Hi All,

Ok, so we've been working on designing a new retail model for games, combining all of our printing capacities together with game retailing. As such, the Guild will be opening a retail store in early 08. In the planning for this new style of store, we've been looking for any many synergies as we can find when blending the printing and binding capacities with games and thing gamers might like. A thought that struck me today is, one service our store could officer was print-on-demand art prints.

What I am thinking is the store could sell art prints both online and in its B&M location/s. In store we would have an area with signage for this service and then have all the artwork that is available in binders, sorted by genre and artist, for customers to flip through.

We could print B&W and Color art prints and can print them onto a nice glossy stock and have an upgraded version where we laminate them. So basically, we would have 8 product options for each piece of artwork, unless, for some reason, an artist didn't want the piece to be available for all of them. What I need to figure out is what would be fair pricing for:

B&W Artwork. 8.5" x 11" on glossy cover stock
B&W Artwork. 8.5" x 11" on glossy cover stock. laminated (3mil lamination)
B&W Artwork. 11" x 17" on glossy cover stock
B&W Artwork. 11" x 17" on glossy cover stock. laminated (3mil lamination)
Color Artwork. 8.5" x 11" on glossy cover stock
Color Artwork. 8.5" x 11" on glossy cover stock. laminated (3mil lamination)
Color Artwork. 11" x 17" on glossy cover stock
Color Artwork. 11" x 17" on glossy cover stock. laminated (3mil lamination)

These would be POD (produced to order). Artists interested in having art pieces available for this service would grant us a non exclusive license to print and sell the art pieces, restricted to our online store for the service and through Guild of Blades retail outlets. Commissions would be paid to the artists as sales happened and I'm guessing a commission split between 15-35%. I don't have a hard and fixed number in mind for this, but it would basically depend on what were the realistic retail prices for the art prints.

So what could art prints sell for? I don't want to get into the mess of having different contracts with different artists. There would be a single contract with a single commission rate and a single set of retail pricing based on the finished format for the print. Or in other words, we would charge a customer the same amount for an Elmore as a somewhat unknown artist. Now, this might mean artists of Elmore's stature might not find it a worthwhile venue for them. I don't know. I just know logistically, this is the only way I can see it working for us on the retail end. In the grand scheme of things, it would be just one small revenue stream among many on the retail end. Having never offered this kind of product (art prints) for sale before, I really can't judge how much business it could draw, online or through the B&M locations. Though I think it is a unique product that we can offer at retail, so its worth doing so we can all find its potential.

I expect those artists that were interested could probably let us list their e-mail addresses or phone numbers for those customers who loved their works and were interested in contacting them for commissioned works. Probably website contact info would be an option for those artists that didn't also offer their own art prints for sales via that site/page.

Anyways, all feedback on this idea is welcome.

Thanks,
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com