune it for search engines. One of your computer-hip nephews can help you with this. It's about metatags and keywords, stuff that you'd rather not bother with.

So, now your site is published. Congratulations, it looks pretty good. Now you can sit back and wait for the orders to come rolling in, right? Well, not exactly. Actually, if you really want your website to function for you, your work has just begun. Now you need to start to promote and update. Start by putting your URL (Web address) on all your correspondence, business cards, e-mails, etc. Send out notes announcing your new site to all your friends and associates, art galleries, the local paper, art publications, etc.