How to earn money from your photos
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I’m a firm believer that anyone can earn money from selling their photos. In fact, that’s exactly how I first started — just the odd random photo here and there. One thing led to another and now I run my own photography business.
That’s not perhaps everyone’s cup-of-tea but the ability to take something you’ve created and use it to earn a bit of extra cash is always good.
Don’t worry if you think they’re not good enough — pursuing a more commercial approach to your photography is a great way to improve. It moves you to a different mindset: you start to see things you’ve never noticed before, you start to ‘feel’ the image before it’s made and you push yourself to do better and better with every frame.
In this post we’re going to explore several different options for selling your images for profit. (Note the word ‘profit’ — it’s key to your success and the only true way to keep track of where you are. More of that later…)
Stock Libraries
Stock libraries are perhaps the easiest way to sell your work and where I started. It’s a simple concept
- you create an account
- upload your images
- pass quality control
- add keywords
- wait for the sales
In practice it’s a bit harder than that. As a new contributor passing quality control can be difficult. You need to stick to their submission guidelines to the letter, any deviation can lead to an image or the entire batch being rejected.
The image stock market is continually evolving too. There are now essentially two different types of library:
- Traditional — e.g. Alamy where images can either be sold royalty free or under a specific license. Image prices used to be higher than with a Micro Stock library but under the constant battle for market share many traditional stock libraries are having to lower their prices in order to compete.
- Micro Stock — e.g. iStock Photo where images are mostly sold royalty free, in many cases from as little as $1. Micro stock is particularly popular with web designers who can pick up web resolution images very cheap with no fuss.
BTW, if you’re thinking of going down this route you need to understand the two different licensing models. As a very rough guide, Royalty Free tends to be an unconditional, non-exclusive, lifetime license (although you need to check the terms for the library you are submitting to) this mans that anyone can use your image for almost any purpose for as long as they want. There are variations of Royalty Free licensees too – some libraries allow the image to be sold (e.g. on a greeting card) whereas others do not. A Licensed image is an entirely different concept. Licensed images are usually more expensive to buy than Royalty Free and in return the licensee is granted exclusivity for a particular purpose over a defined period of time. Very often there are territorial and print run restrictions imposed too (e.g. exclusive use in the USA for the inside of a magazine, max. 10,000 impressions)
My highest grossing images have been sold through traditional stock libraries for text books and advertisements on a Licensed basis rather than Royalty Free.
The biggest problem with stock libraries is the commission they charge. 50% commission is not uncommon and I’ve been charged as much as 70% in come cases. That’s a huge chunk of the pie you’ll never even see.
Secondly, you need to keep feeding the library with fresh images. On average you can expect 1 image sale per year for every 100 images you have on sale. That’s not great so if you want any reasonable income you need to keep feeding the monster.
In summary, stock libraries are great as a first step towards earning money from your photos. It’s hard work, you need to amass a large collection of marketable images to see any real return. Even then it’s likely to be a slow drip rather than a constant stream. The more unique and special your images are the better chance you have.
Greeting Cards
This is a really fun way of earning some cash. As with stock libraries, it’s very much a numbers game – the larger your collection, the greater your chances.
There are basically three ways into this market:
- Submission
- On-line card companies
- Self publish
There are pros and cons with each. Unsolicited submissions are the hardest yet potentially offer the highest short term rewards. Be prepared to face a lot of rejection as greeting card companies receive a lot of submissions. If you are selected as a contributor make sure you understand the licensing agreement (they’ll be none to happy if a competitor runs your image too!). Once you’ve been selected once you stand a greater chance of additional image sales too but there’s no guarantee.
On-line card companies (e.g. Greeting Card Universe) are a good way into this market. Again it’s a slow drip so you’ll need a lot of designs before you seen any returns and the commission they pay isn’t great (approx. $0.21 per card). The advantage is they’ll take care of the sales, order processing, printing and despatch. It’s a fire-and-forget solution. Once you’ve created a card it’s effectively an asset that can generate cash over time.
Self publishing is another method I’ve tried and not one I’d particularly recommend. If you’re really determined to go ahead with this route you’ll need a platform to showcase your designs and take orders. An eCommerce website is the ideal solution but the biggest problem I found was having to process the orders, print and despatch the cards. It’s time consuming and considering the low revenue levels I found there were much more profitable ways to earn money through my photos.
In summary, the greeting card business is fun. It has a lot of similarities to selling stock images insofar as you need a large collection of designs to see much of a return. I found using companies like Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle to be the best solution.
Fine Art Picture Sales
Another fun way to sell your photos with potential high margin. It has a lot in common with self publishing your own greeting cards as you’ll need an ecommerce platform to showcase your work and take orders. Sales order processing is still manual (you could outsource it) but as you’re now dealing with much higher value products that’s not so much of an issue as in most cases you’ll just load the order with the lab and they’ll take care of the rest. Many professional land also provide a white label service and can despatch the finished article direct to the customer. That can save a lot of time and doubling up on shipping costs but you’ll not see the order yourself to check it’s quality.
The pros with this solution are that it’s cash positive (customer pays before you order from the lab) and there’s no stock to hold. The biggest thing to be wary of is offering too many variations as it’ll play havoc with your ecommerce system.
Marketing is crucial. Visitors aren’t going to come to you so you need to put a lot of effort into promoting your site to drive traffic to it. This is where social media platforms like Pinterest can be useful. Pinning your images with a link back to the product and adding the right keywords and a good description can help drive visitors to you but you’ll need to do a lot of other things too as with any online retailer.
Make sure you charge a suitable price too. With fine art picture sales you’re selling your work as art, not a picture on a piece of paper or canvas. That’s where a lot of photographers go wrong. Offering each image as a limited edition can also help support a higher price.
REMEMBER — the value is in the picture, not the medium it’s printed on
Summary
These are just three examples as to how you can start selling your photographs for profit. There are many, many more. I’ve chosen these three as they’re a good place to start. They key to success with all of this is to value your own work and make sure you charge accordingly.
Too many photographers undersell themselves or simply give their work away for free. Others don’t consider the cost of sales leaving them barely breaking even or worse, making a loss.
If you’re thinking about selling your photos for profit what would it take for you to start? If you’ve already tried it I’d love to hear how you got on.
Leave a comment and let me know. Also, if you found this port useful, please help spread the word and share with your friends 🙂
