Like many other photographers, I started my stock career by carefully looking through the pages of the Freelance Photographer`s Market Handbook, and short-listing a small selection of libraries that may be suitable for my landscape and travel shots. I steered away from the bigger libraries (ie Getty & Corbis) simply because I felt that I would not be able to supply the number of images that they required. Upon signing a contract with my first library, I quickly amassed around 500 images which were accepted. So all I had to do now was to continue shooting and wait for the cheques to appear. I shot, and I waited but to no avail. I quickly realised that I had probably made one of my biggest mistakes. I had simply put all of my eggs in one basket.
A quick flick through the pages of the handbooks later, I noticed an online library accepting general images and offering the lowest commission structure of probably all of the libraries. Of course the library in question was Alamy, now a regular name in publications worldwide although back then I was taking a bit of a gamble. Alamy were the perfect library to represent my Australia and New Zealand images, so I started to have my old Velvia slides scanned (which was not a cheap process) and started sending in my CD’s. 200 shots later and I had my first sale (£100 for a image reproduced at a ¼ page in an education textbook). Things were looking good. I started to plan trips to destinations purely to shoot stock. And it started to provide a good return.
For a while I put most of efforts into supplying new images to the big A. I did keep in mind that I should not put all of my eggs into one basket so I also started to contribute to a couple of libraries that only represented British material – Loop Images and the former Britain on View collection. Both libraries have provided good returns over the years with the former showing increasing promise over the recent months. Which is far more than I can say for Alamy. By the start of 2009 I had over 5000 shots with them and I was receiving regular sales of at least 10 images being reproduced every month. But my return per image was slipping and I felt like I had hit a plateau. More images were not necessarily meaning more income.
To be honest if overseas material did not make such a large proportion of my portfolio, then I would have probably just have increased my efforts with Loop and BOV (now managed and marketed via PhotoLibrary) but having returned from a previous around the world foray (which was purely a stock trip) and still having a large amount of un-represented shots, I needed to find a new outlet for this material. I looked through the handbook again but also did extensive web searches looking for overseas libraries. One Canadian library caught my eye. Masterfile had a reputation for being extremely stringent about image quality and the photographers that they represent perhaps understandable if you consider that they are the largest independent stock photography library in North America. I sent in my contributor application, waited, and was accepted.
I knew things were going to be a little bit different with Masterfile when they appointed my with my own picture editor and arranged a phone conversation so that we could discuss exactly what their requirements were and what they were looking for. Technically it was a nightmare getting my first submission through – Mainly because the specifications for the shots are stringent and every single shot has to pass a computer processed test as well as a visually examination by a human being. The second submission was easier but I started to feel a bit disheartened as they were accepting on average about 25% of the images that I was contributing. Alarm bells starting to ring and I started to slow down the submissions at about 100 images being represented by them.
Twelve months in and I had still not received a single sale. However, the start of last year I received my first monthly sales report. A modest sale of £50 (after Masterfile have taken their 60% commission which should be noted is far higher than the commission structure of Alamy) but it was a sale and it was paid into my bank account immediately. At the time I was pleased but did expect it to be my only sale for a while – After all I have only 100 shots with Masterfile compared to 5000+ with Alamy. Imagine my surprise when I received another sales report a month later, and indeed the month later. In fact I have received a regular payment of at least £50 every months (with the best payment being £300) up until the time of me writing this piece. Admittedly I now have more shots represented by them but I still have a total of only 200 images.
You can draw your own conclusions from my experiences but as a general rule my profit percentage for my images represented by Alamy is now surpassed from the other libraries representing about 20% of my portfolio. Stock photography is numbers games but a higher commission percentage for the photographer and a larger portfolio of images represented by a single library does not necessarily mean the highest return. Choose your library carefully but above all do not put all of your eggs into one basket.
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