 In my last article I left you waiting to learn of any response I would receive from the operations staff at Blenheim Palace. I have not yet received a response, and I am beginning to think I might never receive one. I have come to learn that my need to ask for help in selling something to a party is not always matched by a need on that party’s part to assist me. However, I will wait patiently for another week. While I am doing that I will start thinking about who else might be a prospective user of the image.
Now I have to correct a mistake that I made in the previous article when I wrote: While waiting, I will give some thought to how this photograph might end up on a poster. I don’t know where my head was at when I wrote that line, but I meant to write that the image might end up in an ad. It already has been licensed for use as a poster. So, since I’ll be waiting another week for the Palace guard to respond to my email, I thought I’d share how I sold it as a poster.
The first step was to see the potential for it to be on a poster. That kind of use requires that the image either be very artistic or conceptual. In the case of my photograph, I thought the concept for a poster would possibly be built around the concept of light at the end of a tunnel. Of course there is no tunnel, but there is light at the end. I can up with this tag line: Success requires reaching the light at the end of your passage, and that you not be distracted by the light along the way.
The second step was to make the image look a like a poster. That was done in Photoshop by adding a black border to the image, and then by adding the tag line in a layer. I also took the time to remove the two iron rods that protruded from the foreground arch’s upper left side. You can clearly see them in the copy of the photo published with the first article in this series. With that done, proper copyright notice and other data was added to the IPTC data, and the image was saved as both a full size Tiff at 300 dpi and as a medium quality jpeg at 72dpi. It is the latter that was sent to prospective poster publishers. Here is what the mock up of a poster looked like.
 The third step was to locate poster publishers. I searched Google and came up with hundreds of hits to sort through, and from that dozens of Websites to visit. Through that process, I came up with seven companies that looked like good prospects. They were in the USA, Canada, and Europe. I obtained the contact information for sending the posters either from the Websites themselves or by emailing the publisher and asking for the right contact. Once I had the contact I was ready to go to step four.
Step four simply requires sending a copy of the mock up that I made in Photoshop to the contact with an email. The email was short and sweet.
I have attached a mock up of a poster that I created with your company in mind. I hope you will have some interest in publishing it. If so, I can be reached by referring to my contact information below. If I do not hear from you within two weeks, I will assume you have no interest, and I’ll feel free make this offer to other companies. Thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day to consider my offering.
Then the first publisher on the list was sent the mock up. I went through three companies before one expressed an interest. After some email correspondence, I sold the exclusive poster rights to the publisher, which will be enhancing my concept as it sees fit. The poster is scheduled to be released a part of its 2008 line up. Poster publishers have publication cycles, and there can be quite a wait to get into their publishing schedule. Some work as much a three years out. I have not yet seen a version of the poster in the form the publisher will market it. I might have to wait more months to see that.
What was the deal? I granted exclusive poster rights in print media with an unrestricted right to use the poster to promote sale of the poster. The exclusive rights expire five years after the year of first publication. I will receive a 6% royalty on the list price (to be about $30) and I received an advance of $1000 against future royalties. I had to negotiate very, very, very hard for that advance. I kept repeating that 2008 was a long time away from today when it comes to my cash flow. Eventually they gave in rather than listen to a broken record.
Patience and resolve are required to market an image for a specific use by a specific company. But it can pay off because word “specific” often results in rights protected sales, and those usually pay enough money to make it worthwhile. What might I earn on the poster sales at 6%. The company generally sells between five of any poster it publishes. Let’s see: $1.80 X 5,000 ….. well you can do the math.
(c) 2006 Richard Weisgrau [contact] [bio]
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All About Business 
