FLOPS & Bestsellers

Many photographers who like shooting landscapes dream of selling prints someday. If that includes you, then you face a challenge: identifying which images will sell.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. I often wrap up my longer landscape photography workshops by playing a game with students that I call “Flops Versus Bestsellers.” I show the students 16 images. Eight were bestsellers, with more than 100 prints sold. Eight flopped, with less than 10 prints sold. The students’ task is to analyze each image and decide if it soared or cratered. The game seems trivial; surely, it will be obvious whether an image was a bestseller or a dud. It turns out that the game is surprisingly difficult. Few students score 100 percent.

You can play a shortened version of the game right now. In this article, you’ll see eight landscape images. All either flopped or became bestsellers. None are moderately popular images of which I sold 20 or 30 prints before I discontinued them. None are winter images, which in my experience are inherently harder to sell as prints than summer and fall images. None are images with purely local appeal, such as images of