In order to price your art realistically, you must understand and respect how the art business works and how collectors shop and buy. You have to step back and objectively evaluate the meaning and the quality of your art in relation to other arts, as well as a comparison. You must also objectively assess your art world accomplishments and determine how they position you in relation to all other artists. These are difficult tasks and not necessarily pleasant, but they're absolutely essential to achieving the goals of making a go of it as an artist and of selling art.

Understanding common mistakes that artists make when setting prices is the first step in this process. Perhaps the most significant error is the tendency to focus too much attention on only that segment of the art world that pertains to you and too little attention on the rest, or even worse, dismissing the rest as irrelevant. If you let this happen, your asking prices may make sense to you and to your inner circle, but make little sense to the overall art community. The more aware you are of the big picture, of what other artists are creating, how it's being priced and marketed, and who's buying what for how much and why, the better prepared you are to price your art sensibly.

Many artists make the mistake of equating dollar values with psychological factors like how emotionally attached they are to their art or how much angst they experience during the creative process. They place special meanings and, therefore, special asking prices on certain pieces of their work that may make sense to them inwardly, but have little or no relation to the selling prices of the rest of their art or to art prices in general. Dealers and collectors see these prices as inconsistent or excessively high.

Avoid this pitfall by keeping any art off the market that you feel exceptionally close to or involved with. Keep it in your own personal collection. Any insights, enlightenments, sufferings, or inner pain you experience while creating art are your own business. Don't bill collectors for it. People in all professions have intense emotional experiences just like you, but you rarely see the prices of milk, plumbing, clothes, or other goods or services fluctuate wildly as a result.

The opposite of placing excessively high prices on works of art with high levels of personal meaning or emotional attachment is placing excessively low prices on works of art that lack those qualities. Experienced collectors who bargain hunt for art love when artists under-price art based on feelings rather than on more objective factors such as those that will be discussed below. Consistency in pricing is a cornerstone of successful selling.

Artists sometimes confuse subjective opinion with objective judgment when comparing the quality of their art to that of other artists. At the same time, they may also ignore outside factors that influence those artists' prices like who they show with, what their reputations are, how long they've been active, or how collectible they are. Once again, unrealistically high asking prices are often the result.

If you think your art is as good as that of Picasso or Matisse, for example, do you price it into the millions of dollars? Of course not. Your art may indeed by as good as that of a well-known or even famous artist who sells for lots of money, but many other factors must also compare favorably before your selling prices can approach those of that artist. Your personal opinion about how good your art is has little to do with that artist's prices or why collectors pay them. If it did, any artist could sell any work of art for any price at any time.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that your art is so unique that nothing else compares to it. All art is unique. Every artist is unique. Uniqueness, however, has never been and never will be the sole criterion for setting prices at any particular level.

Collectors rarely see themselves as having