Selling those pixels

I have always been on the look out for simpler ways to sell my work.Using the net to do it is appealing but and its a really big BUT …its a lot of work, unless you sign that over to a middleman who takes takes all the profit. (for example selling a photo ebook on the apple store that cost more than $10, sees apple taking a commission of 70%+, I have “sold” a few large prints of redbubble but haven’t yet reached the point where I have earned enough to get a cheque mailed to me, the actual amount you get from many stock photograph services is tiny and shrinking! The 25-30% commissions most galleries charge is starting to look ok. It is possible that Pixel.com, which is an offshoot of Fine Art America, is positioning itself in this “we do everything for you” market but they do seem to be making a few sensible noises to appeal to “real”* artists and photographers. If nothing else I like their video on YouTube (above).
I’m not really sure it will succeed, specifically can they attract the serious art buyers, but I’m willing to give it a try. Watch this blog space for details of my work on pixel.com

* by “real” I just mean those creatives that need to make money from their work to live and keep creating, rather than hobbyists or those with the luxury of another income stream.

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.