 Do you struggle with pricing your artwork or your art services even feel like I ought to be charging more? But this little voice in your head says things like, maybe I'm just not good enough. I get it. Pricing your artwork or your art services is a huge deal and a really key component of building your profitable art business. In today's video, I'm going to share with you three huge mistakes with pricing and what you should be doing instead. Hello and welcome or welcome back to my channel. My name is Sophie and I love to help artists just like you to set up and grow a profitable business doing what you love. If you like more tips and tricks on how to build that profitable art business, then you're in the right place on this channel. That's all we do. Share all things art business and mindset related as well. All right, let's dive into these three huge mistakes. Mistake number one is using that old formula, the time versus costs formula. And whilst that might have worked really well back in the day, I believe it's not the best use of your time to be actually sitting there with a calculator and pen and paper working out how long it's taken you to do something. And here's why there's two kind of reasons for this, I believe. Number one is we're creatives and we're on a journey. Sometimes when you actually create the end work, 80% of your creation has gone into the buildup, the preparation, the sketches, that whatever it is you're doing, if it's 2D work, for example, and the end execution that might just be the final conclusion of what you're doing might not have taken very long. So do you count all the preparation hours? Do you count just the end hours? Do you see how complicated that can be? And sometimes something's going to come really quickly and other times it's going to take you a really long time. So there's too many variables in that, it just doesn't work. All right, so we want to be a little bit more professional. And the second reason is just that you are running an art business or I'm assuming you want to be running an art business, which is why you're here in the first place, watching videos on my channel, right? So the most important thing is at the end of the year, you want to make sure that your art business is profitable. That means what you're selling is actually much more than the expenses going out. So just make this super, super simple. Once you've been doing this for a year, and I get for those of you starting out, it's going to be a bit of a guesswork. But once you've done this for a year, you simply have to look at all the income that you've had, to everything that you've sold, how much is that figure? And then you minus all the expenses, your art business expenses, and you want to make sure that you're making 30, 40, 50, 60% profit, whatever it is that you want to make, whatever the profit margin is that you need in order to take a salary to replace a full-time job or a part-time job or whatever it is that you want. That is a bit of a numbers game. So by doing this, it's much easier than actually just fiddling around with an individual piece because let's face it, some pieces will have larger amount of profits in than others, but so long as at the end of the day, the business you are building is profitable and you are able in the end to pull a salary out of that business, surely that's all you want, isn't it? So I'm going to suggest that you put all of that time sheet down, you stop worrying about all of that because I trust you there is a much easier way. And that little bit of information is coming in a minute. All right, mistake number two, and that is plucking your prices out of thin air. And even worse, plucking them out of thin air every time that you make something new. And the reason I know this is because I know so many artists have told me that they do justice. They've created something new and then they're saying, I don't know what I should, what should I, and they're standing looking at it going, well, what sort of price shall I put on that? And they're just making it up. Now let's think about it from a customer perspective. If over time you say, go do an artist's exhibition and you start to see a variety of prices. For example, you looked and you thought, well, I'm sure last year something that size was this price and now it seems to be that price or work this size has got this price and now something over here, it doesn't all add up. It all feels very unprofessional. The plucking them out of thin air is not using your intuition. It's just literally grabbing and going, oh, I know I need to price this. And what you're doing really is you're avoiding actually cracking those numbers and actually using a formula that works, a formula that is going to provide you with a profitable business. So taking them out of thin air, guessing just randomly putting a price on something you don't even know if at the end of the day it's going to give you with a profit, leave you with a profit. And what if it leaves you with a profit but it's really, really small or you just don't wanna know so you don't look. So therefore you pluck a price. Can anyone relate to that? I'm pretty sure all of us have been through that. When I first started out, I have to say, I'm not that person. I did already make a pricing structure from day one. I made a pricing structure and I just stuck to it and then I just kept putting the prices up. So I've never been a plucket out of thin air but I do know an awful lot of people who do just that or they look around and go, okay, well, what should I charge for that? Or they ask someone else, what should I charge for that? Or they wait until a customer says, I'd like to buy it, how much is it? And then it's like, oh, or you could have it for this amount. All right, you're not selling at a jumble sale. You're not making up the price as it goes along. You're running a business. All right, oh, you want to be running a business. So let's do things professionally from the get go. So what you need to do instead is you do need to use a formula that works and I'm gonna be sharing shortly, not in this video but in the next one, the six steps to pricing that I have actually been teaching on a larger masterclass. I'm just gonna give you a snippet out of that in an upcoming video. So we have a formula that will enable you to always come up with a price that you feel good about and leaves you with enough profit that you're confident to go out and price. The third huge mistake is comparing yourself with others. Now, in these times, of course, we're surrounded by social media and it's really easy to pick up your phone in the morning and scroll down that Instagram feed and look at other artists' work. And I'm sure I'm not alone looking and going, oh, that's really lovely, that's really nice. We're not actually looking at the artist and where they are in their career because let's face it, as a 2D artist or a 3D artist or a deliverer of workshops or whatever it is that you do, you're going to improve over time. That's just a fact. When you start out, you're a bit rough and ready and not so good. When you're in the middle of your career, you're getting better, right? You're getting better, you're honing your craft, you're doing the thing better and after you've been doing it for a serious amount of time, you're going to be in a much more stable, professional place. So comparing yourself with others is not really going to help you because you might be scrolling down that feed, see some lovely work, be a little bit panicked and be put off but that artist could have been around for 30, 40 years honing his or her craft, all right? You can't start comparing and then what tends to happen as well is you look across and look at the website and you either see really high prices when you think, oh my God, I can't possibly do that, I need to wedge them right down or worse still, you look at an artist's work that you like and you see a really low price and then you think, oh, well, I'm not even as good as them so I must make a price lower than them. Now we have to remember that the majority of us don't like the pricing, right? You don't like having to ask for money, it kind of doesn't feel natural for most creatives so therefore there tends to be a lot of people out there with beautiful work with a too low price point so if you start rummaging around and comparing yourself to others, then you could end up in that high, low trap. Either you're put off by the high price, not realizing that person's been around for a while or you're looking at the low price thinking, crikey, well, that's really good, if they're offering that, I better put it even lower. So we just need to stay in your own space. In fact, I think more and more of us are spending a lot more time off social media for that reason and just the fact that it takes an awful lot of your time. It's a massive time suck. So when you're in the creative space, you want to just hone what you are doing. You want to definitely be developing your creative practice. That's something that we talk about a lot in our art with success path. So one of the early stages is really actually improving and working on what it is that you're going to be selling and then really it's about just staying on the zone, staying in on the tracks, right? Doing what you do and just constantly improving and focusing on what you do. We're all individuals, all right? And people are going to buy into what you do based on how much they love it, all right? So you really want to be spending most of your time just like this, just zoning in, focused in on what you're doing and not worrying about what other people are doing. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this short video and if you're a little bit inspired to find out more about the six steps to pricing formula, then right now at time of this video going out, I still have 24 or 48 hours for you to watch my free masterclass, the full proof formula to pricing your art, which does walk you through those six steps. Now, if you're watching this at a later date, there will be another video, like I said, that will take you through some of that as well. And if you really, really, really are very keen to learn that and all things business, then why not check out my Art Business Academy membership? Again, at the moment, we're at 24 hours to go before the doors actually close, but check the link below this video because if they're still open, you can see whether the Academy is something for you. And if not, you can pop your name on the waiting list. All the information is below this video. Thank you so much for watching. If you've loved it, don't forget to give me a thumbs up and I'll see you on the next one.