My sales on FAA were great in Nov, Dec and even Jan.  Started slowing down in Feb and tanked in March.   During this time the relationship with Amazon ended.

Sean Dunn or whatever his real name seems to believe the strengths of FAA is in database programing.  He needs to leave the echo chamber and get some fresh ideas.

And when I click on those links they come up on the FAA site because I must have another window open.  So much for separation between the sites.

"We'll be marketing this business to advertising agencies, book publishers, TV production companies, etc"

The boutique agency I deal with for RM hand selects their offerings, has long time contacts and relationships in the industry, sets up a booth at industry tradeshows, does mailings to key people in the industry, has customer support people who do images searches for the client and negotiates the final deal to get the best price possible.  Also they monitor the RM license.  For this I gladly hand over 50% commission.

It takes more than writing a check for a TV commercial.

I can't get over the childish sounding explanation of why Pixels can operate a licensing company with one person (Sean doesn't even employ a proofreader):


"Image licensing involves a great deal of trust.   Once you sell your image to a buyer, there is absolutely no way to guarantee that the buyer only uses the image for the purposes that are specified in the license.   For example, if you sell a license that allows a buyer to use one of your images on the cover of 50,000 books, you have to trust that the buyer won't use the image to produce 10 million books... or use it in a TV commercial... or use it in a full-page print ad in a magazine.

You would have no idea that the buyer was doing any of those things unless you happened to catch him red-handed (e.g. by seeing your image in a TV commercial).

If you don't trust your buyers to do the right thing, then image licensing probably isn't for you.   However, before you write off the whole licensing industry, consider the following:

1.   There are lots of honest who do the right thing because they WANT to be honest.

2.   There are lots of honest buyers who do the right thing because they NEED to be honest."

Typing in a brand name like "Coke" is interesting:

http://licensing.pixels.com/featured/the-diamond-design-jc-findley.html

Strange thing is you can start in licensing.pixels.com, click on something and end up in FAA.  Or your entire portfolio will show up under licensing.pixels.com.

There needs to be two separate sites with a wall between them, not just different URLs.

FAA's new licensing site "licensing.pixels.com" has been officially launched (not to be confused with plain old pixels.com which sells phone cases and art or the original flavor fineartamerica.com which sells art but not phone cases or licensing).

http://fineartamerica.com/controlpanel/imagelicensingprogram.html

Time to add FAA to the list of stock sites?

I have a new screamer of a machine.  32 ram, SSD drives, gamer video card.  The slow point for me is having my photos on a USB drive that goes to sleep all the time.

Tip - Either save up those gel packs when you buy stuff or buy a bunch of them (Amazon sells them) and put them in your camera bag to soak up excess moisture from the air.

You don't want mold growing in your equipment.

Search for - Dry-Packs 3gm Cotton Silica Gel Packet

So one of the regulars on FAA posted a nice, helpful account of a recent licensing deal.  The whole thing happened with email negotiation.   Potential buyer sees an image they like, send the contributor an email, details go back and forth.  Deal done. 

I'm just pointing out what the source of ridicule might be.  \

 

I did a quick look at a couple of top fine art photographer's sites - Clyde Butcher and Peter Lik.  Two artists whose brick and mortar galleries I've visited.  I wanted to see if they used the same sort of language in their sales language.  Nope.  They list awards and accomplishments.

I did find an interesting similarity in the bios - both are from "humble beginnings"  - this made me look further low and behold! There is a paper online that discusses this common mythology created around artists:

To summarize the basic points of the heroic artist's biography:

- the hero demonstrates talent at an early age

- often poor from a lower social class

- undergoes a turning point through meeting a helper, advisor, teacher (this provides a bipolarity to the biography whereby the artist's personality is allowed to rise out of his humble beginnings and the raising up is carried out by the helper)

- premonitions and the helper/guide is present at the beginning of all biographies.

It is through these elements that we are convinced that the artist is not like other ordinary people, and, after all, the artist in any society can allow himself something more than others can. In this way the hero motif is connected to the artist myth.

http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol15/myth.htm