Crestock

I recently signed up with Crestock and submit 10 images, 7 of which were accepted. They seem to have fairly high standards, so I'm pleased I got in. I've been trying to get into iStockPhoto for about 3 months (and it's been very frustrating, but I'll save that for another post) so I was pleased. It didn't take long to get the images reviewed, either -- I think about 3 or 4 days.

Crestock offers you 20% of the sale price of the image until you've reached 100 sales, and then you get 30% per sale. Image prices are $5, $10 and $15 for small, medium and extra-large images. One of my images was uploaded at an original size of 4000x3000, and that size (12.0 Megapixels 4000 x 3000 pixels) is considered extra large (i.e. $15) and they also offer it downsized to medium (6.0 Megapixels or 2828 x 2121 pixels) or small (4.0 Megapixels 2309 x 1732 pixels). A couple of my images are 3200x2400, which is considered medium and they also offer it downsized to small (2309x1732). One good thing about most (if not all) of the stock sites is that you don't have to upload a whole slew of different sizes -- you upload the largest original you have and they'll downsize it when someone needs a smaller one. They also offer a dpi calculator for each image someone is looking at so they can see at 100 dpi what they could get (cm and inches) with the medium or small images, for example.

I've seen Crestock ads in magazines, so I know they're advertising and being an up-and-comer to the game, they're really pushing hard to get to the top of the stack. I'm pretty excited about being in there.

Click here if you'd like to sign up as a contributor or designer for Crestock.

My portfolio on Crestock.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock was my first foray into the world of microstock. They offer their clients a subscription based schedule where they pay X amount and then get to download Y amount of images per month. Contributors receive between $0.25 and $0.38 for each time someone downloads one of their images, depending on that contributor's sales previously. If you've made under $500, then you're at $0.25 per image and so on. Now, a quarter an image doesn't seem like a lot, but it adds up. Consider that a musician gets $0.17 for an album sale, and $0.25 doesn't sound so bad.

The main requirements to become a submitter for shutterstock is that you submit 10 initial images and have at least 7 of them accepted. It's a general consensus that the initial 10 are judged a little harsher than subsequent uploads, and while I won't point out specific portfolios, if you dig around some, the standards are not always terribly high of what they accept. Don't get me wrong, there's a tremendous amount of good content on there, but there's some "2 minute photoshop" (and worse) stuff on there as well.

After the initial review process, your goal is to upload at a steady pace and be active on the forums. While it hasn't been proven, it's been the longstanding theory (and I've found it to be true) that on shutterstock, in particular, you need to keep a relatively steady stream of uploads and post on the forum relatively often (i.e. do both at least a few times a week) to have success.

To date, I've made the majority of my microstock income from shutterstock, including a recent $9 sale from a short video clip (aka Footage) but I'll leave the Footage information for another post on another day.

If you'd like to sign up for shutterstock to be a contributor, or to buy images, click here.

Where I've been... and microstock.

I went from posting nearly every day to missing 6 months... a great deal has happened in that 6 months... first off, the holidays... then my wife having a beautiful baby girl, and then... well, anyone who's had a brand new baby in the house (especially with a 3 year old sibling) will tell, you get *real* busy those first few months...

I've all but given up on cafepress... despite a strong initial effort, my sales were disappointing, and then my best seller got nixed because it mentioned Chuck Norris (even though it was a direct quote from a presidential candidate) and that pretty much knocked the rest of the cafepress steam out of me... at least for now...

However... I have been spending my spare time being creative in the microstock world, as some of you may have noticed from the banners and images at the top and bottom of my blog. I've actually had a decent amount of success, IMHO. I've been doing it for right at 3 months and earned just under $70 between the 2 main sites that I'm working with, Shutterstock and Dreamstime.

Never heard of Microstock? Well, here's the idea in a nutshell... stock photography is when someone needs a picture of something for their website/billboard/whatever and they don't want to go out and hire a photographer to take a bunch of pictures... so they go to one of the several popular stock photography sites and they find the right picture and buy it for a small fee, anywhere from a few dollars on up, depending on how they plan to use it. But it's not just for photography, as you'll see from my images -- there's a great deal of non-photographs, in fact.

I'm probably going to change the focus of this blog to reflect my experience in the microstock world as well as tips and tricks for people interested in looking into the whole thing.

New character!

I've started on a new character... a baby. In this case, a very unhappy baby. Why is he so unhappy? Well, you'll just have to stay tuned and check back to find out :)

In any case, here's a small preview of him. He's not quite where I'd like him to be -- want to add a lock of hair and a couple of other things.. but I think he's coming nicely.

Google Base and Best Darn T-Shirts...

