Selling assignment photography

Spent much of the day on a course at the Association of Photographers - a lot of demand with 20 there - far more than I thought. I was relieved not to be the oldest there!

There was lots about cold calling, about which I learned a lot, and about dealing with a 'go see' about which I learned less but when I'm in front of someone I'm rather more confident anyway.

The main points for me were:

• Use email to get something (eg image & link to website) in front of people
• That email's then referred to in a follow up call
• The statistics may seem loaded against (know what they are!) but this is moving into territory with much higher potential gains
• Every failed call is a statistical necessity to earns you ££££'s (always look on the bright side......)
  
• The pay for editorial shooting is rubbish!
  

There was a suggestion that in the event of someone requesting to unsubscribe then one should send some written material (eg a card) - I have not quite worked that idea out yet.

After the session I met a potential assistant who it turns out has telesales experience. Nice unassuming guy, with great enthusiasm. And cool too....

Just how well is Alamy doing?

If you look at photoconnect.net then you will see that I sell images through Alamy and some of the images on photoconnect carry a link straight through to Alamy where buyers can download images and pay.

I am not sure if I've ever sold an image through this route because there is no way of tracking. However I have been looking at my overall sales through Alamy to see how things are progressing there. The only sensible way of doing this is not to look month on month (because monthly figures fluctuate so much) but to measure over a period - in my case I look at a rolling 6 month sales pattern and compare these sales with the number of images estimated to be online at the end of the six month period. I then translate that figure into $ invoiced sales per year (gross).

Before June 2004 with fewer images online it's difficult to pick up anything useful but since then this is what I see:

6/2004 800 images $3.16 per image per year
9/2004 900 images $2.83 per image per year
12/2004 1000 images $2.44 per image per year
3/2005 1100 images $3.16 per image per year5
6/2005 1200 images $2.99 per image per year
9/2005 1300 images $3.76 per image per year
12/2005 1400 images $4.87 per image per year
3/2006 1600 images $4.60 per image per year
6/2006 1800 images $5.81 per image per year
9/2006 2000 images $5.58 per image per year

The important thing is that there is a growing trend, which makes me feel happy because I appear to be good at getting the right sort of images to Alamy and, importantly, am getting better at doing so.

It's worth looking at this to this point because of the change in the way the Alamy search engine works. I always used to be in the bottom of the 3 tiers of photographers results as shown up in searches. Now I am gratified to find my images near the top, even for my 'specialist' collections where I have hundreds of images online.

When my images were at the back of the search results they did not get to be seen often but when they did I guess that they generated above average views and sales. Hopefully now they will be seen more often with an impact on my sales per image per year. We will see.