Personally, I would try one character illustrating different concepts in many images. Then for the images which sell well, you can later use the same scenes/props and keywords for new images with a new character, if you want to.

And buyers who use your character to illustrate a business concept (e.g. saving money, worrying about high interest rates, hiring a new employee...) on a website will look at your portfolio and use the same character to illustrate other concepts also.

This is the way Scott Maxwell made a lot of money with his 'gold guy' character.

Quote from: louoates on August 20, 2012, 15:18

If Canada's tax folks are anything like the U.S.'s your home office deduction is a red flag. You may as well tattoo "audit me" on your forehead.
If you are in business you must have an accountant who can explain all these wrinkles. The multiple audits I've been through in several of my businesses have caused me to be super-conservative in such matters.

^^This is completely correct^^.  I have opted NOT to claim a home office for the reasons Lou states.  It just isn't worth the risk.  I was audited last year and it was specifically about MS income and wife's school tuition.  You are GUILTY until proven innocent.  The IRS sends you a bill with all kinds of interest and penalties and you have to fight it.  A home office makes things exponentially worse

I don't mean to argue with you, I'm sure you're right, but I am curious. If the IRS issue with you was about your MS income and your wife's tuition what does that have to do with a home office deduction? And if you didn't claim the deduction, how could it make things 'exponentially worse'?

'Exponentially worse' implies that if the IRS decided you owed more taxes for the year in question and a penalty, then the amount owed would be multiplied several times because you claimed a home office deduction, which you say you did not claim anyway. I don't understand.

...remember quite a lot of the profit results from buyers not downloading all the images available in their subs packages.

Correct. And also remember that a lot of SS submitters never reach the minimum payout level, so SS never has to pay them. Maybe Stan is in that group?

Quote from: lisafx on August 11, 2012, 12:27

I think it's a good start.  Kinda scary reading the comments though.  10-1 against the move, bitching about "selling out to corporate interests".   

I wouldn't worry, there is a very active, young, vocal minority that gets it nickers in a twist over anything that sides with copyright holders.
The amount of comments posted is no indicator of the weight of opinion.

How true. The commenters don't have jobs and are writing those comments in their mom's basement as they use the cable service she pays for to download music and movies from the pirate sites.

Google is giving us an example of what may be the only way to stop the trend toward deprecating copyright. People, businesses, and even nations tend to stop being pirates when they start making money from the selling licenses to IP.

I cannot get on the Shutterstock customer (as opposed to submitter) home page using Firefox. I get this message:
"Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit."

And yeah, the vector submission process will not read the metadata in the JPGs. I submitted a couple Monday pasting the descrip and keywords by hand, and they have still not been reviewed.

My sales are way down this week.

Hope SS gets things worked out before school starts back and microstock sales begin to pick up for the Fall. 

Other than the commission percentage, the only really important thing to me is: What licenses are they selling?

The only information I can find about that is: "When making a download available for sale, sellers can use a standard Personal Use/Personal Non-Commercial Use License Agreement. Alternatively, sellers can insert a Custom License Agreement. These options are explained at the time the seller makes the content available for sale."

Is there anywhere in the site where I can find out what kind of licenses they are going to sell in these "Custom License Agreements"? 

Quote from: Roadrunner on July 23, 2012, 13:53

I stopped uploading to them two years ago, but still get the same number of sales per month.  I only get a poultry six sales or so.   That is no doubt due to my no longer updating.  I got another sale today.  It was actually $.63 USD; most of the time I get about $.23 or $.27 per image.

All your sales are of chickens (or other domesticated birds)? That is weird.

I think he means he is earning chicken feed. 

Interesting blog by a professional writer who got caught using a copyrighted photo, and what happened to her.

"Like most of you, I�m a casual blogger and learned my way into blogging by watching others. And one of the things I learned early on was that a post with a photo always looked nicer than one with just text. So I looked at what other people were doing for pictures. And mostly it seemed that everyone was grabbing pics from Google Images and pasting them on their sites. Sometimes with attribution, most of the time without.
   . . . .
"And I'm thinking--well, that must mean it's okay because if that weren't true, sites like Tumblr and Pinterest couldn't even exist because reposting pics is the whole POINT of those sites. So off I went doing what everyone else does--using pics from Google Images, putting a disclaimer on my site...
    . . . .
"Well on one random post, I grabbed one random picture off of google and then a few weeks later I got contacted by the photographer who owned that photo. He sent me a takedown notice, which I responded to immediately because I felt awful that I had unknowingly used a copyrighted pic. The pic was down within minutes. But that wasn�t going to cut it. He wanted compensation for the pic. A significant chunk of money that I couldn�t afford. I�m not going to go into the details but know that it was a lot of stress, lawyers had to get involved, and I had to pay money that I didn�t have for a use of a photo I didn�t need."

http://www.roniloren.com/blog/2012/7/20/bloggers-beware-you-can-get-sued-for-using-pics-on-your-blog.html

...nothing has changed in terms of overall revenue in the microstock industry.

That's my experience. I don't know how it's really going for the photo folks, but as an illustrator I see no signs of a downturn. (Congratulations to Simonox on his new independence!)

"I can't say I have any evidence one way or the other, but I would think most exclusives would have trouble because they are unprepared to deal with the rest of the market. It's very different. Your images don't get all the special favors and perks that exclusives used to get. Maybe, that is why Jo Ann did well with the transition. She knew exactly what to expect."

But she didn't :s

Only one month has surpassed exclusive earnings in over a year now...

She said it was the first month, not the only month.

for the ones that don�t read that often on FT forum take a look at the following link:
http://www.fotolia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=579103
...There is some sort of algorithm that prioritizes contributors that upload more frequently.

This is key bit of information. I have stopped submitting for several weeks and my sales everywhere have been pretty normal (for June), with one exception: Fotolia. There, sales fell off a cliff. My 7-Day rank suddenly (over a few days) dropped over 150 positions. Nothing remotely like this has happened to me there before. And I, as is said, all other sites are normal.

Yesterday I submitted five images and my FT sales jumped back up to almost normal.

Fololia's algorithm must kick in after a certain number of days of not submitting, and move your search engine results way, way back. Something to keep in mind.

I have been submitting vectors to SignElements (formerly isignstock). It is pretty easy to submit vectors there by FTP.

I have long submitted vectors to Juha Tuomi's site Rodeo in Finland. I have definitely made enough money there to make submitting worthwhile and Juha is a nice guy.

And I see DT has an account at Pin and is doing some of the dirty work themselves

Just because a page says that it belongs to Dreamstime doesn't mean that DT had anything to do with it. Pinterest allows its users to use the trademarks and logos of companies without permission, and make the pages look like they are the official company page.
"20 B2B Marketers Losing their Brand on Pinterest"
http://b2bdigital.net/2012/02/21/b2b-marketers-pinterest/