April comes round and here it is arriving with a very pleasant warm spell, so there have been a few opportunities to get out and about with my camera. As I have written in previous posts I have been very busy on two projects – completing the video of my son’s opera (which had to be done virtually due to the virus) and trying to get some traction on my print sales to build an alternative to stock images. The...
A new month and a new set of earnings. I have been doing this for so long, I could write these on autopilot! However, it looks as though this month is maintaining a more positive direction in terms of earnings with the total ending up (without EyeEM who are late for some reason) at a very pleasing $3274. Well up on January and February and about $110 up on earnings in March 2020. The full historic graph is here: I...
I’m still at this! And I did manage to get one sale this month, although it was only a coffee mug! I explained my plans in a post last month to really boost my presence on the major social media sites. I’ve been keeping this up with daily posts (using Buffer) to Instagram, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter but when I came to Pinterest, I came up against a major issue – I had no idea how that site worked. I...
As the month has progressed, I’ve been thinking of what new images I can create and the recent passage of the American Plan Rescue Act of 2021 (the new stimulus package) gave me a few ideas. Yes, I know this is a US thing, but it is something that can be illustrated wherever you live with a little bit of creative Photoshop work. I created a US Treasury check for the first stimulus package last year and the images of...
I’ve achieved something today that I should be proud of, but with all the unease about what Shutterstock are doing for contributors (or should I say doing to them), it all feels just a little jaded. But anyway, here is a snapshot of my contributor page on Shutterstock just now: I have a suspicion that the next $100,000 will take a much longer time that the first!
Looking at my sales in late January and now February, I am just not seeing any trends or directions – images are selling, but they are very random and coming from my entire portfolio, rather than any particular subject or concept. On one level that is good – it shows that I have built a portfolio that has enough different subjects to continue to meet demands, but on the other, it is becoming hard to spot those new opportunities. As...
Always an interesting month – just 28 days, but it follows a usually slow start in January. This month followed that pattern with a growth from January, a growth over Feb 2020, but still a middle of the pack sort of performance. The final score was a total of $2812 for the month. This is all becoming very stable (which is good), but the growth of years gone by seems to have stopped. Not surprisingly, bearing in mind the pressure...
OK, you have uploaded your best work to your favorite Print on Demand site and are sitting waiting for sales – where are they? How long do you have to wait? I’ve been through those anxious days and although I am far from satisfied in my results, I am starting to see a little progress. My latest sale came last week with a framed 10 x 7.5 inch print of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington DC: I’m following a...
I’ve written about this a few times, the most recent being my attempts to push my images higher up the search order on Fine Art America. I don’t know if that made the difference, but I did sell two images at the end of January. This one as a 72 inch wide print: And then this one as a coffee mug: OK, I thought – that was interesting – perhaps I should continue to add images and do a bit...
I’ve been very slow this year on creating my own images (due to a focus on the Opera video and updating my stock presentation), but I have managed to add a few new images to try to capture the latest trends. As I mentioned last month, there is a big growing demand and interest in e-sports and I did talk about a very popular drink among gamers called GFuel and my order finally arrived a week or so back. So...
