Tips for pricing your release

When we control how we want our work to circulate, it also means we get to control how we assign value to it. Personal impact, reach and scale, audience, and price are all different tools to assign and measure multi-dimensional value.

Price is a particularly sticky area because how it is determined has gotten incredibly skewed. The fine art world faces criticism that its pricing is outsized and arbitrary, while in music circles many feel that the shape of the industry is systematically devaluing their work. Self-releasing gives us room to take back the reins and set our own terms.

When we’re setting a price for our releases, we constantly come back to a few core questions to ground ourselves:

• How many hours did I put into the work?
• Are there other people involved? Did I pay them? Should I try to?
• What did it cost to produce?
• Were there shipping or design costs?
• Is there any part of my inventory that I don’t actually want to sell (promo, archive, keepsakes)?

Having a sense of each of these questions can help give you an initial sense of how you might want to set your price. There are other external factors that may make sense to take into account too, but we find that starting with the most practical approach gives us the space to work backwards and see if the unit price is one that you feel comfortable with.

To help with this, we made a handy worksheet that you can download and use for any project. Input your costs and generate a unit price by toggling the number of works you are hoping to make available for sale.

What’s most important is to think about what kind of value you want to prioritize with this particular work. If you decide the focus for this project is for as many people to see and spend time with it as possible, you might find a way to deprioritize price. If you intentionally want the work to be limited, then price might play more of a factor.

Remember, this is just a starting place. We recommend filling this out once you’re done creating the work and you start the next chapter: shaping the creative way you want the work to circulate in the world. What you learn in exploring all of that is up to you, but you won’t know until you map it out so don’t be afraid.

Want more advice around pricing? Check out our new podcast New Creative Era, where Joshua Citerella and Yancey Strickler explore how creative people release work and develop their creative practices.