What Sells?

Hello again and welcome to another blog, this week’s thoughts have all been centred around the idea of sales, what sells and why? This has partly come about from the setting up of a sales page on my site where amongst other things for sale, mainly me, I wanted to see if there is still a market for stock photos and sales of prints.

Now this has been a difficult one for me, as historically my brand of work has struggled in these traditional categories, so I’ve steered away from it but as I examined the market, I realised that mine seemed to differ mostly on issues of (and for want of a better word) ‘quality’. Mine consisted of something that was seemingly different from the strict imposed market values of stock but recently I’ve noticed there has been a definite steer away from this rigidness of thought.

So as I sort my archive and look at saleability, I thought I’d see if my mix of archive, historical, text driven interest ie through interesting captions images could become rejuvenated and/or make some sales. This puts me in mind of my brief dalliance with Alamy, which was not a great experience as I joined just before another cut to photographers’ percentage and left when their terms became completely dire, I still had work going through Getty, I think at that point, or I’d left, little cloudy at the timings of what happened and when, as these sort decisions were not instantaneous and fade over a period of time. There is also the idea that the price Alamy sets is what you can claim in a court for unlawful use, which shouldn’t be true but alas when courts treat photography as a single commodity then it does seem to be held up as an example. Surely it should depend on the content within, shouldn’t it?

Any way things are different now, I have a shiny SquareSpace site and the idea and possibility of a ‘shop’ to sell my wares is a lot easier and actionable on my part. Although there are a lot of questions: Do people still buy stock images? What price to charge? Will my work gain any foot hold? How will people find these images? Is SEO as much of a metaphoric minefield as ‘they’ make out? Keywords and captioning are interesting, (think that will be another blog tho.) As if people find image through those important descriptive words, what to write but it’s really not what you think but what a prospective client thinks and types into the search engine? Well without my crystal ball how would you know such things?

Hold or stick? Sit on the work or publish and be damned? Stop or Go?

What’s best to do?

Some of my (best?) advice in these sorts of situation, and one that I tell my students is, why not try it and see?

So let me follow my own advice by doing just that!!!

Following my own advice, whatever next?

Now I have decided initially by putting a mixture of images up, to see what if any will gain traction. Mixing new and archive shots for a start. I’m then going to follow with a few mentorship sessions, sessions on teaching how to with cameras, mainly dslr’s but the advice can translate to other systems. Adding in some more theoretical further ideas on discussion points too, as I have been asked about all of these previously, finally getting round to offering them now!

Choosing the images to begin with was another difficulty, listening again to what I would advise assembling the images together, seeing what would/wouldn’t work. They seemed to split into three distinct sections, I’m going to follow that for now, may possibly change later but so far the opening categories are:

·      Manchester scenes. These are my newly shot street style images of different parts of Manchester

·      The archive. Some of my archive shots that I think could be of Interest, bits of 90’s Manchester, the Hacienda, street, etc. 

·      Signs. These are either handwritten, constructed signs or just images that signify something, this one is slightly abstract and possibly the most creative of the opening section.

As I write this, I know there will be others as it progresses, but I must remember that this is just the starting point, the hope is that it will give me enough scope to explore ideas but set the work within a commercial framework. The next job will be accurate pricing and T&C’s which shall probably be pretty standard and based on what I provided a number of years ago but new to this I think will be a sliding scale of payment dependant on use and time requirements, it seems to have changed the most recently. Good to do as in this digital wild west it’s a difficult area to enforce, hence the need for accurate pricing so court claims can be issued fairly. That’s another few jobs on the to-do list as well as everything else but it’s all good and moves towards something I’ve been planning for a while for the archive and for the future.

Well that’s a lot of discussion around images but not of images so I’ll leave you with one of my “longstanding-project-images-that-I-really-must-make-a-book-out-of” type image that I made this weekend, I never in a million years this sort of image will sell unless it’s in a book but aren’t there an awful lot of photography books out there, is there any more room for any? Unsure but think it could make a nice home just here.

A single glove lies discarded on a low wall waiting for it’s owner or to be thrown away. The rain has caught in droplets on its black leather surface. Image forms part of a long term documentation project of single gloves that starts back in the 1990’s

Thank you for your time and as ever any comments, feedback or the such-like, get me on the usual channels.