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Selling images - freelance
David Pike

	This shot of backlit autumn leaves featured in an article that I wrote about backlighting for Australian Photography. Selling on a freelance basis is thinking about how your images can be used - this image might be used to illustrate autumn, Japan, film (saturated colours), trees (Japanese maple) and composition. Being creative about how to use your stock images may be one of the factors determining your success.

There are basically three approaches to selling your photographs - through a library or agency, through commissions or through your own efforts on a freelance basis. I have covered the issues related to using libraries and agencies elsewhere, selling images on a commission basis can really only happen if you establish yourself as a professional photographer and advertise and/or build your reputation. In this article I want to cover the issues of selling on a freelance basis.

While it may seem like tough advice if you are starting out, you should carry no illusions - selling your photographs is not easy. The massive stock of outstanding images and the vast number of photographers producing quality images mean that editors and picture buyers can be very choosey. Moreover, prices have come down steadily over the years to the point where it is increasingly difficult to make a living as a professional stock photographer. So don't kid yourself, you are unlikely to get rich selling your photographs - some do, it is true, but they are a tiny proportion of those trying to sell photographs. You may be able to make a living from photography, but to do requires top quality photographic technique and composition as well as strong and dogged marketing skills.

Step 1 - Picture selection
There is a vast array of picture needs out there, with opportunities to sell to the magazine, book, advertising, greetings cards, calendar and postcard markets to name a few. With very few exceptions picture buyers will want to see original transparencies, slides, they will very rarely accept prints for a submission.

If you have a range of slides, then the first step that you must take is an assessment of your own stock of images - take a very critical look at what you have in your files because the most important factor determining your success will be the quality of your images. Remember that picture buyers can afford to be choosy and they will select only the very highest quality shots. It is critically important that you edit your images aggressively - weed out and throw away any shots that do not meet the key criteria for picture selection - accurate exposure, sharp focus and strong composition.

If your images are under-exposed they will lack critical detail in the shadow areas and the punch and brightness of well exposed shots. Similarly if your images are over-exposed they will appear washed out and again the colours will lack impact with little or no detail in the highlight areas. Accurate exposure will give you strong colour saturation, a good tonal range and critical detail.

This was another example of how I used my local contacts to develop early sales of photographs. My employer, a financial company in Japan, used photographs to brighten the covers of their financial reports - I approached the head of publications to see if he would accept any of my slides. Again, the amount that I earned from this was quite limited, but it gave me confidence to continue.

When I was photographing these polar bears I did not realise for several hours that the screws on my lens mount had become very loose - perhaps because of the shaking as we travelled across the tundra in a tracked vehicle. This resulted in several rolls of film being ruined by 'camera shake' leaving all of the images less than critically sharp - I had no choice but to throw all of these slides away, despite the cost and the effort it took to get the photographs.

The best way to assess the sharpness of your photographs is to look at them through a loupe on a light box. This is the way that a picture buyer or editor will view them. Usually picture buyers will use a 4x loupe (especially if viewing a number of 35mm slides) and if they want to assess critical sharpness they will use an 8x loupe. These are the best loupes for you to use. Do not be fooled into thinking that you can assess the sharpness of your images through a small slide viewer, or through prints or projection - do it the way the professional picture buyers and researchers do it - with a loupe and a light box. Be rigorous - if they are not sharp throw them away, because even if you keep them, picture editors will never select them.

Step 2 Generating ideas
As you edit your images and look through your stock of photographs make notes on what you have and how they might be used. If you have a range of landscape and architectural images of your local area, for example, then you might want to think about postcards, local magazines or newspapers as initial targets. If you have a stock of images of farm animals or pets, then you might want to consider the greetings cards, calendar, magazine or book markets, and so on.

Once you have a broad outline of what you have to offer start to get a little more specific - if you are thinking about postcards of your local area - see whether you could put together a range of different images of the local beauty spots and key buildings - see if you can develop a theme within these that shows off your style or capabilities. Similarly, if you are thinking about calendars or greetings cards think about putting together a range of related images.

As another example, if you are thinking of tackling the local magazines or newspapers try to consider what story you can put around your images - one of the best ways to sell your pictures is to sell them in conjunction with a written article.

At this stage you may find it difficult to get very specific, but it will help if, from an early stage, you are thinking about the sales angle for your shots.

I have written articles for a number of different photography magazines as I go through my slides I try to think what uses I can make of them and in particular what articles I might write which can use the slides. Writing articles and illustrating with your own photographs is a great way to get published.

 

Step 3 - Finding the markets
As you develop these ideas - whether in broad outline or in more detail, you will have made the first step towards selecting potential markets for your images.

