Contributing to Artistorm

We at Artistorm sell art on behalf of independent artists. We don't have a huge database of art (yet) because we're pretty picky. If you think you can make the cut, here's some information about getting your work into the store.

We don't intend to sell any one thing in this store. It's not going to be posters/tshirts only - whatever our artists produce, we'll sell, within reason.

We're definitely willing to sell originals. These tend to be the big ticket items in the store, and as such we give the artist pretty much full control over the pricing and shipping.

Preparing Artwork

If you're going to have any of your art printed, you need to have a full-resolution file ready. For example, Camille's Megiddo was originally made in Photoshop. The problem? The file was high resolution, but not high enough to print on a big poster. She spent two months recreating the entire thing in Illustrator - thanks to her work, we can now make beautiful, high quality prints onto any paper size.

To cut to the chase, we expect this from all of our artists. If you're interested in having something printed, but the file isn't large enough to make a 300dpi (or higher) print, you'll have to redo it. The best way around this is to make everything in vector (eps) format - Illustrator and Freehand are your main two options for doing that.

Another important note - CMYK COLOR! If you're going to have something printed, it's gotta be in CMYK color - this is the only way to get color which matches what you've made on your computer.

Printing

Posters and t-shirts are great and can generally sell pretty well, but you've gotta have guts to really make money on it. The more posters/shirts you have printed at once, the less it will cost you per each.

For example, we sent Camille's beautiful Megiddo to be printed on gigantic 24"x36" posters through psprint.com. After waiting for a proof to come in the mail, we approved the print and, within two weeks, 200 lbs of posters made their way to our apartment. Megiddo is an absolutely gorgeous piece, so we bit the bullet and ordered 500. That's one heck of a lot of posters, but we think her design is strong enough to sell that well.

Shipping

We've decided that we want to ship almost everything on our own for now, with the exception of original pieces (which we'll let the artist take care of). The reason is simple - if we get behind on shipping or don't do a good job, we have no one to blame but ourselves. And since we have a vested interest in the store, we won't let shipping get behind or sloppy. So if you want to sell posters, t-shirts, or other mass-produced art in the store, you'll have to ship them to us so that we can ship them to the customers. If you're uncomfortable shipping them ALL to us, you can send them to us in batches - 50 or 100 at a time. If at any time you'd like your product(s) removed from the store and the remaining stock returned to you, we'll be happy to do it.

We'd like our shipping to be great - although we're not going to go as far as overnighting posters, we hope to keep shipping cheap by allowing people to ship up to X items for the same price. We'll be including free Artistorm posters with each order we ship out, too.

Commission

There is overhead in running an online store - mostly the costs incurred in paying for a merchant account, programmers, and hosting, so we're obviously going to need to take a commission from each sale to keep the store running. We're going to take the charges for the credit card merchant account out of our commissions. The main reason is that we may be changing plans from time to time (depending on how well the store does), and the percentage is something weird like 3.47%. To keep this is simple, we're breaking it down like so:

• ORIGINALS
  Commission for original pieces will be 10%, since we won't be involved with shipping. You'll be responsible for telling us how much you want to charge for the item and the shipping. You can charge whatever you want for the item (although if you're asking too much we might not want to put it in the store).
• YOU PRINT
  Our base commission will be 15% of the profits - this is assuming that you provide us with a printed product that we will ship to customers. We'll give you a price range that your product has to be within, but we won't dictate the price. For example, we'll tell you that you can choose a price between $7 and $10 for a poster - wherever you want to price it within that range is up to you. Obviously, this is something we'll discuss before having your art printed up - we don't want to force anyone into a price they're not comfortable with, especially if they just dropped several hundred dollars on printing.
  
  This commission rate will change as Artistorm grows, due to the cost of order fulfillment!
• WE PRINT
  If you have something you want printed, but don't have the money to pay for the printing, we may pay for the printing in exchange for a higher commission - instead of the 15% base, we'll take 50%. This is not a guarantee, but an offer that we may make if we really think your piece will sell well.
  
  For any piece that we have printed, we will have the final say on the price of the product. We will be extending the offer to print on behalf of artists less and less frequently as the store progresses, since it's very costly and takes a long time to recover those expenses.

Payments

We cut checks every month, even if you've only made a couple of bucks (we can wait until you've made a certain amount if you like). We send checks out around the beginning of each month.

Decency / Censorship

We don't want to censor any of you, but we also want to run a store that we won't be uncomfortable showing to our parents. No sense in writing up some ridiculous guidelines about this - use common sense. If you're not sure, just ask us about it.

Rights / Property

The artists retain full permission to use their art and anything they've had printed however they see fit. If an artist has 600 posters printed, they can send us as few or as many posters as they like for sale on the website.

If we pay to have something printed, our only right is to sell what we paid to have printed - we will not reprint or reuse the artwork in any way without the artist's permission.

Still Interested?

Head on over to our Artist Inquiry page and submit the form. Be sure to include some samples of your work! We'll get back to you as soon as possible.