Giving Red Bubble a Go

I have been looking around for a while for an "low fuss" but good quality way to sell my photos on-line. Basically I had concluded there wasn't one. Flickr gets you exposure, but has no commercial aspects, there are other places like Lulu, Cafe Press and Deviant Art, not to forget any number of self publishing stock photo sites, but to be sweepingly general without wanting to get involved in law suits they all exploit the artist, photographer or content creator. These guys are there to make a profits and take the lion share of sale price. I strongly suggest you read the fine print before signing in because you may give away ownership of your images without realising it.

I have heard about RedBubble and decided to give it a try, sorry no glowing endorsement yet (I haven't sold anything, yet!). I thought just writing about joining up and what's going on in there might be interesting enough. What caught my eye was that red bubble just charge a fixed amount to produce and forward the work to the new owner. They charge "premium" rates but they do seem to have the right quality mentality. This is all important to me because I worry about my images. Then they leave the photographer (or other content provider) to add their own mark up, and general it seems to be 20% plus (not the 5% if you are lucky on some other places). Joining is simple but read the conditions.

They do offer a wide variety of formats, from card to posters and onto large mounted & framed prints. The purchaser gets all the say on format of the finished product and there are a good range of options in terms of matt colour frames size and colour. If that doesn't suit, you can choose only to sell particular formats, and there is a very strict limit (overly so, from my experience) of the image size (in pixels) that can be reproduced for different sized products. The best part of RedBubble though from my point of view is it has the groups and community feel of early days in flickr and the quality of work in there is really outstanding.

So watch over on the right hand side and you will see a little slide show of images of mine you can purchase off the web via Redbubble. Give that a try and I will appreciate RedBubble more.