[jartzh]

Just had my latest consignment gallery close its doors on me. How do you get rid of this stuff after your house, your family's houses, and your in-laws houses are full of your stuff. I have given up on galleries within 200 miles of Houston. Is there an online site that I could sell this stuff on? BTW did I tell you my garage is full too?

[Donna_T]

Hello,
Although it's not a solution for lots of carvings, it might help with a few. Have you considered donating some of them to charitable auctions? When I was carving lots, I did this regularly. Ducks Unlimited, YMCA, local kinds of events that hold auctions to raise funds generally appreciate your donations and you can usually get a good tax credit for it. It also helps build your reputation as a carver and can sometimes lead to additional direct sales.

Although I don't check on it regularly, some folks like to sell carvings on EBay.

Donna T

[Lynn O. Doughty]

Find a dark unused room to hide them in. Years after you've left this earthen world someone will stumble across it and one of two things will happen:

1. "Oh my Gawd Honey.... Look in here at this treasure trove of American Folk Art!!"

2. "Oh my Gawd Honey... Look at all the crap in this room!"

I'm hoping for number 1!!!

[Johnny-Five]

If you wanted to sell them locally you could always try Craigslist.

It's essentially a huge online classifieds, specific to your area, that is free to use. The one here in Charlottesville gets quite a bit of traffic and I have managed to successfully buy and sell several items on it.

[Jim Arnold]

Hold on now....

There are several ways to market woodwork successfully, one new and much anticipated avenue is going to be the new "WoodCarvingIllustrated Marketplace", currently under discussion and developement, it has the potential to be THE premier Wood Art gallery in the world! And its NOT just going to be a by woodcarvers, for woodcarvers, thing, its GLOBAL. It will enjoy fantastic page rankings, its going to be very popular because there isn't going to be anything like it anywhere.

I have had enormous success using the craigslist.com website (Craigslist is totally free BTW). There are also many 'art gallery' type websites that will welcome you with open arms...some good, some not so good. Its not enough to have your own website, you have to 'DRIVE' qualified prospects to your site and nobody else is going to do that for you...YOU have to do it yourself! And there are several ways to do that.

I don't think there are but 2 or 3 people here on site that realize how high WCI posts get page-ranked by the major search engines like Google and Yahoo (MSN to a lesser extent). Its just a matter of connecting the dots. Just like knowing how to use different tools when woodworking, you have to know how to use the tools of internet marketing. Its WORK! but its not "Rocket Scientry" either!

Others may have different stories, but I have had nothing but bad experiences with consignments in ANY form, I quit doing them years ago.

I'm not going to waste space here explaining all the details on the marketing aspects because I know there's probably only a very small percentage here who sell their work. However, if you want some simple solid stategies feel free to PM me, I will happily share them with my fellow woodcarving brothers and sisters.

Once the WCI marketplace is up and running, I think a separate area on the message board for marketing 'wood art' would have merit as well.

My point is that you CAN sell your work and you don't have to rely on 'brick and mortar' galleries AT ALL to do it, in fact avoid them whenever possible!

Jim