the weekly fix
Selling stock photography requires a big push to start, but then you only need to keep topping up your collection once a week
David Bailey is often quoted as saying, “To get rich, you have to be making money while you’re asleep.”
Stock photography is one way that you can attempt do that. Notice the emphasis on the word ‘attempt’. You have to be very, very lucky to make any real money from stock photography.
Actually, scratch that: luck doesn’t really come into it. You need to be dedicated, able to plan ahead, have a good understanding of how to make your work stand out from the crowd and able to think conceptually.
While you can, of course, whack your best landscapes and pet shots on a stock library and hope for the best, it pays – literally, usually – to approach things with a well-formed plan. What are picture researchers and designers going to be searching for in three months, six months or a year’s time? What upcoming news or sporting events will there be a strong demand for images to help illustrate them – and how can you illustrate them in a non-literal way? Brexit will obviously be a perpetual headline-maker in the UK and overseas for years to come: can you anticipate the key events and stories and get your images uploaded to stock libraries before anyone else?
Taking stock
You’ve undoubtedly heard talk of the demise of stock photography, but it’s far from dead. You’re much less likely to make a good return from a handful of images, as these days the sheer volume of pictures – over 800,000 new stock images are added weekly to Shutterstock alone, according to the company – and availability of low-price ‘micro-stock’ sites mean that it’s a buyer’s market and the money that you see from the sale of an individual image is likely to be extremely
low. So it’s all about attracting many lower-return sales, rather than a few high-value ones.
Choosing the right stock library for you is one of the big challenges. The most important thing to look at, before selling your images through a stock agency, is how the revenue is split. You’ll need to factor in the commission the library will make on each sale, and whether it’s worth working with them exclusively to increase the percentage you receive. Many microstock agencies have moved to a subscription model, where clients can download a set number of images for a low monthly fee. This may leave you with just a few pence per picture, so you really do need to concentrate on building up a large collection of images that clients are looking for to make a worthwhile return.
You’ll need to get up to speed with the art of keywording when you do take the plunge and get accepted by a stock library. Do your research on the type of keywords that buyers are likely to use, and add the relevant ones to your photos. Make sure your images are appealing when they’re viewed as thumbnails too, as this is how buyers will see your image initially. Does it stand out from the rest?
When it comes to choosing images to upload to a stock library, only submit your most technically and aesthetically top-notch shots. There’s a risk that they’ll be rejected by the library if they don’t meet a certain standard. Bear in mind that those pictures that appeal to friends and visitors to your Flickr or Facebook page aren’t necessarily what commercial image buyers are looking for.
You need to be dedicated, plan ahead, make your work stand out from the crowd and think conceptually