Selling your work on Mirra

How this works, end to end

Mirra's marketplace is reviewed rather than open. A person reads every application and every collection before anything is listed, which is slower than an upload form and is the reason the catalogue is not a pile of stock images.

There are two gates between applying and being paid, and they are kept apart because they fail for different reasons and are fixed by different people. The first is ours: a judgement about the work, and about whether we believe the person uploading it made it. The second is about identity, tax and whether money can legally be sent to you. Collapsing them into one “pending” would hide which of the two is actually blocking you, which is the only thing you want to know.

Applying

“Sell your work” is in the account menu, under your own name. The page explains who it is for whether or not you have applied — an artist cannot apply to a marketplace nobody has told them exists.

1. Open Sell your work and fill in the form

   Only the account owner can apply. If you are signed in to somebody else's account with a limited role, the page says so and asks you to have the owner apply instead.

2. Press Apply

   Both gates start shut, and neither is settable from the form. That is the whole point of it being a review rather than a sign-up.

3. Wait to hear

   The Review panel says where you are. “We have your application and are looking at it” means a person is reading it, which takes a few days. An approval or a refusal appears in the same panel, with whatever note we wrote.

Name your work should appear under

The name shown on the work and beside your collections. Required, up to 120 characters. It can be changed later from the same page.Default: Empty

Town or city

Where you work, coarsely. A town, never an address.Default: Empty

Country

A two-letter code, and it should be where you are tax resident. Payment is by UK bank transfer, so an account outside the UK cannot be paid today.Default: GB

Tell us about your work, and where else it can be seen

A formatted note about you and the work. It is what the review is largely based on. Up to 6,000 characters after formatting.Default: Empty

The second gate: where the money goes

The payment step is not offered until the review passes — the panel is there from the start, but it says only that it is set up afterwards. Asking somebody for bank details before a person has looked at their work is a great deal of trust to ask in one direction, and it would leave us holding those records for people we then turned down.

There is one way to be paid: a bank transfer, made by hand, into a UK account. It used to be possible to choose Stripe instead, and that option has been removed rather than repaired — Mirra never actually sent money through Stripe. The account it created handled identity and status and nothing else, so anybody who chose it saw a screen saying payouts were enabled while nothing was ever sent. One route that works is better than two where one of them is a promise nobody can keep.

The cost of that is real and worth stating plainly: we can only pay UK bank accounts.

If you had chosen Stripe before this changed, your account has been moved to bank transfer and you will be asked for an account to pay into. Nothing you had earned was affected — there was never anything in flight to affect.

Bank transfer: the account, and asking to be paid

This panel appears once you are approved. It shows three figures — available now, requested, and paid to date — so the number you are about to ask for is never a surprise.

1. Add the account

   Name on the account, a six-digit sort code, an eight-digit account number, and optionally which bank it is. The checks are shallow on purpose: they catch a typo, not a fraud.

2. Wait until you are above the threshold

   Nothing may be requested below £100. A payment costs roughly the same to make whatever its size, so a dozen small payments a year serve nobody well. Balances roll forward until the threshold is met, and both the balance and the shortfall are on the page the whole time.

3. Press Request

   The amount is frozen at the moment you ask, along with the lines behind it. An artist who asks for £43.20 and receives £41.80 three weeks later has been given a reason never to trust the number again.

4. Watch the request move

   “Waiting on us”, then “Approved — due on the next run”, then “Paid” with the bank reference beside it. Transfers go out on the 15th of each month; a request approved after that waits for the next one.

• Only one request can be open at a time. Earnings that are already spoken for are excluded from the available figure, so refreshing the page never offers the same money twice.
• “Not this time” is not a forfeit. A rejected request returns its earnings to your available balance and you can ask again.
• Bank details are encrypted and never leave the server — not even back to you. What any screen shows is the last four digits, and a full reveal happens once, at the moment of paying, and is written to the audit log.

Nothing is ever sent automatically. A transfer happens because you asked for it and a person made it — slower than an automatic payout, and the only arrangement Mirra can honestly offer.

