You wanted input, so here's my thoughts. Hope you don't mind.
First off, you're the artist. That you means you get to set the terms.
Medium, subject matter, price etc. You also have the un-enviable job
of balancing your need to make at least some profit vs. your desire to
meet the requests of your potential customers.
Second, you put a lot of preliminary art, sample art and other bits of
your work out there. So it's not like the only way to see something by
you is to pony up the bucks. You only ask that people pay a fair price
for quality work.
From what you're saying so far it sounds like you've already weighed
the options and decided that the potential loss in customers from this
anti-theft device is outweighted by the possible greater loss from art
theft. A pretty reasonable decision. This is, of course, all
assumption on my part.
Now putting myself in the buyer's position I can think of only two
reason why I would honestly object to this.
1) Loss of quailty. It's possible that this watermark disrupts the
image enough that it could be seen as a defect, especially if you're
not expecting it. From what I've seen of your work, and your prior
posts I get the impression that you would not use paper that hurts the
quality of your artwork.
2)Unexpected surprise. Some folks will just complain about anything
that isn't spelled out for them (in large print and short words).
So it sounds like maybe you should stick a little bit of boilerplate
text in either the description, packaging, or maybe even the cover
about how this art is printed on a copy-protected material. No
surprises, no right to complain.
But that's just my two cents.
It's good work, at worth the price. Anyone who is sucking a lemon over
this really should just stuff it.
-SpotWeld
Received on Thu Jan 19 2006 - 20:03:21 CST