Puppetainer brings up a lot of good points. It's interesting in my case that here in Oz we have a very small and not-very-well-publicised community of puppeteers, with roughly the same interest in buying puppets as elsewhere. Considering the size of the group, you'd think that we'd do a better job educating the public about puppetry; but by and large it's so insular that the people who *are* buying puppets are as Puppetainer says, performers and/or parents/teachers. Even then the majority of performers who've approached me about commissions have considerably under-budgeted. (Probably because arts funding is non-existent here. Government funding is pretty much all we get so it means everyone is putting in their own money to produce shows. That equals small budgets)

The other thing I'll add is a bit about what I'm doing now: when I decided I needed to relaunch my shadow puppets, I took a hard look at how I was selling. Mainly I've been selling to online audiences, but with physical products, it's hard going and it's pretty obvious that to get anywhere I need to go into craft/arts markets. But people don't buy puppets - outside of kids stuff, and certainly not shadow puppets - at those markets really. I'm more interested in doing designer art than kids toys, so that's my new target market.

What this has meant is that I'm now doing a short series (no more than 6) shadow puppets specifically designed for performance. They're designed to showcase what I can do and attract performers and commissions. I know there won't be much interest in the 'real world', which is why I won't produce many characters; but it will attract interest in the online world where I can either sell them as generic characters for shows or get people thinking about shadow puppet commissions.

The second thing I'm doing is making other items which will be more palatable to local craft/arts markets. This is including small versions of the puppets which will be more for decoration/play and will have more appeal to your average parent/teacher. They're still technically puppets, so I don't feel like I'm selling out to the kids toy idea either. And I'll be making a range of puppet kits and various accessories for building at home.

That along with the patterns via School of Puppetry, I've found that most of my sales are going to people who want to make their own stuff, not have it made for them. This is not only cheaper for them, but probably about the kind of people puppetry tends to get sold to: teachers, parents, students and performers.

My point in all of this is that pricing as Puppetainer points out is tricky precisely because you have to factor in what you're selling, where and to whom. Most puppeteers I've seen on Etsy for instance, have a line of products specifically for cheap sales/younger audiences, and another for adults and performers. Go into any Australian arts market and finger/glove puppets are all you'll find, if that.

Etsy certainly is more for the crafts people than for puppeteers, but I've found a lot of really amazing and professional stuff there - gems amongst the crap, often enough. But eBay I'd think is worse, because that gets easily flooded with cheap China products.