Photographers that print your work or make photo books, but don’t have enough of a following to sell them… What do you do with them?
I really liked printing my photos in collage when we would do critiques, but since then I haven’t really printed anything because the cost hasn’t felt worth it. I like the idea of doing books or zines, but don’t have anyone to share them with (friends/family will flip through once, but are otherwise not that interested). I’ve thought about looking into local art fairs, that kind of thing, but am not sure my work is good enough to sell. I simply can’t afford to print 100 copies only to sell one or two haha!
What do you all do? Or is having the physical copy for yourself enough?
Selling prints or even just random digital photos is extremely hard these days. The market is extremely sarurated: millions of stock photos, hundreds of thousands of photographers, AI-tools that can create photos better than the average Joe,… Unless you have a dedicated following or are very good at online marketing, there’s little chance of selling prints or digital copies of your work, no matter how good you are.
If you want to make (decent) money with photography you have to work-for-hire. Just shooting things and then trying to sell them is… very often not worth the time and effort.
You could just add them to your digital portfolio or just store them offline somewhere.