There are several ways that you can find markets for your work. The easiest step is to purchase the Freelance Photographer's Market Handbook 2002, available from the Bureau of Freelance Photographers (visit www.thebfp.com). You may also want to subscribe to the BFP and receive their monthly Newsletter, which provides details on current picture requirements from a range of different picture buyers. See below for a special offer for UKP members only on membership of the BFP.

	The BFP's annual publication the Market handbook is a fantastic source of leads for freelance sales. The BFP also publish the newsletter which gives a monthly update to picture requirements. The Newsletter is only available to BFP members. See our special offer for BFP membership.

You can also subscribe to the Guilfoyle Report or GR On-line, this is a US based service and you can subscribe to their Daily wants list or a less frequent service. The daily service will send you an e-mail each day of the latest picture requirements of a wide range of different picture buyers. It is an expensive service and you may find that there are limited opportunities for sales of specifically British subjects - if you have more generic shots or pictures of overseas subjects you may meet with more success with this service.

I subscribed to the Guilfoyle Report on-line for one year and managed to make a sale of images to the Los Angeles Times colour supplement, for a travel article about Carcassone in the south of France. The earnings from this sale covered the cost of my subscription - so I just about broke even. I did not renew my subscription as I felt there were insufficient leads for me to make it worthwhile.

You should also take note of various users of pictures that are similar to the ones that you have - this approach take a little longer, but may yield some interesting leads. The chances are that your photography reflects your enthusiasms and if you are enthusiastic about a subject, then it is likely that you will be drawn to other images of and information on the subject, whether these are in books, magazines or calendars etc. Make a note of the publishers of these various information source - these publishers will become your target.

In thinking about possible uses for your images you need to be aware of some basic characteristics of your potential targets. I have summarised some of the key aspects of various markets below, this may help you prioritise your approach:

	Selling on a freelance basis to book publishers is not easy, unless you see specific picture requirements on a listing as noted above. Book publishers are very decentralised organisations and so it is difficult to find out what projects they are working on an what their picture requirements are.

Book Publishers
The book publishing industry is very fragmented - while large publishing houses produce a wide range of books, there is rarely any centralised picture-buying unit. Usually each book is delegated to an individual editor and, where lots of images are required for the book, a picture researcher will be used and this person may actually be a freelance. For this reason it is difficult for the freelance photographer to tackle the book publishing market - as it is difficult to identify individuals who are buying images and even more difficult to identify what their current requirements might be.

Access to book publishing projects is possible through the various picture requirement listings noted above - I successfully sold some images to a publisher of a book on Ospreys through a listing in the Market Newsletter produced by the BFP.

Advertising
The advertising market is probably the most lucrative market for photographers, but it is similar to the book publishing market in that it tends to be very fragmented - individual projects are run by account executives with the creative elements handled within small teams - without a centralised creative team or picture buying unit, it is again very difficult for the freelance photographer to make submissions or to know what the current requirements might be.

Again, some freelance advertising work is likely to be seen in various listings of image requirements such as the Photo Wants section on Creative Lens, or the Market Newsletter by the BFP.

I responded to a picture requirement from Anness Publishing listed in one of the sources that I monitored and was fortunate to have a set of Osprey images selected for a children's book on Birds of Prey (see above). I never received a copy of the book, but did have a photocopy of the double page spread on which my photographs were included. The inset image of an osprey in the water was used on the other page.

	I have written quite a few articles for different magazines - the most successful submissions have been to photography magazines. This shows an article that I wrote for Nature Photography in the US - an article on composition.

Magazines
This is probably one of the best markets for the freelance photographer, the BFP claim that there are over 8,000 magazines published on a regular basis in the UK. Most magazines will have someone who is responsible for picture buying - usually called the picture editor or art director and this is the person that you should approach with any ideas. The best way to tackle the magazine market is to develop ideas for text/picture packages, think up various articles which are likely to have general appeal to the readers of a given magazine and that can be illustrated with your images.

As illustrated by this set of cards produced for a local school, most cards use illustrations, rather than photographs, but there is a reasonable market for photographic greetings cards and there is some suggestion within the industry that photographic cards are on the increase.

Greetings cards
The greetings card publishers are a lot easier to tackle for the freelance photographer. Many of the companies are relatively small and the picture buying tends to be centralised - it is usually possible to identify who the picture buyer is and what their current requirements are. The main problem with the greetings card sector is that most images used on greetings cards are illustrations, rather than photographic. When looking at greetings card manufacturers, try to identify those that use photographic images and then look carefully at the type of images they use.

Calendar Publishers
Unlike greetings cards, the great thing about the calendar sector is that it is largely based on photographic images. Inevitably, the calendar market is very seasonal. The schedule for calendars is that the 2004 calendars will be sold to distributors and retailers during Jan-Mar 2003, the calendars themselves will be designed during the autumn of 2002 and picture calendar designers and publishers will be looking for images during the late summer into the autumn of 2002. Contacting calendar publishers at other times is still worthwhile, but do not expect them to accept a submission much before the summer months.

