Tips for selling landscape photos?

[Tosca]

[font color=\'#000000\']Didger , get the book call photo grapher's market..
You will get all the information the you need....
Good luck







Blas[/font]

[Image Northwest]

[font color=\'#000000\']Marketing and selling your own work takes as much skill and time as taking good pictures.  First thing, identify what kind of pictures you like to take.  Then identify the markets.  You'll find that whatever you do, it will be competitive, so work with only your best work.  If you like to write and can put together a magazine article, so much the better.  It give the editor the whole package.  If you want to sell prints to the general public, you are going to have to go to them.  One of the best ways is to sell your work at art shows.  There's plenty of shows all across the country.  Just find the ones that fit your style.  If you want to work with a stock agency, then you really need to produce the wares.  They want continual flow of new pictures.  Something that not all of us can produce. You might develop a web site. although everyone seems to have one, and they all have pictures available for sale, I find that web sites are more useful as a portfolio of your work.  Print out busniess cards, show your pictures in art walks, contact art shops and ask if they will display your work.  The possibilities are unlimited, but one thing is for sure, marketing and selling takes a lot of work, and many of the aspects I can't rate very high on the funometer.

However, selling pictures is gratifying, knowing that someone likes one of your pictures enough to bring it home and hang on the wall.  

There are all kinds of books on the subject as well as websites, including this one, that have tons of information.  Good luck. [/font]

[didger]

[font color=\'#000000\']Advance apology if this is deemed too crass a topic, but the subject title is clear enough and clicking is voluntary, right?

I've had SLR's for about 45 years and taken thousands of pictures on several continents and sold a few for publication and once a collection to Corel for a stock photography CD.  However, my marketing efforts so far have been casual minus at best and for the past few years I haven't gotten out to take pictures either.

I've just started putting together a fabulous Eos 1ds based system and I imagine by the time the dust settles I'll be edging close to $10K spent and then there's the issue of traveling expenses for shooting.  I think I need to get a little more serious about selling pictures, but I barely have any clue how to go about it.  I don't want to branch into commercial photography (weddings, product shots, etc.) and I don't really want to get into having prints made and personally selling them either.

Years ago I sent out demo CD's of a bunch of my pictures to several stock photography companies and that resulted in pretty favorable responses and the sale to Corel.  But soon afterward my car got totalled in a wreck on the way home from Zion and I haven't done any photography since then and also not followed up with stock photography marketing efforts.  I figure once I have a bunch more pictures with the new outfit, I'll make a much more intensive effort sending material to all the stock photo places.

What are some other good marketing venues?  I really don't have a clue.  How do you I about finding folks that might want to buy publication rights to some of my pictures?[/font]

[didger]

[font color=\'#000000\']Thanks for the tip.  I went right to Amazon.com to look the book up, but since it's something that comes out with a new edition every year, I'll wait til 2005.  I'll be lucky to make enough time to get out shooting a lot this year anyway.

While at amazon.com I noticed that there's another book called SellPhotos.com, which shows you how to set up your own on line stock photography business.  I've occasionally thought about this idea in the past, and now that fast internet connections are so cheap and server space is also cheap, this is now pretty feasible, but I imagine the marketing effort to get potential customers to ever find you must be quite challenging.  Any of you ever tried this?  Is it worth it just to sell your own landscape photos this way?  Sure would be cool if it could be made to work.[/font]

[didger]

[font color=\'#000000\']

but one thing is for sure, marketing and selling takes a lot of work, and many of the aspects I can't rate very high on the funometer.

Hey, you and I must have the same brand of funometer calibrated just the same way.  I did craft fairs for decades, first with jewelry, then with cassette tapes of my own music.  Presently my main income is didgeridoos and Native American style flutes of my own design that I have made in India.  I can survive with the income from this without any personal sales involvement, but the expenses for photography traveling will mean making some extra bux.  I'm sure I can make more money selling my CD's and musical instruments retail than selling my pictures, but really, the older I get the less eager I am to do much selling personally.  I'll try to focus the photography marketing more on publication than me on the road with a van load of prints.[/font]