Lots of artists are auctioning their work online these days.
The simplest way to do it is probably Ebay. Unfortunately, you can’t sell internationally on Ebay until you’ve got a certain amount of positive feedback.
I’ve never been an Ebay seller, and most of the people that follow this site are in the US, so when I decided to try auctioning small works, that option was out for me.
You can also sign up for sites like Carol Marine’s Daily Paintworks too, and do it there. As far as I know, they have their own proprietary auction software. You also get the benefit of being part of a community. I’ve never actually tried that so can’t comment, but it’s an option you might want to look into.
But what if you want to do it on your own site?
A really good example is Julian Merrow-Smith. He’s been doing this forever with Postcard from Provence, and I think is up to about 2500 paintings now. His auction software is custom built, though, so unless you want to pay a developer to do it for you, you’ll need to find another solution.
Thankfully, there is one. It’s a little clunky, but it works pretty well.
Setting up auctions on WordPress
If you have a wordpress site, there’s a plug-in you can use that doesn’t need too much setting up and can you up and running with your on auctions pretty quickly.
This plug-in isn’t free. But it’s inexpensive and it does work. If you manage to sell your work, the first painting you sell will probably cover the cost of the plugin.
But before I tell you about that one, make sure you avoid this one:
Ultimate Auction Pro
Before I landed on the one I use now, I tried Ultimate Auction Pugin. It doesn’t work well, resulted in some of the people who bought by paintings getting spammed non-stop with “You’ve won the auction” emails, ad infinitum, and the support is frankly terrible. Save yourself the bother and get one that actually works.
WP Auctions
This plugin, WP Auctions, is much better. It does take a little time to set up, but is well worth figuring out.
If you want to make it look the same as the rest of your site, you’ll also need to create a stylesheet for it. It looks serviceable out of the box, but much better if you know enough CSS to style it.
If you’re thinking seriously about doing this and want a step by step tutorial on how to set this up, click here to register your interest. If enough people are interested, I’ll record a video on how to do it and email it to you.
How to actually make sales
Ok, so let’s assume that you’re all set up and can run auctions on your site.
To actually sell the work, you’ll need to be able to reach a lot of people, and that means you need subscribers. Lots of them.
The pioneer of this way of selling work, Duane Keiser, built up a large following by catching people’s attention. He painted huge PBJs that were widely shared on social media, he put out videos of painting an ice cream cone as it melted, and of course, he was the first to really do this so that got him noticed, too.
He uses Ebay to actually sell his work, but he also has a huge number of people subscribed to his site. When he starts a new auction, he doesn’t wait for people to notice it on Ebay, he emails everyone with a link to the auction.
Things really took off for Julian when he got mentioned in the New York Times (let me know if I’m wrong, Julian, but I think that was the one). He’d been selling his small paintings for a year or two at that point, he’s been auctioning them now for over ten years.
The point is, for both these painters, the key to them doing so well now is having a very large number of people that they can contact when they have a new piece to auction. And it’s taken them a long time, and a lot of work, to build that up.
Their work is also excellent, of course. It stands out by itself. I was listening to Carol Marine’s interview on the Savvy Painter podcast the other day, and she mentioned that many people seem to expect to sell their work before they’re really good enough to attract much interest. Her recommendation is to make sure that you’re doing work you’re proud of before you try to sell it.
I’m not trying to put you off. I’m just trying to help you set your expectations realistically.
You don’t have to be huge
As for me, I have about 7000 subscribers following this blog. I’ve built that up naturally and very slowly over time, just by sharing my learning journey and trying to help other aspiring realist painters as much as I can. If I didn’t have a following that size, I doubt my auctions would be doing as well – I only have one unsold panting so far.
To put it into perspective, I’ve been writing on this site for almost ten years. That’s how long it’s taken me to build a following that size.
Yes, you can build an audience faster than that, much faster if you’re focused on it. I haven’t really been focused on it so my audience has grown slowly. But if you’re going to sell your work by auction, you’re going to need to be able to reach a lot of people.
I can’t tell you how many. A smaller number of really devoted followers might be enough to start. And I don’t think you should let the current size of your audience hold you back.
Just be realistic about your expectations. If you only have a small following on your site, chances are it’s going to be tougher to make sales. You can also post on social media, of course, facebook and instagram. I stick my auctions up on facebook. But the same applies, how many people you reach on those sites will pretty much decide how successful you are.
Planting trees
You know the old adage, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.
If you want to have a go at this, but you don’t have much of a following, start anyway. Be realistic about how well you’ll do, and do it because you want to paint regularly. That will be enough of a challenge by itself if you don’t already do it, believe me.
I do believe that we’re on the cusp of some major changes in how art is produced and sold, and it’s a very exciting time to be an artist. It’s also very likely that these changes will have a profound effect on the kind of art being produced. Some changes will be good, some perhaps not so much.
