Running a presale for a body of work still in progress

Running a presale for a body of work still in progress. It's a decision every working artist eventually has to make, usually without a clean formula to make it with.

The decision itself

Licensing a digital file for commercial use is a genuinely different income stream from selling an original, with its own pricing logic — a licence fee reflects usage rights and duration, not the object itself, because there often isn't a physical object at all.

An artist's commission rate isn't a fixed cost of doing business so much as a reflection of how much risk the platform is absorbing on their behalf — marketing reach, payment protection, and dispute handling all sit behind that number.

How it plays out over time

A marketplace with transparent, published commission rates removes a specific kind of friction that direct sales rarely resolve cleanly: knowing exactly what an artist nets from a sale before either side has to have that conversation directly.

Editions exist to solve a real tension: an artist wants a piece to be affordable to more than one collector, but scarcity is most of what gives an edition its value, so the size of a run is one of the most consequential decisions an artist makes before a piece ever lists.

Rei Nakamura, working out of Kyoto since 2022, is one example of how this plays out in practice — 96 sold pieces and 71 collectors in, starting with work like "Break."