Print Sales

In a fit of organizational madness–and it’s not great to draw while printing, because it slows the computer down–I went through December and November’s print sales and calced them out. This is probably of no interest to anybody but me, but I did learn some interesting stuff. (Midwest Furfest is not included in this calculation, because my record keeping there sucked ass, and I still have to go through it so I know how much money to fling at the tax dudes.) This is mostly for me, but other artists, and those of you following my career closely to see when the optimal moment to kill me and make the value of those originals jump might also be interested.

First of all, variety. Counting jumbo prints seperately from their smaller counterparts, I sold 80 different TYPES of prints in the last two months. Variety is obviously doing me good. I sold 128 prints total.

The big sellers were, in order, Smallrus, Lurking Sock Puppet, and Morning Dragon. (The smallrus evidentally had some kind of bizarre appeal. Curse James and his honey mustard dreams!) The vast majority of sales were one print apiece, naturally. The big surprises, for pieces I generally hadn’t thought would sell well (or at all) were Wombat Pirate, Habenero Slug, Hummingbird Hat, and Balthazar Disdains the Lemon. Slug Totem also made a surprising sales blip–I’d thought I’d never move any of those, but it’s gotten a lot of interest.

I sold sixteen different types of jumbo print, and nineteen prints, which would pretty much pay for the printer even if I hadn’t sold a number of jumbos in months before. Biggest jumbo seller, Mammoth Garlic. (no surprise there.) Runner up, oddly enough, Angel Lovers. Huh.

The interesting bit here, to me is A) the sheer variety, and B) virtually all the big sellers were real media pieces. Admitted, they were all pieces I’ve done in the last six months, and we can assume that if people really liked some of the digital pieces, they may have bought them already. But nevertheless, this assuages some of my fear that my digital stuff is much better and I’m wasting my time on real media, since even the more popular digital pieces like “Penguin of Arabia” and “Sir Bunny” weren’t doing nearly as well as the real media stuff. (Oddly enough, the best seller of the digital pieces was “Gearworld Invasion” which I’d NEVER have suspected in a million years. Most of the other gearworld pieces also sold at least one copy. Which is heartening.)

The other interesting bit is that all three of the top sellers were quickies. I mean, a few hours, tops.

Hmm.

Well, anyway, them’s the numbers. Since my New Year’s Resolution will be to actually keep track of bloody sales this time, we’ll see how those numbers pan out over time. I can’t honestly say that I’m likely to cater my art to sales figures–I’m too easily distracted by what looks cool. But that’s probably not a bad thing at all.