How To Sell Pictures

Almost everyone has a digital camera.  Wouldn't it be a good idea to make money out of this?  This thought has occurred to most photographers, amateurs and hobbyists alike.  The selling is not a problem because there are lots of ways to sell pictures.  It's the buying which is the problem.

Loosely, there are several ways of selling pictures.  One way it to bundle your pictures and sell them as CD compilations.  If you have a set of pictures which you think people would buy, you package them and copy them to a CD, and then market the CDs from your website.  The website could be a portfolio showcase of your pictures, with several albums as samples of the high-resolution pictures in the CD. 

The website would also serve as the front-end of your sales and marketing, complete with shopping cart and options for payment.

One other way to sell pictures would be as prints.  Again, from your own website, you can have an option for the buyer to order prints in various sizes and media.  For instance, if the pictures were of art pieces, you might consider printing on canvas.  Or you can print on archival paper with non-fugitive (non-fading) ink.

Increasingly, one option is to sign up with a stock photo website.  A stock photo website would be the middleman to selling the picture to interested parties.  An advantage of such a site is that they have criteria for submissions and you would know if your work is acceptable to them.  In this way, you can develop your photography skills as well.

Click Here To Learn How To Take Pictures That Sell

Some people think that owning a camera automatically means that they will take good pictures, or that the pictures will be good enough to sell.  This may or may not be true but in stock photography, this is not a problem as the industry started with photo discards from journalism assignments. 

And besides, this is a numbers game:  the more pictures a photographer has in stock, the greater the chances from him earning because somebody picked up his picture.  For a stock photographer, having 100,000 pictures in stock means that he’d probably earn more than 10 times compared  to having only 10,000 pictures.

However, selling pictures is still very much dependent on what the buyer or buyers want.  And if an amateur or hobbyist (no matter how talented) were to become successful in selling pictures, he still needs to know the market.

What pictures will sell?  What pictures do buyers want?  Who are the buyers?  These are questions the photographer has to ask in order to understand what pictures to take.

The buyers, for the most part are ad agencies, or public relations firms or web site owners, or magazines.  These groups have their own independent and varied needs.  What is common among them is that they require good quality pictures. 

Quality pictures are sharp, well-lit high-resolution pictures. The pictures are not grainy, are without any artifacts, and taken with the use of a good quality (high-end) camera.  If a picture is not good enough, these would be rejected by the micro-stock web site. 

For a beginner, there will be lots of rejection before you can sell your pictures.  It is important to learn from the rejection and make the next picture that much better.

Click Here To Learn How To Sell Your Pictures