But I think that, overall, it’s a very good time to be an artist if you can get to grips with the online world. The great promise is that you’ll be able to support yourself doing the work you love.
For myself, I’m just taking my first steps down this particular road. Sometimes my paintings do well, and sometimes I make less than minimum wage on them.
I’ll keep you updated as I go and share whatever I can that might be useful to you.
Best wishes and thanks for reading,
Paul
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Thank you so very much for posting this information. I have been wondering about it myself and appreciate your openness to sharing your resources and knowledge.
I love you work!
– Alika.
You’re very welcome Alika, glad it was useful.
Thanks Paul, very interesting post.
I don’t know much about selling online, it’s something I am just beginning to look into; I don’t even have my own website at the moment (let alone the ‘good enough’ work). I wonder whether it’s simpler to avoid the complication of auction software and instead just sell at a set price using eCommerce plugin?
Thanks again and good luck with your auctions.
Potentially, yes. Then you have do decide on a price point, though, and that’s a very difficult call. With auctions, the price finds its own level so it makes that part much easier!
Great post Paul!
Thanks Darren, and good to hear fro you! Hope things are good with you.
Thanks for this Paul, very interesting, I started daily painting in 2009 and started to build a mailing list, had a fair bit of success and always sold at £99 for 6×8’s, didn’t use an auction just sold to the first email. The mailing list is SO hard to build though and I find people leave as fast as they join! So then I start judging my art, I’ve really cut back on the small dailies now but as you say online prescence is very important and one has to keep working on it, exciting times…
It is very hard to build an audience, and increasingly so as more people are online. There weren’t that many art blogs when I started mine, but of course there are lots now.
I am planning some experiments to build my own audience this year, though, and will share the results here. It’ll be interesting and hopefully informative.
One of the things I plan to try and to is to build a larger audience on youtube – my audience there is quite small because I don’t use it much, so that’s a good place for me to start.
Thank you for your very detailed post about auctioning on a homepage and the sharing of your experience. I appreciate
I am also a self thought artist and I am using WordPress.com but cannot find the WP plugin for the auction
I think it works only with WordPress.org, where you have your own provider. I just startet with the beginning of January a daily painting online site and use Daily Paintworks for the auction in oder to get some audience.
Would be interested in how to set up auctions, will sign up
Thanks again for sharing your experience
Hi Christa,
You’re very welcome! Yes, I should have said, the plug in is just for self-hosted wordpress. I’d always advise using the self hosted version of wordpress. It’s a lot more work, but you have much more flexibility and more chance of building traffic from Google. About 60% of the traffic to this site is from Google, and almost all of the new visitors.
What’s your experience with Dailypaintworks? Do you like it? It strikes me that there are a lot of artists on that site now, so it might be harder to stand out.
Yes Paul, you are right it is hard on daily paintwork, every day there are about 200- 220 new daily paintings on the website. Most of the are in the auction. When you then see the active biding with about 40-50 so this is not much.
The only thing, when you told most of your audience came from google, how do you manage this. Do you pay extra with google AdWords , or how do you rank your website. I am not
an computer specialist and have no idea about the so called SEO of a website, (sorry for my bad English it’s not my mother tongue.) Do you a website specialist for your wordpresss site for the right ranking?
I can imagine it being very hard to stand out with so many! I do think that makes it more sensible to have your own site and develop your own audience – but of course that takes a lot of time. There is no easy road.
The visitors that come here from Google are all from the natural search results, I don’t do adwords. Although I was a professional SEO for many years, funnily enough I haven’t done much SEO on this site, most of the traffic is natural.
I haven’t made any SEO mistakes, of course, because I know what I’m doing. But the most effective thing I’ve done is to publish the best content I know how to write for a number of years. Other sites have linked to various blog posts over the years, and that helps the site to rank better in Google. But those links happened purely because the content I was writing resonated with people. So although that’s a long, slow build, it’s very much worth it.
As I said above, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is today 🙂
Quite a few visitors do come from facebook now, that’s probably the second biggest referrer after Google, but I’m not really active on any other social media sites so I don’t get many visitors from them.
Thanks Paul for the email. I have a web page with the SAA but I think I will need my own website. Could use some advice on that. I like the idea of Auctions
Definitely you’ll need your own site if you’re going to develop an audience for your work online. I’ll put that one in the pipeline 🙂
Thank you, Paul. Did you ever look into Fine Art Studio Online?
I haven’t Deborah, but it’s on my todo list (which is unfortunately rather long)!
This was quite informative blog about selling on wordpress using auction. I do have a website/blog on WordPress and each finished new painting is a new post. I use DailyPaintworks and Etsy to sell my works. Would you recommend linking the post to these websites? Or just create the links in a page.
