Signing up to a Photo Library to sell your prints is an exciting thing to do. Always stay organized and do your homework - get yourself a file to keep all your paperwork together.
Once you have chosen your library and have a set of images ready to upload you still need to consider some other important points.
So you’ve joined your first stock library and want to try and sell your images. But now what do you upload to sell? Your best work, all your work? How do you make yours stand out? Here are some ideas on how to get your images noticed in a stock library.
Nearly every photographer imagines that his work is good enough to be saleable. There are many ways to enter the photography industry although many of them seem like a big challenge if you have never freelanced before. A great idea is to try selling some of your images as postcards and greeting cards.
Here are some tips on how to do this.
If you want an opportunity to make money with your photography, why not try to sell your work via a picture library? What a picture library does is host your images on the Internet and advertises it to potential buyers, who will then pay the agency if they want to use your photo. The agency will take a fee, anything from 20% - 60% generally.
The most successful picture libraries around include Corbis and Getty. These libraries, along with a handful of others are the crème de la crème of libraries. However – these companies will only take the work of the very highest standard from established photographers. They take work of great interest or beauty, for example images that may be topical or represent a current event; images of remote places around the world or of important people. Nor do they take speculative submissions from new photographers. However – by all means look at these sites to see how high the quality of work can be.
Many people wonder how a stock photograph is defined. The answer to that is that it is not. Every business needs photographs for reports, projects, publicity and so on. They place they go to get them is stock photo agencies who have a huge amount (maybe millions) of photographs in their stock. The stocks could be of nearly anything and are submitted to them by photographers. As and when the agencies sells a photo, the photographer who took it will be paid a percentage of the sale income.
To make money from selling stock photographs, the first thing to do is visit the websites of various agencies and check out the categories and sub categories of photos they carry. Have a look at the various types of pictures in each and find the categories that you are comfortable with and will have opportunities to shoot. Read the rest of this entry »