Let the millions pour in…or something
Last September I opened an account with Photoshelter with the idea of applying to have my work sold as part of their collection. Photoshelter is one of the stock companies that has shrugged off the exploitative practices of the mega-stock companies like Corbis and (shiver) Getty. The big companies have a pretty standard 30/70 split, with the photographer getting the 30. Additionally, they control the pricing of the images, so the photographer generally can’t even control that much. Photoshelter has a different policy: that 30/70 split is reversed – the photographer gets 70% of all sales:
You keep 70% of your transaction proceeds.
No fancy accounting, no co-brokered transactions to water down your earnings.
Total transparency of transactions.
You price your rights-managed and royalty-free images at market rates.
You keyword your own images against our controlled vocabulary.
Our search results provide the fairest ranking algorithms to maximize visibility and revenues for all of our photographers.
You do not need to compete with wholly owned content.
Get valuable feedback on your work from our team of editors with every image you submit.
Anyways, it seems like a great idea and has gotten great feedback from the community. So anyways, I started the application to be part of the collection last September, but didn’t get around to completing it until earlier this week. And I’m happy to announce that the editors at Photoshelter have approved my application and my work is now a tiny part of the collection. I submitted several still-life images with my application, which were all accepted and classified as Pro-Stock (which basically means traditional stock rather than the funky, “contemporary stock” classification). I am hoping to start building out my collection, but seeing as most of my work is work-for-hire these days at my day job, it’s going to be a while before I have a big collection up there.
But it’s nice to finally have made the step and now have a place to actually make a few dollars on my images. Here is the link to my collection on Photoshelter. I’m not expecting to make millions, especially not on the six images I have up there now, but shooting with the idea of stock in mind is a great way for me to potentially get paid for personal projects.
Now if only I understood the stock business enough to shoot exactly those images that buyers are looking for…oh wait, Photoshelter helps me there too with their School of Stock, complete with shot lists. Sweet.