Today, I've uploaded my current set of cafepress products to Google Base (formerly known as FROOGLE -- can't imagine why that name didn't go over..) as well as Darn Fine Shirts. I've only added a few designs there currently to see how well it goes over. Apparently, people are encouraged to click on these links to help rank those shirts higher:

-- the Border Security Shirt

-- the iPoo shirt

-- the Gore Peace Prize shirt

-- the "explosion A" shirt

So if you liked (or haven't seen) any of those, please check them out and rank them on that site.

More to come....

Quick update.. and a poster

I've taken one of my 3D designs that lends itself to a poster and rendered it at poster-size (4600x7000) for what should be a very nice 23x35 poster. It's the design below, on a white background.



I've also spent some more time working on the blog and related items behind the scenes. And, as always, more designs coming up soon.

Sold another one... more character work.

Sold another t-shirt today, that makes 5 in all so far. They've all been the Chuck Norris quote by Mike Huckabee. I've really got to give it to Huckabee for doing that -- he's got some very savvy marketers (and very savvy tech people) working for him. He's got some good ideas about some things as well, but I digress...

I'm slightly concerned that after Christmas, sales will drop, but I suppose political humor is political humor all year 'round, so maybe they won't. I'm still working on some new character designs for the cafepress shop... still trying to figure out which direction I want to go in with them. Getting feedback from people on the shop (and the designs) always helps. I did spend a few hours wrestling with the html/css/tables of the shop yesterday, and added a link so that people can add the cafepress store to their del.icio.us with a handy image and link in the sidebar. Don't know if anyone else has done that -- they probably have, but I haven't seen it. I'm going to add Digg and Reddit and Facebook icons soon (and all the other ones people use) just to round it out. If you make things easy for people, they tend to be more likely to bookmark than if it's not as easy.

Anyway, I know a couple of people are reading this... I'm hoping over time that this blog becomes both a history/journal of my cafepress adventures, as well as a guide to anyone who is considering opening up a cafepress store. I'd really encourage you to do it -- you can open a basic store for free, and uploading a design is free, and getting some very decent graphic software for free is pretty easy in this day and age. I'll probably go into more detail about the tools I use, both graphical and website related, at a later date. I'm also going to post some statistics about what I've done and how many things have sold and all that... but it'll be more interesting later when there's more than a week's worth of data. But so far, I've been up for about 10 days as a premium store, I've got about a dozen designs, a variety of products (some designs are a good fit for some products, but not others) and I've sold 5 t-shirts, for a grand total of $5 profit towards my $35 membership (for 6 months). So, all in all, I'm pleased. It's a lot more work than I thought it would be -- the shop interface can be a bit clunky at times, but as I'm getting more used to it, I'm getting faster. I'm also optimizing keywords and things like that which hopefully will help people find me better. Anyway, I'm off.

New look for the shop and a new design...

With some help/advice from a graphic guru friend of mine, I've got my shop in slightly better shape. This is the old look:

And the new look:


I'm not 100% satisfied with the new look, but I think it's a lot better than the old one. I'll probably revise it to be somewhere between the two before it's all said and done.

In addition, I've added a new design to the abstract section and I've started on the first of a series of characters. I've also added a Zombie section and the first design there. Here's the abstract (on black and white backgrounds) and zombie hunter designs added.

New design, new products...

I've added a new design to the 3D/abstract section, and I've added a couple of new products to those items. I added tote bags and mousepads to all 3 of the existing designs, in addition to all the black t-shirts and the coffee mugs that were already there. I took the steins out -- I can't really imagine someone buying one of those with one of these bizarre graphics on it, though I think the mousepads could be a big hit if people can find them (which is always the trick).

Anyway, here's the new design:


More to come!

New designs, another sale, and Google found me!

Well, I made another sale of the ever-popular *grin* Mike Huckabee's Plan for Border Security (which is 2 words: Chuck Norris) -- I'll be more excited when one of my own designs sells one, but I'm happy to have sold a handful of these so far.

I also created a new category -- 3D/Abstract -- and will be adding various things to that... it will probably open up some new categories for me besides just t-shirts... I think mugs or maybe even clocks/notebooks or something could work, depending on the design. The tough part with this is getting it to take up the maximum space, but not cutting off the outer edges of the design (so there's a visible seam at the end) -- it'll get easier as I move to other designs, I think. Here are the two designs up in the abstract 3D section currently:


I think the abstract designs *could* do well, but people finding them is going to be the hard part... I could turn them into backgrounds and cross-promote, but I'm not sure... we'll see. Also, if anyone is interested, I'm using Cinema 4D R10.1 from Maxon to create and render these abstracts.

Also, my shop seems to now be listed in Google! Someone found me by looking for a shirt about having twins. They, of course, found my shirts about *not* having twins, but that's good nonetheless. It doesn't look like Google has updated their version of my store lately, but I suspect it won't take long.