I’ve been at this for a long time, and I’ve experienced this dynamic myself.
It can be exciting to project what you might make from your art in the coming year. You have plans you believe will put some sales on the board. You look at what happened in previous years, what you know about your plans for next year, and make some realistic assumptions.
Maybe you’re projecting that you could make $50,000. And if you’re lucky and things go your way, you may even make more.
That’s what I wish for you. But that’s not the whole story. In fact, it’s just the beginning. That $50,000 is at the very top of your earnings. Nothing has been deducted from it yet. And your top number could be anything. $10,000. $50,000. $100,000.
While your gross sales figure matters, this dynamic always applies.
It’s not what you make. It’s what you keep that matters.
Sometimes, that outcome can be a sobering reality. But it’s the kind of information you absolutely need if you want to have a successful, sustainable career in the art business.
This dynamic holds whether you’re marketing art as a profitable side hustle or creating and selling art as your main occupation that supports you and your family. When it comes to the financial side of your art business, the bottom-line question is pretty simple:
How much is left after I deduct my business operating costs?
Before you bank anything, you first pay for or deduct materials, framing, commissions, show fees, shipping, marketing, payment processing, studio expenses, and everything else it takes to make and sell your work. All those costs reduce your top number.
I wanted to give artists a better way to see the whole picture.
That’s why I created the Artist Income & Pricing Forecaster. I’ll tell you how to get it below.
It’s a workbook that lets you use your own information to create three different views of your potential income: Conservative, Realistic, and Stretch.
You enter your own assumptions about your prices, sales, and costs. The Forecaster then lets you see what those numbers could mean for your annual and monthly take-home income.
I developed it with three scenarios so you can experiment and compare outcomes.
The variables let you examine what happens if sales aren’t quite as strong as you expect, or what if they are, or even better. You can see what happens when you increase your prices, change your sales mix, or get creative in finding ways to reduce expenses.
The reality is that some of those things are under your control and some aren’t. That’s life.
I created this workbook to help you clearly understand that the things you can control can help you bring more of what you earn home to yourself and your family.
This isn’t a tool you use once and throw away. You already know your circumstances will change and that next year’s business won’t be exactly like this year’s. With the Forecaster, you can go back, change the inputs, and get a new perspective.
The Artist Income & Pricing Forecaster is $17. I’ve intentionally kept the price low so it’s useful and affordable for working artists.
Before I tell you how to get it, I want to share another part of the pricing picture for free. I also created a complementary research project because knowing what you might earn and keep is only one side of the pricing question. Artists should know what other artists are actually charging.
It’s a brand-new, free 16-page PDF called “What Are Artists Like You Charging?” — An Independent Artist Pricing Index.
I’ve found tons of posts, free and paid courses, and calculators on pricing your art. While most are pretty good at providing formulas, they are also limited in how much real help they give because they lack context. That’s why I created this free resource.
It examines the publicly listed asking prices of 250 original artworks in August 2026. I included a cross-section of different sizes, media, price points, and selling environments. The result is a report that I’m offering for free to all artists.
I created it because artists are naturally curious about what other artists charge, and that information provides useful context.
There are plenty of ways to calculate art prices. You can use price per square inch, price per linear inch, hours and materials, or a combination of these. What I find is that all these methods work to some degree, but the results are a bit like reading a thermometer.
You know the temperature, but you don’t really know the weather.
That’s because a formula can only give you a number, but it can’t give you the whole context in which that number has to work.
In conducting the research, I found a remarkably wide range of prices. Across the 250 artworks, asking prices ranged from $100 to $20,000. The median price was $1,150, with the middle 50% falling between $550 and $2,500.
My research also examined differences in asking prices by artwork size, medium, and selling environment. The results reinforce the idea that copying someone else’s price is a mistake.
That’s because these are asking prices, not confirmed sales.
Another artist’s price cannot accurately determine what you should charge. Your costs, reputation, audience, selling environment, size, medium, and actual sales experience are unique to you, and each matters in its own way. As such, I hope you recognize that the report is intended to give you market context, not a pricing formula.
I think that’s much more useful.
You can have the report for free.
Download What Are Artists Like You Charging?
There’s another reason I’m giving it away, and I’m happy to tell you what it is.
I use the report as a lead magnet.
I’ll be advertising it to artists who don’t know me and aren’t subscribers to Art Marketing News. They can download the report for free, and afterward I’ll offer them the Artist Income & Pricing Forecaster for $17.
I’m offering you the same thing. When you download the free report, you’ll also have the option to get the Forecaster.
I think $17 for the Forecaster is a bargain given what it can help you understand. And I’ve intentionally priced it low.
I operate on a premise I’ve mentioned before:
I judge my success more by what I give than by what I get.
I want to make useful things available to as many artists as possible at prices they can afford.
The $17 also helps make the economics work for me. I’ll be paying to advertise the free report to reach new artists. Sales of the Forecaster can help offset those costs, allowing me to reach and help even more artists.
I look at it as a virtuous circle.
I give artists something useful for free. Some of them decide the Forecaster is worth $17. That revenue helps me reach more artists. And I get to continue doing what I’ve been doing for a very long time: helping artists make better decisions about their careers and businesses.
So, I encourage you to download What Are Artists Like You Charging? It’s free, and I think you’ll find the information useful.
And when you get it, you’ll also have the option to get the Artist Income & Pricing Forecaster. I encourage you to consider it because knowing the prices other artists are charging is useful, and so is knowing what you might make and keep.
Whether you make that $50,000 next year or some other number, there’s still one question that matters more.
Do you get to keep $10,000? $20,000? Or even more?
The answer depends on your business, your expenses, your prices, your sales, and the decisions you make along the way.
But it’s a number worth knowing.
Because in the end, it’s not what you make. It’s what you keep.
See you next week.
— Barney