Hi Marlene,
I would just add a link to the page for each painting. Do you have any subscribers to your blog? do you email links to the paintings on Dailypaintworks or Etsy when you put them up?
I had a look at your site, BTW, nice work 🙂
Hi Paul,
Great article. Thanks!
Here’s a tip for reader retention from a programmer by day/painter by night:
For hyperlinks, open link content in a new window so that your site stays up and readers stay with you and don’t forget where they came from. It’s super simple to edit the HTML code. View your page code (in WordPress, edit the page and click Text view).
Find the code for the link. It’ll look like this:
Postcard from Provence
Add the following before the ending > bracket:
target=”_blank” so that it looks like this:
Postcard from Provence
If you already know this, I apologize. Otherwise, I offer it as a thank you for your blog.
Feel free to email me if you have questions.
Thanks Margaret! I think it’s probably laziness – or perhaps just forgetfulness – that I don’t do that, I have a programming background too 🙂 Thanks for the reminder.
I want to try my luck with online auctioning of my paintings.
Thanks for the tips!
You’re very welcome, Dar!
Thank you for always sharing so freely and openly with your audience! Your posts are always so inspiring and helpful. I’m interested in finding ways to sell my paintings outside a gallery because while I like outsourcing the selling to professionals, I don’t feel like it’s a balanced relationship. The artist invariably takes on a lot more risk. I don’t have enough interesting topics to start a blog so I’m still trying to figure out what to do.
You’re very welcome, Julie.
I think you’re right about the imbalance in the relationship between artists and galleried – depending on the particular artist and gallery, of course. Generally, though, I think you’re right.
But I’d encourage you reconsider starting a blog. The ideas for topics are much more likely to come when you actually have a site set up. You’ll find things occurring to you all the time, particularly as you work.
It’s like anything, the best approach is to start small. Thankfully, the barrier to entry is very low so you can try it without investing to much time and energy. You make beautiful work, and I’m sure that there are many people out there (including me!) who would like to hear about how you make it.
Hi Paul
A late reply on this thread, I’ve re-read it a number of times, along with the “earning a living” post.
As you know me, I’m not an artist, I don’t paint, I’m still learning to draw and most importantly at this moment in time I’m not looking to earn a living from art. I only set out on this path to prove the theory of brain plasticity and look where it’s got me 😀
However, I do qualify for the boring office job and this in particular related with me ;
“You never will feel ready. You may be more ready than you think right now.”
Now, I know for sure I’m not ready to earn a living from it. But I think it’s about time I set myself a challenge to try and sell a piece of art. By the end of 2017!!
Yeah, I know, crazy talk considering I haven’t even produced a proper ‘piece of art’ as yet. But I think if I could convince someone to buy something I produced then that would be a massive validation of the hours I’ve put in. It would place me way above the Steve of five years ago that could only draw a stick man.
So… many thanks for your continued inspiration. I’m going to plant that tree rather than in another five years time.
As ever, best wishes,
Steve
That is so not crazy talk Steve! That’s exactly how you manage it, one step at a time. It’s really scary to make commitments like that, but I know you can do it. You’re certainly good enough now.
Good luck!
Hi Paul,
I hope you are well during this uncertain time. This is a terrific article! I really hope you are still going as this article is on here a few years.
I just came across you and your page by googling about how to sell work online.
I’m back online after many years just relying on my local gallery and now my partner and I have a small rural studio & gallery. We host classes and workshops in painting and are trying to get our feet off the ground. It’s our second year in our studio.
At the moment COVID-19 is upon us all and we are finding it difficult to get ourselves going again. So we’re trying to explore online sales further.
We live in Ireland and as painters, the market here for art is quite saturated with a small population, so we wish to expand further. I have sent a request to you for your video on WPAuctions as I’m in the process of creating a website on WordPress. I look forward to hearing from you and a pleasure to come across your page! Hope you can help!
Kindest regards,
Póilín
Hi Póilín,
Yes, transferring things online has become even more important now. This article is from a while ago but I’m still auctioning work here and still using WPAuctions.
If you’re teaching, I’d look into setting that up online too. It can be done reasonably simply and without spending too much through Zoom or Youtube Events. You do need a basic lelvel of equipment of course, and some of that is hard to get at the moment (the Elgato camlink for example) since everyone is wanting to do more online.
I’ll look out for your email. You might want to have a look at my Threads program too, I cover everything in detail there, including setting up a wordpress site to auction work, teaching online with multi camera set ups and also building an audience.
https://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/threads-is-open
I wish you the best of luck. These are trying times for a lot of us, but artists are natural introverts anyway and if you can translate what you do to the online environment, it’s perfectly possible to keep going.