Sales in September 2014

As usual, I’ve been a bit slow in posting – this time because of a 3 week trip to Europe including a cruise down the Danube (photos still in development…). As a result, I have only just updated my records of sales for last month. As it turned out, the month of September was OK – again, not great, but I ended the month with $2300. I’m sure a lot of you will think that “if, only…”, but I’ve noticed that Shutterstock seems to have hit a plateau for me – just less than $1000 this month, which is where I was 12 months ago, even though I have added about 1000 images over the past year to Shutterstock. I’m now at an average of 5000-6000 images on most of the sites. I’ve given up with new uploads to Fotolia, YayMicro and a few of the smaller sites as the effort/reward equation was not enough, but it is disappointing to see Shutterstock get stuck in a rut. Alamy was not good this month after $400 of sales in August – this month just $62. iStock seems to be working out OK for me. I upload images in batches when I have some spare time, and so I have increased my portfolio there to 4100, and in August I earned $445, September $294. A lot of this is turning out to be their partner program, but it is nicely boosting my income. Nothing, I’m afraid on my own stock site BackyardStockPhotos unfortunately. I think at some stage I must reconsider what to do with that site as it is costing me around $40 a month in the dedicated hosting I put in place for it. A shame, as a self run site seemed to have promise. Still, no need to make rash judgments yet!

Fine Art America turned out nicely – $51.70 profit from a sale in September and I’ve just seen a new one for $190 in October. I’ll post about that separately.

Still no loss of enthusiasm though – I take pictures because I enjoy it, and getting $25K a year from my efforts is still pretty nice.

Happy Shooting…