How To Get Featured In Collections

Hello, Guo Quan and welcome.
Images in collections are chosen by a few FAA representatives. Not the general membership.

its based on how well you sell, your keywords and fairy magic. only the staff picks and i think it's by lottery only. not many get in there. i wouldn't worry about it.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

luck

sacrificing to the right god maybe lol

Follow the Yellow Brick Road........just be careful......welcome to oz..........

Maybe by first making a huge amount of sales on your own, then contacting FAA privately. But who knows.

Members can not put themselves in the collections which are staff curated. Just make sure to use the most and best keywords that fit your image and you will be found

I hope that helps

Isabella, I don't want to bring any trouble around the way collections are managed... but I would still need to get your view on this....

Some collections are pretty clear to understand as dedicated to a specific member (Anne Geddes as an example). It is clear as Anne's name is part of collection description... so we know where we fall into.

But there are some collections (like "European photography") capturing work from 1 or 2 members (only 1 in my example) which is more than confusing. I don't have anything against work quality but I don't understand why limiting to few members when speaking about a general topic...

Patrick: Yes I was thinking the same. Pretty discouraging.

Thanks everyone for the response. I get it now.

Quote............Oct 2014

sabella F Abbie Shores

20 Days Ago

I am answering, quite succinctly and matter of factly I thought without giving you any bs or false hope..

Collections have been here since 2006, even if mentioned later, and, although slightly more prominent now, are not going to be removed or changed apart from they will evolve. They are chosen by staff members.

Yes, they are seeming unfair but, there is no getting around that, and whoever is not in them will not like them but it is not the idea of collections to have everyone in them.

Those answers are answers from Fine Art America/Pixels direct

My personal view is that collections are all works and artists that will sell, or have been proven to sell, are printable, and are from people with complete portfolios of saleable, printable, work. I do not have a portfolio like this so will not get in a collection.

This is not being defensive Walter, it is common sense.

Instead of berating them and moaning about them, which I could also, as an artist here really wanting to sell my work, I see them for what they are. I didn't when they first showed up boldly there, I do now. A great draw for the site. A great selling point. Good marketing for FAA who, after all market FAA. I am going to make sure I market me better. The collections made me go out and meet people in the real world, as it gave me a kick up the bum. I now have two commissions. FAA never said they would sell my work. They gave me the tools to sell it myself and then FAA print it. If I could pay to be in the collections you better believe I would but people don't get put there by paying! I only pay $30 per YEAR and that is purely for the right to have over 25 images and the other site. It gives me no shares in the company nor the right to demand any changes so I go with the flow and am happy

Thanks ViV

Thx for posting... Your Q was why I clicked into Discussion Room... couldn't figure it out either!
Thx for the reply that makes it clear, from FAA!

Follow Up Qs:
1. How many images or volume needs to sell to get into Collection.
2. What a ballpark stat...need x# hits for each x$#

1. its picked by the staff, it's a mystery to all, but i'm sure total sales is the main factor.
2. i don't know what X# is or X$# is


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I don't think in every case it is necessarily to do with how things sell, some collections appear to have been created simply to tie groups of images together. There are quite a few pictures in quite a few collections that don't have any comments mentioning a sale. While not every sale results in people leaving comments, and while some artists do delete comments, there are collections like this one:

http://fineartamerica.com/art/all/all/all/champagne+corks

Which has images from multiple different artists, none of which mention a sale, so I suspect at least some of those have not yet sold. That doesn't concern me, I merely mention it because I think that while sales and printability almost certainly play a role in deciding if you get into some collections, I suspect some collections are simply created by FAA staff when they have an idea of what might make a good collection, and they'll then put some suitable photos into it. In other words, while selling a lot almost certainly helps, some of it is inevitably just down to luck. If you had a good picture of a champagne cork that appealed to the FAA staff when that collection was created, I doubt the fact that you hadn't sold it would have prevented it from being added.

The one thing that I don't like about collections, personally, and I think that is shared with Patrick, is that some collections are generically named but feature only one artist. I don't have any problem with a collection featuring one artist, for example the Anne Geddes collections, that makes perfect sense, but if a collection is only going to feature a single artist, I think that should be made clear in the collection title.

For example (and I hope this doesn't count as naming and shaming, as I doubt the artists had anything to do with it), the Nightscapes and Northern Lights collections are both generically named, but only feature works by a single artist (not the same one). I feel this is an under-representation of the talent on the site, to have such generically-named collections that lead customers to believe they will feature the best work in these categories, but actually only feature a single artist's work, especially when the collections are small enough that they don't even take up a whole page.

There are a great many amazing photos of the Northern Lights on here, and while I wouldn't suggest removing the existing photos from this collection, I feel that it would be more representative of the amazing work on this site to have pieces by multiple artists. Similarly, there are a great many amazing night sky photos that would fit well in the Nightscapes collection (I have a couple that sell pretty well, although I don't mean to suggest that they should be included, just that a wider range of art from all members is considered, as it certainly exists). I believe that customers who find these collections will expect them to contain work by a variety of artists because of the generic collection names.

