Any Experience with License for Storm Photos?

[Aaron Anderson]

Hi everybody, not sure if this is the right place for this or not so mods please feel free to move.

I wanted to get some advice on licensing photos. I have been contacted by a gift store owner up in Wichita that likes one of my photos and wants to make a postcard using it and asked if I license my photos. He asked specifically about the postcard but also mention they make magnets, coffee mugs, etc. I have never licensed any of my photos like this before and wanted to get some advice from the more experienced people on here. Is there a service most of you guys use or do you usually handle it yourself? What kind of amounts do you think are reasonable for something like this? Have any of you ever used the LicenseStream service? I came across that site when searching the web and it made things look pretty simple.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Aaron

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

There is no right or wrong answer for how much to charge for licensing, only answers that are better or worse for your pocketbook -- but one jumping off point would be the software "Fotoquote", which lets you plug in different useages and returns the average price most photographers report for a given useage. A cheaper way to find a starting point would be to go around to some of the stock sites like Getty and Corbis and see what they charge and work from there. All sorts of things come into play when negotiating a RM image license.

While you still have time, I'd also reccomend that you head over to Amazon and buy a book that has pre-fab licensing contracts in it. You will need a contract to sell the image, and you don't want to try to write your own.

Now, if this guy is just a mom and pop shop planning to run 20 cards and stick them in his own personal shop, then you may just want to pull a number out of your butt that you think will make you money but also make him a profit on the cards. You're probably talking beer money at that point. Just make sure in your contract you specify that the license is only for 20 cards or magnets or whatever. If this guy is representing a major card distributor, on the other hand, you need to do some reading and fast!

 

[Aaron Anderson]

Thanks so much Ryan that did help. I heard back from him and he wants to make 1000 postcards and 500 photo magnets so at least it will be more than beer money lol. I think I am going to use LicenseStream as it makes it really easy to build the license and send it to the client and they will also take care of billing. I believe they just keep 5% for a fee. It makes it pretty easy and straightforward but their suggested prices are a little out of whack. I'll check out those sites you mentioned and try to get a better idea of what to charge.

If anybody else has any thoughts please let me know as he is not going to start these until after xmas so I have some time to do some research. Thanks for all your help.

Aaron