Stock Photography FAQ

What disadvantages are there for photographers selling their images to clip-photo disk publishers?

Most photographers who have sold-out all their rights to images that appear on these clip-photo CDs have claimed justification for the practice because they only sold those images that were rejected from their stock libraries.  They were willing to settle for sharing a 5-8% royalty of the sales of each disk for exclusive rights, which usually only netted themselves an average of 1-2¢ an image, because it amounted to more than they thought they could have earned from selling the images themselves (Weisgrau, 1992). This behavior can be largely attributed to a lack of communication in the stock photography industry by those who seem more interested in protecting their own immediate business interests than protecting the industry as a whole.