What you keep

You keep 70% of every sale to start with, rising permanently to 80% once you have earned £1,000 through Mirra. The rise is applied when lifetime earnings cross the threshold and only ever moves in your favour — an artist given better terms by hand is never quietly moved back to the default.

Your own page shows the share in force, what you have earned so far, and how much is still to go before the rise.

• The share is stored per artist, so an early cohort can be given better terms without anything else changing.
• Where a split has to round, it rounds in the artist's favour.
• “Earned so far” counts money that has actually reached you, which is also what the rise to 80% is measured against.

Earning by the hour a work is shown

Alongside sales, display time is counted. Mirra screens report which piece is on the wall, so a pool funded from subscription revenue can be divided by how long each artist's work was actually shown. An artist whose piece is genuinely lived with earns more than one whose piece is bought and skipped past.

The rules are arithmetic rather than detection, and they are published rather than hidden — knowing them does not make gaming them profitable, which is the whole reason they are built this way. Read carefully, some of them limit you too.

• Only households on a paid plan accrue anything. Time on a free account is worth nothing, so anybody farming the pool has to fund the pool they are farming.
• Time on your own screens never counts.
• At most four hours per work, per household, per day — and twelve hours per household per day across everything. Where a household overflows that, the reduction is shared pro rata rather than first-come.
• No artist may take more than 20% of any one household's contribution. The excess is redistributed to everyone else shown in that household.
• A month is priced only after it has closed and settled — a week after month end — and a month that has been priced is never re-priced.
• An implausibly long day is flagged for a person to look at. It never reduces a payment: presence is optional and privacy-sensitive, and nobody should earn less because a household declined a camera.

Neither the roll-up nor the pricing run pays anybody. They work out what is owed and record it; sending it is a separate decision a person makes against a reviewed line.

Listing a collection

You build a collection on the art page exactly as any household does — a title, a line describing it, and the work itself — and then ask us to list it. Approval as an artist is what unlocks submitting; you do not have to have finished setting up payouts first, so it is worth sending one while you wait.

1. Open the art page and build the collection

   Upload the works, then fill in each one's title, artist, year, medium and credit line.

2. Give it a title and a description

   Both are required before it can be sent. The description is what people read first.

3. Press Submit for listing

   The button sits under the collection with its state beside it, and it is disabled with the reason showing whenever something is missing — every one of those refusals is knowable before the click.

4. Read the decision

   It appears against the collection on the same page, with any note we wrote. If it comes back, edit it and press Submit again.

• Not submitted — the state of everything you have not sent us.
• With us for review — a person reads every collection, so this takes a few days. You can carry on editing it in the meantime.
• Listed — it is published, and from that point it counts as marketplace work.
• Changes needed — the note explaining why is shown in full, next to the button that lets you act on it.

Submitting does not start any meter. A collection is marked as yours for wall-time purposes at the moment it is listed, by the person who listed it, rather than by the act of asking.

Your own words on a piece

On any work in a collection you own, the Details panel offers to record up to two minutes of your voice. It records in the browser — an artist who has to find a recording app, export to a supported format and remember where it saved will do it once and never again.

When somebody standing in front of the screen asks the mirror what they are looking at, and a recording exists, it can offer to play yours instead of reading the catalogue entry aloud. It is the one thing a frame cannot do.

1. Open a work and scroll to “Your voice on this piece”

   Press Record. Recording stops itself at two minutes rather than rejecting a long take after the fact.

2. Listen back

   Press Save recording to keep it, or Discard and record again.

3. Replace or remove it whenever you like

   The stored recording is playable from the same panel, with its length beside it.

What this page does not do

Mirra is deliberately plain about the edges of this arrangement, because an artist deciding whether to hand over their work deserves to know them before rather than after.

• Review is a person reading, not a queue that clears overnight. There is no way to expedite it.
• Being approved as an artist does not list anything. Each collection is submitted and read separately.
• Being listed does not release money. A month has to close, be priced, and — on the bank route — be requested and reviewed before a transfer is made.
• Earnings are shown to you as your own figures. They do not identify which households showed your work, and nothing in Mirra will tell you.
• Mirra never shows your account number back to you after it is saved — every screen in the product shows only the last four digits.