There are easier ways of making money

With but seven days left to my month long, one-man show at a local gallery, marketing has taken a front seat in the ongoing efforts to make this a success. I’m not sure what success means – but selling everything on show would be a start. Even if the net reward to yours truly is the order of magnitude of a few hamburgers at the local hang out.

I checked out the local town on a sleepy Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, making note of the businesses who cater to wealthy cutomers. Not that wealth is needed to buy one of my prints, but wealthy people predominate amongst those visiting wineries – just check the parking lots – and the gallery happens to be located in the center of a winery. At $245 for a framed 18″x24″ or $95 for an unframed one, no one will be getting rich here, but fame never was easy or cheap to acquire.

No one has yet refused to hang my poster, so my reserves of courage are building and I hope to have a dozen on display around town (meaning Paso Robles and Templeton, in central California) by the time the show opens.

I have also printed up some postcard invitations to one hundred of my closest friends, and you can see these in progress in the picture above.

Here’s the front of the card:

Pelican, Morro Bay. Leica M2, 90mm Elmar C, Kodak Gold 100 – yes, I was still using film 2 years ago when this was snapped

And here’s the back:

The cards were composed in Apple’s Pages, ideal for this type of project, though that application’s weak mail merge function means that I had to go with stick-on address labels rather than printing natively on the card. A shame, but the results looks pretty professional all the same. I used some two sided, heavy satin paper which works well with the Hewlett Packard DJ90’s dye based inks, meaning the paper does a good job of absorbing these. I print four to a page and then slice them up with my Rotatrim trimmer, a device I have used for ages and recommend unreservedly. No matter your state of disrepair, it is impossible to cut yourself on this latter day guillotine.

While I know this is far from the truth, here is how this two year project feels right now in terms of labor (mine!) allocation:

Marketing 50%
Printing/mounting/framing 49%

The other 1%? Well, that was used up in actually taking the pictures ….