His answer?
Single use for copying to create a single art work in some other medium: $500.
That sort of intimidated me. Was any image I created worth that kind of money? Could any poor, well-intentioned recreational oil painter expect to have to fork up that much money. Would it be wiser to charge less and get the license than quote sufficiently high that the artist just went ahead and copied the piece and hoped to not get caught?
How else could one arrange a fee for this type of usage?
OK. There's comping. How much do people tack on to licenses for the comping that a designer "accidentally" admits s/he already did? $100?
I've not yet been forced to look in Fotoquote for that number but I recently got $800 for a print run of 3000 on the cover of a non-profit's annual report. That was a bit higher than Fotoquote but they fell in love with the photo and had gone ahead and had their printer scan from a print on one of my cards and begin to lay out the cover - comping. The license was for one time NA print use and web use for one year, with a mutual link between my site and theirs.
Then there's catching someone red handed. Someone bought one of my notecards of the sign on the front of their guest house. They charge $125/night on weeknights, $150/night on weekends - that's per bed. Their guest house holds 8-10 people. It's mostly only good in the summer and pretty empty in Dec./Jan./Feb., although they do weddings and other big events. They're right on the water in a lobstering village - sort of mixed picturesque and working rural port.
Retroactively I charged them $100 for the license that they, ahem, neglected to arrange for before the usage. But that was three years ago.
Then there's the book market where some portion of the income comes from a percentage of the sale/s of the original piece and copies thereof. 15%? I think it's around that, but there's a payment upfront.
So what would I quote now?
Well, just what's the nature of the usage? Is the person enquiring just wanting to try out copying my photograph for fun, or will that person go so far as to pretend that that's all they want to do? Or is that seriously all they want to do.
Alternatively, are they wishing to create their own piece and have a gallery they've ben affiliated with for 20 years market it for $1500?
Perhaps they're working up a collage of pieces and mine will be a small part. I once licenced a reuse of one of my images to Modern Postcard for, they claimed, a single ad in a single mag. It was to appear along with 11 other postcard images - about thumbnail size. They offered $50 but rapidly agreed to a full print run. Was that a reasonable amount for that usage? At that point, five years ago, I knew just enough to insist on more than their initial offer. Now, if mine had been the only image I wouldn't have traded for anything less than 10 complete custom print runs.
Would my possible licensee put $100 on the table and honestly cough up the balance to 10% of their income from sale of the original? Would they tell me when they had a print run of 300 iris prints done of the painting and sold each of those, framed, for a couple hundred? I once had a request from a watercolorist to make a piece based on an image I took for the paper. The image belonged to the paper, of course, because I was an employee. The artist made a pretty neat realization of the image and invited me to the opening. The paper charged her $5 for the b&w print I made in the paper's darkroom for her. The paper paid me to make the print in its darkroom.
I was kinda pissed when she didn't even offer me a copy of the iris print that she had made from her watercolor. But I chickened out on bringing it up with her. It wasn't my image, after all. And I was damned if I was going to earn money for the paper!
But she did such a nice job that I'd really like a copy of that watercolor.
So, Bobberty, what do you think? -- Emily L. Ferguson elf@cape.com 508-563-6822 New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography Beetle cats on the web at: http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf http://www.beetlecat.org/store.html#yrbook
