RE: Pricing Your Art
cerebis remarked on February 09, 2010

I've been selling my photography for a few years now on alamy.com, with about a 60/40 split (in my favour, just about)

Selling photo's through a Stock Library like this means no self-estimation of the worth of your work, since the company has set rates for every reproduction rate imaginable. However, when it comes to organising an exhibition yourself and attempting to price individual works, I found that very hard. You try to strike a balance between pricing yourself out of the market, charging what your local market will bear, and bizarrely having to set the price high enough so that potential buyers don't treat your work as a commodity (a nice frame with a picture in it, as opposed to the other way around)

I've been significantly more successful with the Stock Library route than selling pieces as "works of art", if photography can be considered that (cue off-shoot debate on merits of photography :) ) That might also be because I'm quite lazy, and photography is not my main source of income (just as well) Nonetheless, with almost no effort from me, I've had revenue of almost $9k through the stock library (not all for me, don't forget the 60/40 split) That has just about covered what I've spent on camera's and gear over the years.

That particular market is currently both imploding and exploding, however, with micro-stock offerings appearing even from major players like Getty, and the traditional exclusive licenses being strangled to death.