Most artists consider the revenue from the sale of an original work ends there. In other words, once the product is sold you have received as much revenue as you will ever get for it. Illustrator Lisa Rotenberg takes a very difference view. She continues to derive royalty income from works that are sold and long gone. She considers a painting just raw material that can yield a source of income indefinitely.
Her approach to generating on-going royalties is to register her work with online firms that sell stock illustrations. These online firms generally sell images to organizations, vs individuals, who want to include them in print advertising, displays, websites, brochures, greeting cards and so on. Charges for the use of these images vary, depending on the application, the number of countries where the image will be used, the duration of use, and the industry. For example a painting of an orchid, for use in a movie circulated on 1 continent cost $849 on one site. A painting of a bird’s nest, used for product packaging for 5 years in 1 country would cost $1,213. Sales revenue is often shared equally between the artist and the marketing company. Examples of these companies are Stock Illustrations, Illustration Works, and Illustration Source
. Lisa has been selling her illustrations this way since 2002.
Because customers of these services are often looking for something specific, Lisa will add many relevant tags to the illustrations so that her work will be found in the search facility of the sites. If fact, she will often create art for a particularly popular keyword, such as “Christmas” or ”twitter” (see illustration on right), and sets of illustrations for keywords groups such as the “alphabet” or “zodiac signs”.
In addition Lisa gets commissons when people use her images in greeting cards (see Greeting Card Universe) and in gift-ware (see Cafe Press).
According to Lisa, you continue to have rights to sell the image after the painting is sold. One customer said he did not want to see an image of his work showing up anywhere else. Lisa accepted the request provided that he pay double for the original painting. He agreed. In this case Lisa acknowledged this limitation on the back of the original work.
Fine art painters can use a similar approach and generate a revenue stream by offering their works on sites that print giclees from a digital image.
P.S. Lisa also sells coffee and uses her art on the packaging. See www.rocketfuelcoffee.com.