On the other hand, if there's a reason or desire for a collection to contain only one artist's work, that's fine too, but I would prefer if these collections were named accordingly, such as 'Nightscapes by Artist Name', as the Anne Geddes collections are named (Anne Geddes - Black and White, for instance), so that it's clear to customers that they are viewing a specific artist's work. Not only will this make it clearer to the customer, it will also benefit the artist, highlighting that their work was of a sufficient standard to justify an entire collection to themselves. If a customer finds one of these generically-named collections that only has a single artist's work in, and that artist's work doesn't appeal to the customer, the customer is more likely to think that FAA doesn't have any of the type of art they want, and look elsewhere, hurting us all.

While I understand this has been the case for some time, the increased visibility of collections that has taken place is inevitably going to result in more customers viewing them (that was, no doubt, the point!), and so they are inevitably going to be discussed more. I absolutely understand that there's never going to be a way to make everyone happy, and that a great many artists are going to see it as a personal snub when their work isn't included in a collection. However, from my point of view, if the generically-named collections could be either renamed or expanded I would be very happy, regardless of whether any of my work was included or not, because I think it would show the collections (and hence the entire site) off in a better light to the customer, which benefits us all.

Just my two cents :)

retracted

Because variety sells too. If I'm a customer looking for a photograph of a certain subject, and I end up in a collection that's full of paintings of a certain subject, I'm probably not going to buy one, regardless of how well the work sells overall.

I'm not suggesting that any random art should be piled into collections, the whole point of them is obviously that they are curated. But when collections like 'Monochrome Landscapes' have 21 images in them, all by a single artist, and the first page of a collection can have 36 images in, it's not going to be that hard to find other work that fits the theme of the collection and has sold many, many times over that could be added to it and increase the chances of something meeting the customer's expectations. I can't see how doing so would do anything other than boost FAA's bottom line, and as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Sorry, Alexis. I see Collections not as a rising tide to keep us all afloat, some more than others, but as a calculated tsunami, sinking all but a few money-makers for their benefit and that of FAA bottom line.

It used to be we endeavoured to fix Search so one would be able to be found in that vast sea of members' art, not always tagged correctly....which was infuriating enough.

But to compete with entire one-woman/man COLLECTIONS is more infuriating.

I don't care any more. It's more of the same. IF one can't be found in Search or COLLECTIONS, what's the point! Happy to park at FAA, expecting nothing....I really love my pretty AW....

Vivian: Well, I'm certainly not in a strong position to argue otherwise, as I feature both in some collections, and rank quite highly in a fair few search keywords. But as I say above, there do seem to be collections where it's likely at least some of the images have had no sales at all. The artists may be best-sellers with other images though, I don't know.

Regarding the suggestion that FAA only selling best-selling work would benefit FAA's bottom line, that's certainly counter to generally-accepted wisdom in marketing (and, in my opinion, not what it appears FAA is trying to do). By far the most successful businesses on the Internet take advantage of not needing to have physical storefronts to exploit what is known in marketing as the 'long tail', offering an almost unlimited selection of items that you can buy that individually don't sell often, but when combined make up a huge percentage of their sales. While it's easy to think that companies like Amazon, eBay, etc. make a lot of money because they sell a lot of bestselling items very cheaply, they actually make more money by selling items that almost nobody wants, because even though each individual item rarely sells, there are so many of them. Amazon will sell far more things today that didn't sell yesterday than they will things that did sell yesterday.

For example, imagine everyone on this site made a list of every book they own, and we compiled all that information together. There'd be lots of best-selling books that hundreds of people here all owned, but in terms of how many books were actually owned by everyone, it would be a pretty small percentage of the total. Some people only buy best-sellers, but most people also have lots of books that are far more specialised and sell in far smaller numbers, and if you add all of those specialist books up, there's almost certainly more of them than there are best-sellers. The same is true with art -- there's a huge number of people in the world who own prints of the Mona Lisa, but there's far more people in the world who own prints by the combined collective of hundreds of thousands of artists who each individually sell very little.

This is exactly the business model FAA follows, and I think you might be surprised at just what percentage of FAA's income comes from best-sellers. The rest is sales of work by artists who individually sell very little, but because there's so many of them across the site, it ends up being a far more significant amount than you'd first guess. And if the site can bring in more buyers, it increases the chances of everyone's art selling, even those who don't sell very much. Of course it makes business sense to sell lots of best-selling work, and it makes sense to list it first when people search, but as with Amazon, it's very much not in FAA's interest to only sell best-selling work.

Excellent post, Alexis.

Thank you for your enjoyably persistent insight , Alexis.....shall we agree to disagree, seeing as you say, you don't know definitively, and I'm beyond caring?


I'm sure what you surmise is music to management's ears. But maybe not to those of us in Collections...not. .......no use complaining....

i don't mind collections per say, but i just don't like how in the face it is, if your cursor gets too close to them. and there isn't a good place to scroll off the page to make them vanish. if there was more of delay to prevent them from opening right away maybe that would be easier.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Is there an easy way for an artist to tell whether any of his/her work is featured in a collection?

On Alexis' s post.

1% of my images account for 30% of my income. 70% come from the other 99% that are one hit wonders.

David Gordon....what a good question!

@david - you find it accidentally. that's pretty much it.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

@Mike - thanks. I'll assume that I'm not unless I stumble upon evidence to the contrary.

Dave