Best Business Practices for Photographers [218]
Selling versus Licensing
If your estimates refer to "sales," or if you say, "I will sell you this photograph for X amount of money," or if it says anything other than "license" or "licensing," you are setting yourself up for a huge headache. When I hear someone pose the question, "How much would you sell the photo for?" I cringe and then I object. Dictionary.com defines the words "sell" and "license" as follows:
Sell: To exchange ownership for money or its equivalent; engage in selling.
License: Official or legal permission to do or own a specified thing.
So, while you may "sell" a print, such as an 8×10, there is no license included to reproduce that print. When you buy a poster (or artwork) for your wall, you are not also obtaining a license to reproduce it for other walls in your home or to sell to others.
Although this might come across as a given for most people, if you refer to the selling of a photograph, there is an inherent expectation that you no longer own it. Never, never refer to what you do as selling an image. The correct term that should be used at all times is licensing.
You should not see revenue from your stock photography as sales from stock, but rather as licensing income. There are a number of books that deal only with negotiating and how to become good at it; the book doesn't have to be one specifically geared toward photographers. I've outlined several such books at the end of this chapter.
As noted earlier regarding exclusivity, one of the most ambiguous areas in photographic licensing is the language. Simply put, what is a brochure, versus a sales-slick, versus a custom-published magazine, and what the hell is an advertorial anyway?
Licensing Language and Examples
PLUS licensing information becomes a part of the photo's metadata, (so too, it is intended to appear in estimates, contracts, invoices, purchase orders, and image database systems), so the uses are denoted by a number, termed by PLUS as a PGID#. For the term collateral, it returns the PGID# 10610000 0100. To get there, search for the ambiguous term collateral on the PLUS website (see Figure 26.1).
Figure 26.1
Such a search returns the result shown in Figure 26.2.
Figure 26.2
When you click on the Collateral link, the site returns what is now an unbiased body's definition of what has heretofore been a term that has been misinterpreted (almost always to the client's best advantage), yet now has an agreed-upon definition by both those licensing photography and the largest organizations involved in licensing photography, from Getty to Corbis, the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA), and many smaller organizations. Thus, a broad cross-section of the business has agreed to a set of terms, and this can only lead to good for all photo licensing down the line. It is important again to re-emphasize that this was not the photographic industry preparing definitions for the approval of other industries; all the industries collectively co-wrote these definitions.
The definition is:
Printed marketing and advertising pieces for use in direct request and personal contact, not in publications.
And PLUS provides additional information (see Figure 26.3):
Often reflects a larger broadcast, print, or direct mail campaign. May include leaflets, brochures, pamphlets, and business cards, among many other possible uses. However, collateral is often misunderstood to comprise an even longer list of uses. Listing individual uses may be more practical for most licensing situations.
Figure 26.3
And then a sample of the defined term in use:
Collateral is delivered directly to the consumer or dealers rather than via mass media.
Special attention should be paid to the last sentence of the "additional info" section, where it is noted:
However, collateral is often misunderstood