Priced to sell

The good thing about selling your crafts is that its an opportunity to perpetuate the cycle of creativity.
The difficult thing though is deciding how to price your work.
Looking around at those who sell similar items through on-line sellers like etsy or Ebay or Facebook groups can give you an idea of what people are asking. But check up and see if they are actually selling those items at that price.
Then decide if you want to join this market or if you want to keep things more local at shops or at bazaars. If this is your path you may need to modify your prices to reflect the local market or mark up put on by shops.

But there is also the formulas you find on other blogs for how to price your work.
Some say you should take your costs and triple them and that is your sale price. But what about if you craft like me with a lot of salvaged and second hand materials. Here is an example:

I recently began making sleep masks. A quick search on-line and I found prices ranged between $6.50 to $25.00 with very little difference between one mask and the other.
When I price things I use a formula that takes into account not just material costs but time spent as well.  But when I craft something I seldom just make one so I end up guestimating how long it takes to make a mask. Instead I try to pay attention to how much time it takes me to get 10 of them done or how many I can do in an hour. (depending on the craft)
In general when I get that figured out, I can take my material costs (as if I was buying stuff new) and add for my time.  I tend to value my time at $18-$22 an hour.
The time that is lost in the process is time spent developing a new design, and time spent on label or package development. In this case I modified the patterns I found to make the masks more comfortable, I also designed a care label to print and attach to all of the masks.
So:
Fabric & elastic cost $1.50
Label printing $.07
Time to make @ 25 minutes at  $18/hour
and I more or less came up with $10 each as being a reasonable cost for these in my area.
At present I only have them in one shop and they do a mork up from my $10.
But if I want to sell them at other shops that want 50% I may not be able to afford to sell them in those outlets.
As far as on-line marketing goes I am sure my price makes them very competitive.

Serious business

I have had the opportunity to watch some folks I know wade ever deeper into the business of creativity. 

One friend, Lizzie Newell is a writer. She explores a world with its own sexual and environmental situations. But in addition to the pure writing there is the whole editing and marketing process.
She is blessed with the talent to design book covers for herself and a few others, but the effort she takes to understand self publishing, because her stories do not fit into a neatly defined mass market box that publishers push on unsuspecting readers is amazing. There are places for independent sellers and small scale publishers to get their product made and on the shelves, but it takes a lot of hustle.

Other friends have opened businesses as the outlet for their creative endeavors. Happily Carol at the Screaming Weasel in North Pole has recruited other artists (including me) to sustain and diversify her inventory.

I have also seen the efforts of other artists who network continually to get shows and their name out to galleries and businesses to hang their work for first Friday art walks or in pop up shops. or marketing through Facebook groups, Etsy, Ebay, Craig's list, and their own websites.

I find myself wondering if I would ever really have the energy and drive it takes to follow any similar paths. Because as many hours as they spend marketing their work they still find time to create new works for the public to enjoy and desire and buy. 

And more than anything I would need the confidence in what I produce to market at the intensity that I would need to to make it pay me.