POD sites such as Fine Art America (where many of my best-sellers have been selling for 10+ years)

Quote from: Faustvasea on February 14, 2024, 11:50

Quote from: Zero Talent on February 14, 2024, 11:29

Yes. FineArt America. See below its share of my last month's revenue

Thanks for that. May I ask, do you just upload photos on there and the rest the platform does for you?

Yes. I uploaded a subset of my port with what I consider suitable for prints.

I make more on fine art sales than on stock sites but that's a combination of POD sites such as Fine Art America (where many of my best-sellers have been selling for 10+ years), direct sales, and through art agents. I only have around 900 files on FAA and I spent years marketing them on social media. I've cut back on the marketing and sales have slowed but are still pretty good. I do better with agents who take a huge cut of my sales, so I make much less per sale, but they do the marketing for me and it adds up much faster than FAA. POD is a lot more work than stock and a different market. I also show my work in galleries in the NY tri-state area and make occasional sales that way.

Honestly, I made much more when I was doing photo assignments but between Covid and lingering health issues, I've switched my focus to photography I can do on my own time. Editorial assignments earned me okay but not a living wage, however, they helped me get commercial assignments for local businesses which earned me substantially more. If photography is your full time business, assignments can be the way to go.

But yes, I've found POD sites worthwhile but only in combination with other outlets. I also license stock directly but that took years of finding clients too and still requires a lot of contact.

There's no get rich quick answer and depending on what type of images you shoot, stock can be a better outlet than POD or vice-versa. With stock, you don't have to market, the agencies do it for you but they also take the lion's share of the profits. On POD sites I can earn $$$ from one sale, which is rare for a single stock photo license although that can happen too. This month I netted over $300 from a single license on Stockimo (the Alamy app that they are now discontinuing) but again that's rare - I usually get 2-3 $$$ licenses on Alamy in a year these days, it's the $$ licenses that add up.

You still need a lot of $$$ sales to make decent income from photo sales and the steady daily licenses from microstock also add up. You can try Fine Art America with 25 images on their no cost plan, or for only $30 you can upload an unlimited number. If you have 2,000 good images to sell, why not try it for a few years and see how it goes?

Redbubble is another outlet for merchandise like mugs and T-shirts (occasional prints). They now charge you if you don't sell enough - I've made enough sales there over the years with a very small portfolio so I'm not getting charged but I find my illustrations do better than my photographs though photo stickers sell. The markup on merchandise is small though so you have to sell a lot. And when I cut back on marketing myself sales slowed.

Good luck!

I sell both but have totally separate subjects for each. Some subjects sell well on PODs but not stock and vice versa. One of the problems with selling the same photos on micro and POD is price shoppers. I found that buyers price shop a lot more than I expected. If you have a photo on micro they can get for a couple dollars where they can use it to get a large print at Walmart for another few dollars, why would they spend a lot more money for a print at a POD? A lot of them wont so if your POD stuff isn't selling well one reason may be because they're using your micros for prints.

How well you do depends on your photos and how much demand there is. Also, different PODs have different buyers so you'll need to try different PODs to see which ones work for you. You'll see some people saying they do great on a certain POD and others will say it's a waste of time.

Quote from: wordplanet on February 14, 2024, 12:22

POD sites such as Fine Art America (where many of my best-sellers have been selling for 10+ years)

Right, you sell well on FAA because you signed up 10 years ago. Their algorithm favors authors who have been registered for a long time.

Just take a look at this page: https://fineartamerica.com/recentprintsales.html

There are almost always the same authors. And if you check the registration date it's almost always 2010-2014... You can do well on FAA if you do a lot of marketing yourself, but it's very very difficult (But at that point I advise you to open your own website and do marketing by sponsoring your site and not your FAA profile).