images - rights for one-time use

How much should I charge?

[HarryM]

I have been approached by someone who wants to use two of the images from my website in a forthcoming book relating to the history of a Middle-Eastern State, but as I have never done this before I am unsure how to price them.

I would like to get this right, not only for this sale, but also as a standard price list on the site. The charges therefore have to be competitive and reflect the quality of the images.

I have seen various stock photo sites with a wide variety of prices. However these photos were taken by professionals while my images are based on photographic slides taken many years ago which have been cropped and tweaked in Photoshop. On the plus side they are of historic interest.

Any suggestions how I should price them? I can supply jpegs in a variety of qualities.

[rogerd]

Pricing images is tough, HarryM. Often it seems there's no rhyme or reason why one image sells for hundreds of dollars while another is free. Looking at stock photography, for example, sites like Getty get hundred of dollars for a photo, while istockphoto gets a buck or so. Comstock sells a disk with a hundred images for a few hundred dollars, while you can find retail CD sets with 500,000 images for twenty dollars. Of course, there may be major differences in quality, exclusivity, etc. Sometimes, though, it's hard to see the difference between a 50-cent and $500 image.

So, I'd advise you to try to estimate what the market will bear for your images. Are they unique enough, or will any cheap clip art/stock photo compilation have alternatives? Try to gauge the threshold of pain, beyond which your customers will shop around for cheaper alternatives.

The other factor to look at is the budget of the customer. Images going into a corporate annual report or a Fortune 500 web site can command a higher price than those used on a personal website or the weekly newsletter of a small business. Good luck!

[HarryM]

Thanks rogerd,

You explained the situation admirably.

[Shannon Moore]

HarryM,

You may want to look into a commercial application called FotoQuote, which is marketed specifically for photographers selling their work as stock photography. It helps provide a ballpark range of what pricing to quote, based on factors such as publication type (eg. international magazine versus corporate annual report), circulation and size of photo, among other things. It may give you a better idea of where your work falls in the pricing mix, or give you more confidence to bump your prices up and experiment.