Don’t Sell Your Work - License it!
Published by Matt Glover October 7th, 2006 in Copyright and Legalities
Whatever you do, don’t sell your work!
Well, you can if you want to, but I’ve found I can make significantly more money by selling a license to use my work instead of the work itself.
Selling your work outright usually means giving away your copyright. That’s always a dangerous move because it means you, as the artist, are cut out of any future earnings your work might make. Worse still, if you sell the copyright to some of your characters, and they then go on to be Simpson-like mega stars, you won’t earn a cent.
It is far better business sense to sell a license to use a particular image for a particular project. For instance, I recently sold a license to a client that allowed then to use a series of images in some promotional brochures. The terms of the license clearly stated that if the client wanted to use the images again then we would negotiate a re-usage fee. A couple of months later, they decided to use the same images in a series of posters, so we set a re-usage price and I ended up getting another $1000 or so without having to do any extra drawing. Had I sold them the copyright, they could have used the images as often as they liked, whenever they liked without paying anything.
It might sound like money grabbing to some, but it is standard practice in all areas of comercial art (music, movies etc). For example, if you want to use a song in an advertisement on TV, then you pay the artist a fee - even though they’ve probably already made some good money from CD sales, concerts and the like.
Licensing your work is simply good business practice. It maximises the earning potential of each image you create and helps keep your bank balance looking healthy.
Brilliant post!
Have you heard about Numly.com? They allow you to register your works online and return a verifiable Numly Number for proof of copyright submission. The original submission is assigned the parent Numly Number and subsequent copies of the original can also be registered with Numly and recieve unique Numly Numbers with the assigned licensee information and copyright issued on the copy. This allows an author or artist to track all of their licensed works and even transfer licensee information from one work to another. All Numly Numbers can be verified for authenticity online and tools exist to automatic the generation of Numly Numbers via WordPress, FireFox plugins, and Apple widgets.
I’ve not heard of it before. I notice it’s in beta still - have you used it at all?
Very interesting that you made this post… Just minutes ago I was discussing with another beginner artist who wasn’t aware of this license-selling thing. During our discussion, another artist (I assume a beginner too) chimed in and said that the rights should be given away for free, because it’s “common knowledge.”
I tried explaining to him otherwise, but now I can just send him over to read this blog entry.
Hi Greg!
If anyone ever says something like that to you again, give them a good hard wedgie. I can send instructions if you need them…