Blog #3 – Limited Edition

October 2023

I’ve recently been asked if an image I was selling was a ‘limited edition’, “no, it’s not” was my reply…..and I went on to try and justify my decision as to why it’s not….

Although I am a very experienced photographer, I’ve only recently (Summer 2023) created the website this blog sits on, I don’t market myself other than entering the weekly Monday ‘X’ (formerly Twitter….as the BBC likes to say), hosted competitions, the three I generally tag are ‘#ShareMondays2023’ that will, stating the obvious, change to 2024 come the first of January, ‘#FSPrintMonday’, this is run by the photo printer paper people, FotoSpeed, and lastly, ‘#WexMondays’, run by Wex Photo Video, although you can enter this on any day of the week and it’s now a monthly run comp, that no one can get to grips with when it’s open and closed for entries for a particular month!

Anyway, I digress, back to marketing, or lack of it…….therefore, my market is tiny, I mean mega tiny, no one really knows about Lawrence Smith Photography, in the 3 months or so I’ve had my website up & running I’ve had 3 emails through the contact email address on my contact page, one as a test from a friend, one as a test from me, and one where I’d specifically asked someone to send a mail to me at that address…..I gave her a card (my other feeble attempt at marketing myself) and even then I had trouble replying from the mail address that had an ‘SPF Policy Rejection’…it’s sorted now! So that’s 3 emails, all driven by me, not what I would class as prolific in terms of contact from ‘Joe Public’!

I’m not expecting bundles of prints to be flying out of here, firstly because I haven’t set up my online shop, I’m researching the best way to go about that, whilst being extremely busy in the day job too, and secondly, because whilst I think my images are good (don’t we all), there is a massively saturated market out there, with not too many punters scouring the WWW looking for landscape (or ICM images sometimes for me) images to adorn their dwellings. I’m also acutely aware from the pro photographers I follow and watch on YouTube, they’re not selling loads of prints either, so what chance do I have. Therefore, to me, part of the reason to not offer the print (which is framed, double mounted, with non-reflective glass, image description, metadata and a certificate of authenticity) as a limited edition is, fundamentally, I don’t want to limit the opportunity to sell multiple copies of the image, I’m not a ‘Charlie Waite’ or ‘Joe Cornish’ who, rightly so, can ask for decent money and create further value by limiting the numbers of their artwork they sell, this is me, trying to sell some art that I’m proud of, and if I manage to make a few quid to buy myself a nice bottle of ‘Chocolate Block’ off the back of it, all well and good.

Some of the conversation I had with my potential customer also turned to what a limited edition really means, it could be limited in that particular size of print, but there could be a myriad of sizes available, all limited in their own rights…..which I felt sort of countered the argument too. There’s another question, how many do you limit it to, what’s reasonable to add value but not too limiting if the image gained some traction and was well received in the market.

Anyway, I had a really nice conversation with the potential customer, I learnt about her move to the seaside, how she’s going to carry on re-styling the décor to something modern and sleek, it’ll be exciting for her….and exciting for me if I manage to sell the image, which I’ve attached below.

“Moored Up”………an ICM representation of a sail boat at anchor on the Conwy River Estuary

I really like this image myself, in fact, I’ve used it on one side of my business cards, you know, that feeble attempt at marketing I mentioned…..

More images like this to come for me I think but as I write this, I’m planning a long weekend of Autumnal splendour in Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, let’s hope storm Babet and more impending storms this coming week don’t strip all the colour away before I get there!

Cheers for now…...

Lawrence

Oh….and if you read this and are viewing my website, of course, images are for sale, probably not as limited edition but you never know.