Make money by selling photos
Now, I remember googling this when I was broke and desperate. I wanted instant money and outside of selling nudes selling your images for instant cash is pretty thin on the ground, unless you’ve got a huge following who are really into buying prints, in which case it’s a pretty good suggestion.
But to make consistent money by selling your images is a better long term plan for either a side hustle income, passive income or to become your full time income like I do.
Selling photographs isn’t ‘easy’
There are a ton of stock photography websites out there but the main runners are:
Getty Images/Shutterstock - Now basically micro-stock and the main reason I left because the money was so rubbish.
Alamy - Not great payout AND anyone can sign up, you have to have either a bloody good niche or millions of photos on there to get a good income going. I have a small selection on there of my rejections from other agencies, I’ve had a small stream of income from them over the years, around £200-£1000 per year, which for not doing anything is pretty good in my books.
Stocksy - I love stocksy and I’m not even a contributor there! It’s different and high class quality. They offer a good royalty rate too but all their images are royalty free so they can be bought over and over again which is fine if you look at their work and collections. It would be the place I would go too.
As most of you know, I specialise in book cover photography, it’s better for the more fine art, angsty photographers. If you do upbeat, happy very trendy images head to Stocksy, you’d sell more. But however you do more dark, fine art photography then book covers is something you’d probably want to consider. They have a very good royalty rate and 99% of the photographs are rights managed, meaning you can’t put the images anywhere else but you get much better money overall for them. For me it was a no brainer of course!
So if you’re thinking, “Oh book covers is something I definitely want to do!” feel free to head over to my course. You might be thinking you just want to upload your photographs and off you go, but creating images for book covers is harder than it sounds. Lot’s of people who were already on this career path have taken my course because they weren’t getting many sales if any at all, despite being very good photographers! The information I provide is ALL my experience in one go, so you can avoid downfalls, common mistakes, trends and more than anything how to stay productive!
