Calling pulykamell and any other dopers with experience in licensing photos!
I’m currently negotiating with a few authors who wish to use my photos to illustrate their stories. I’ve licensed other photos to traditional print publications such as calendars and magazines but these authors wish to sell their works as e-books and I’m at a loss as to what terms and prices would be considered fair for such usage.
I understand that they’re unknowns and don’t expect to make much money so I’m willing to be quite flexible and take a nominal fee but I don’t want to seem too cheap either. Of course, as a voracious reader, part of my terms would be freebie copies of their books ;). In case anybody’s interested, the photos in question are: Here and Here
Any specific suggestions or even general guidelines would be helpful.
How about going to Getty or similar and see what they charge for something similar? I had to buy an image for a book recently and remember that their terms for such things were very favourable compared to commercial advertising and the like. It might at least give you a starting point.
Or do you have some kind of professional photographer’s association in the US who could advise you? Here in the UK, most prof. photographers are members of the Association of Photographers who issue guidelines on things like licensing/usage fees. They might give you some free advise?
This is actually quite a difficult question for me to answer.
When I charge “nominal” fees, it’s something like $50 or $100. I have no experience in the ebook market, so I can’t really give advice on what to charge. My instinct would be the $50-$200 range, limiting the usage of the photos to the ebooks and nothing else (and I probably underestimate the market price for these sorts of things). If these books get to print, there’s a separate charge for those.
Then again, royalty-free imagery out there is cheap as dirt. If they don’t need your images, they can probably get them from a variety of sources for just a couple bucks. Oh, solid pictures, BTW. Great attention to toning.
Given that the photos are already on the web, why should licensing them for use in an ebook present issues any different than for print? Ebook publication is not going to make them any easier to steal.
I thought the issue was that Hodge knew how to price them for print publication, but was not sure about about ebooks, and the only reason I could think of why ebooks might present a different issue was that it might make make them easier to steal (if they were not already on the open web). Maybe I misunderstood, however. Nevermind.
SanVito, I’m not a pro. Photography is just a sideline that provides me with occasional pocket money. I’ve actually been invited to submit a number of photos to Getty Images through their flickr invitation program so I’m looking into taking them up on their offer.
pulykamell, I think $50 sounds reasonable although that’s lower than anything I’ve charged for print publication. I’ll definitely include a clause insisting on more if they want to go to print. My biggest score was $200 for exclusive use for a run of christmas cards for 1 year with an option of another $200 for another year (which they took :)). But those kinds of prices would definitely scare both of them away. Thanks for the complement, BTW. I spend a lot of time in post-processing but I still try to keep them natural looking. I hate the garish look of a lot of HDR photography.
njtt, I’m not overly concerned about theft. As you said, the photos are already online and are licensed creative commons for non-commercial use but I’ve no doubt that some people have abused that license.
My thinking is that, for print publications, authors or publishers probably already have an expected revenue stream (unless they’re self-publishing and then they probably have money to burn) so they should pay market rates for the use of my photos. However, with e-books, the barriers to publishing are much lower and so are expected revenues.
Basically, I don’t want to price myself out of a few bucks, but I don’t want to be taken advantage of, either.