Re: [APML] Payment for astrophotos

[Jerry Lodriguss <jml@astropix.com>]

Chris,

I can sympathize.

Everyone wants something for free, or almost free. I also get a lot of 
people who don't reply when I quote a fee. But this is normal.

Because amateur astronomers have given their work away for free for so 
long, and because people can get Hubble images for free, that makes it 
tough to compete with "free" when we want to sell our pictures. The only 
leverage we have is the quality and uniqueness of our work, and that makes 
it have value.

I have a basic philosophy that I think is fair. If it is a commercial 
enterprise that wants to use our images, and they make money by selling 
them as content, then we should share in that profit.

A little while ago I had a story published in Astronomy magazine. It was 
one page. They paid $500 for the text. I had a Leonid storm picture 
published in the same issue that was run 2 pages, and they paid $25 for it.

I contacted David Eicher and told him that I wanted to start a discussion 
about the equity of this. It did not seem fair to the photographers. I 
suggested a payment schedule based on the space that a photo was used. 
Space rates are pretty much standard with professional magazines and 
publishers. Space rates (or per word rates) are also what is paid for 
words. This enables a publisher to have a fixed expense for producing x 
amount of pages of editorial content. The rate can obviously vary from 
publisher to publisher, but the concept is pretty much standard.

I explained to David that people buy the magazine for it's editorial and 
advertising content, and that the pictures were just as much part of the 
reason people buy it as for the words.

My suggestion did not meet with much acceptance. After telling me what a 
friend of photographers he was, he said that the magazine had a fixed 
budget for acquiring pictures, and that it was $25 per picture.  He also 
told me how they paid more for writing because writing was something 
completely different than photography, and that they paid different amounts 
for the writing based on how much work the editors had to do to the text to 
make it publishable. I thought based on that, that they should pay a lot 
for pictures because they require little work to publish. I also pointed 
out that astrophotography requires thousands of dollars worth of 
specialized equipment to produce the photographs, whereas writing did not.

A couple of days ago an assistant editor at Astronomy contacted me about 
publishing my winter hexagon photo. They said they normally paid $25 per 
picture and they wanted to use the picture a full page.

I explained that I would be happy to help them, but that now I was going to 
charge  them licensing fees for the use of my images based on a space rate 
and the circulation of the publication.

The assistant editor said she would talk to David Eicher and she came back 
and said that in this case they would be willing to go to $100.

Well, I referred them to the same page you use, which is what I use for all 
of my licensing deals, and I said that normal fees for full page use in a 
magazine with a circulation of 180,000 were in the range of $275 to $550, 
but that since this was a new concept to them, I would only charge them 
$200 for the use of the image at the size of a full page.

I reminded them that they recently paid me $500 for a full page of text.

Well, nope, they couldn't afford $200 for a picture. See ya later.

This is disappointing. Not because I didn't make the sale, but because of 
the lack of fairness and respect that photography is given by an editor who 
claims to be friendly to  photographers.

Everyone on this list should keep this in mind when they give their work 
away for free to commercial enterprises. They are in business to make 
money, and they are, in part, making their profit off of your work. Make 
sure you are fairly compensated.

Jerry



At 02:32 PM 11/1/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>This topic has been discussed here before but I just thought I'd share some
>recent experiences.
>Two different people have emailed me over the past two months wanting to use
>some of my images in a text book and regular book.  One being on the cover.
>I emailed both of these people back with a price and never heard from them
>again.  Both were very interested and indicated they really wanted to use
>the image, specified in their original email, but once I gave them a price,
>which was in the hundreds of dollars range, they vanished.  Not even a
>"that's too much, can you accept this" reply.  Nothing.  I based my price on
>the following licensing calculator:
>http://photographersindex.com/price-ed-calc.htm  I even came in on the low
>side.
>
>I refuse to give my images away for free.  My guess is that's what they were
>expecting......  Too much time and effort goes into them.


Astronomical photography: http://www.astropix.com




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