Last week I had an experience that reminded me
just how cunning you have to be in this business to do really well. If you’re
expecting to have your footage or photos accepted just because they’re well
shot, well lit and well composed…go to the back of the class.
Having not submitted any footage for a long time,
I sent a very small batch of HD clips from a recent shoot in Morocco to a
stock agency to see if they would be interested in licensing them. And if so, maybe
they’d like to license a much larger batch of clips from the same shoot.
The clips were very well filmed, of a commercial nature
(I thought) and I was confident that I would be asked to send over the whole
batch immediately. I thought to myself – it’s cool footage, Morocco is hip, so it’ll sell.
Wrong.
I received a nice email telling me that the agency
already had a large selection of HD Morocco clips that really didn’t sell very
often, so there was no sense in accepting mine as well. A simple lesson was learned
- I hadn’t done my research.
Keep up to date by regularly looking at sites like
Pond5, Fotolia, Revostock and Shutterstock to see what
they already have lots of, and to identify gaps you can fill. An even easier
way to do your research is to go to Shotspy (www.shotspy.com)
to compare a large number of sites at the same time….genius.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking
‘good’ always sells. It’s ‘relevant’ that always sells.
