Every week a customer suggests we sell posters, postcards, calendars, stationary or sketchbooks that feature a piece of artwork or photograph from one of our Lost Art Press products.
It’s flattering, but we decline. During my tenure in publishing, I’ve studied this market and have concluded that this is how you make money on posters that do not feature kittens, human flesh or dumb motivational sayings.
- Select the most popular images from your publishing business; scale and clean the images so they will reproduce well on heavy coated paper stock.
- Find a press that can hold the line screen appropriate for a quality reproduction job.
- Purchase 2,000 posters so you can reduce the unit cost and charge less than $20 for the poster – a key price point.
- Sell 200.
- Warehouse the 1,800, running up a monthly fee to store them until your profit is gone and someone decides to pulp them.
- Sell a kidney.
- Profit!
Rather than lose another internal organ, let’s try this. Last night I made a high-resolution scan of one of the pages from this post on furniture styles. I scanned it at the maximum resolution we can handle, cleaned it up in Photoshop for about two hours and scaled it so it would print nicely at 18” x 24” – a common and inexpensive ($13) poster size at Staples.
You can download the high-resolution file here (it’s more than 50mb):
You have our permission to take it to a printer and have them make you a poster for your own use. If 50 people send me a photo of this poster on the wall of their shop, I’ll do another one for free. We lose less money this way.
— Christopher Schwarz
I don’t particularly want a print of that image… but this kind of awesome-ness is why I’m happy to give Lost Art Press my money.
This may be a bad idea that would still end up losing money, but what about a digital download poster pack? Make up a few of these and charge a smallish fee to download the lot of them… if 20 people buy it you’d have at least made a halfway-decent hourly wage. How many people would be interested in buying images to make posters out of is obviously the question that makes this possibly still a terrible idea.
LAP: Make Books, Not Posters. I’ll take the bumper sticker. 🙂
Can’t digital print-on-demand handle the quality/archivability you are looking for?
Yup. But not at a price that makes us comfortable.
I’m in that group of 1800/2000. Eagerly looking forward to the book and looking at the images while sitting in bed in the evening. No interest whatsoever in buying a poster, even if it combines kittens, naked women, and motivational sayings. Wise decision.
Besides, my shop is ini the basement, which has fieldstone walls.
Staples won’t let me upload an image online > 12mb :(. All that effort you went to, and I guess I will have to sneaker net the file to the store.
NB: When your corporate overlords decide to pulp the remaining posters instead of paying warehousing fees, you might also make the foolish decision to store them in your already overpacked cubicle.
Points one to seven in a poster, please.
The poster storage problem is exactly the same on faced by every single person I ever knew who was in a band that self produced a CD or a 7″ single. I remember a hall closet stacked to the ceiling and threatening death to anyone who touched the stack. Smart move on the digital download alternative.
Did a 13 x 19 inch print and it looks great. Just had to figure out that the printer wants to call it A3+ paper size. Will hang it about my Dutch Tool Chest for inspiration.
what about keychains?
Poster sized? I don’t know. People seem to have enough trouble bending their new iPhone 6’s keeping those in the front pocket. Imagine the havoc you could cause carrying around a 13×19 keychain!
I got a poster made at Staples, and I was surprised that it only cost $1.99 plus tax! (A color 18″ X 24″ poster costs $12.99, but the same size in black and white only cost $1.99!
I posted a picture of the poster hanging on the wall behind my new knockdown Nicholson workbench on my blog. You can see it here: http://woodworkingfortheloveofit.blogspot.com/2014/09/looking-forward-to-charles-hayward-book.html
Staples wouldn’t let me upload to get a print as the file is too big. I still hope to take it to the local Staples and see if they can print it. So maybe part of the reason you had so few photos was because of this.