	I usually submit the same article ideas to different magazines - you have to be careful about timing these submissions, because magazines in the same country would not want to publish the same article at the same time. This shows the article on composition as it appeared in Australian Photography magazine.

Step 4 - Getting organised
In tackling different markets for pictures it is very important that you are organised and this is best done from the very beginning. Organise your list of targets so that you can keep notes on who you have contacted, with what ideas or images, what the response was etc.. If you use a computer then it is worth developing this filing system on either a database (ideally) or an excel spreadsheet - alternatively you can use a paper based system, but whatever your choice, try to ensure that you keep a careful note of the following:

i) who you have contacted (name and address of company, person contacted,
ii) contact details (telephone, fax and e-mail)
iii) details of the idea (you will probably send out similar ideas to a number of different picture users and different ideas to the same picture user - so it is important to keep this straight)
iv) when you contacted them
v) when you received the response
vi) what response you received
vii) any follow-up action

This hopefully is a useful start, but it is important that you develop your own 'system' and that you use it consistently. Give some thought to this at the beginning and it could save you a fair amount of time later on.

Step 5 - making contact
At this stage you should have weeded out any weak images (remember you have to be tough on yourself because picture buyers will otherwise be tough for you), you should also have developed some ideas on the potential uses for your images and finally you should have developed a list of potential targets. The idea now is to prioritise your targets and start to make contact.

You will often meet early success if you make submissions to local, rather than national or international magazines. Generally speaking the smaller the circulation of a magazine, the less you will earn from your picture sale, but the easier it is likely to be to make the sale. Look for local markets first when starting out. As you build experience you can tackle the larger magazines - I was lucky when I made a speculative approach to Geo Australasia with a set of pictures showing the wildife of Japan - they used the images to run a short photo-essay.

Do not aim for the national magazines and the largest publishers of greetings cards and calendars etc. set your sights a little lower. At this stage you want to build experience and get some of your images published - remember that once you have been published you can build a list of credits that will help sell your ideas to ther publishers - getting a first step on the ladder is important - even if it is the lowest step. The chances of getting published are much greater at the lower end of the market (in terms of circulation or production volumes - not necessarily in terms of quality).

At this stage it becomes a little more difficult to give generic advice, advice that will work in most circumstances but first, do a bit of digging around to see if you can find out what type of material your targets like to receive, how they want to receive it etc.Check their website, look for sections on the website which relate to submissions of new material, and also look through any examples of the publication or product range to get a better understanding of the type of images that your target uses. You may also consider calling publishers and asking for more details on their picture needs and how they like to receive submissions of new product/publishing ideas. Remember that these people are very busy and that they probably receive calls from a number of aspiring freelance photographers - so prepare your questions in advance, make each one relevant and try not to take up any more time than is necessary. A professional approach will be respected, avoid any possibility of gaining the reputation of a time waster.

	This shot of a Boabab tree is a vertical shot, with a relatively uncluttered composition and some space at the top of the page - these are the key characteristics for a cover shot.

Armed with as much information as you can gather you are now in a position to make a submission. Now is the time to hone your ideas so that they are as relevant as possible to your target - there is probably little point in approaching your local newspaper with an outline of a story on the butterflies of Malaysia - but you may be able use some of the same images for a story on travelling to Malaysia story - if your local newspaper runs a travel column. At this point you must be thinking about what your target publisher or producer wants and what his or her ultimate clients want - not about what you want to give them. I was very disappointed when I first returned from Japan that UK photography magazines did not want to carry an article about photographing Japanese crane - the problem as far as they were concerned was that this subject was not very relevant to their readers - very few of whom were likely to want to go to Japan and fewer still would actually do so.

The front cover of Australian Photography in May 2001 showing the use of the picture of the boabab tree.

The next step is to write a letter outlining your idea or ideas and providing a brief description of the idea including examples of the images that would be used. I would suggest that this letter is kept to one page only and that you put some effort into the presentation of the images that accompany the letter.

Your organisation will really come into it's own at this stage. You will probably find that your ideas are suitable to more than one publisher or producer but it is important to approach each of these with the idea in succession, rather than all at the same time. For example, if you have an idea to produce a range of greetings cards using some images of kittens - this may be suitable for several greetings cards publishers. If you write to all of them at the same time, and more than one takes you up on the idea, then you have a problem - you will only be able to follow up with one of them as they will not want to 'share' images for the same type of product. You can of course run this risk in the knowledge that it is likely to be a small risk, or alternatively you can contact each publisher in succession, waiting until you have had a response from one, before sending out the same idea to another. Accurately tracking this process is important.

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