Licensing Art & Photography 101: The Most Comprehensive Guide to Licensing in the Industry

By Michael R. Woodward

A must-read for anyone entering the art licensing industry, the Ultimate Handbook for Artists and Photographers will take you step by step through the complicated licensing process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543928976

Book preview

LICENSING ART & PHOTOGRAPHY 101

New E-book edition fully updated with many new sections

This is a MUST HAVE guide for anyone entering the Licensing Industry.

The author takes you step by step through the process of licensing; from copyright control, record keeping, product categories, approaching clients, creating presentations that work, as well as valuable information about what to charge in terms of advances and royalty rates. The appendix includes many useful contacts: trade shows, manufacturers and publishers, trade publications and associations, trend information, list of licensing agents and much more.

New section includes several, detailed How To articles on producing work for products. Tips and tricks from successful professionals.

About the author

Michael R. Woodward is an industry Veteran of over 40 years initially running a successful stock agency and major photographic advertising studio. He then started the very first Art Licensing Agency in Europe in 1979.

His experience and knowledge of the industry is legendary. He continues to run Out of the Blue Licensing from his offices in Florida, Panama and Portugal. He also acts as a consultant to artists and photographers.

www.ootblicensing.com

First E-book edition 2018

© The Fitzcarraldo Trust

Author, Michael R. Woodward

President ,Out of the Blue Licensing

www.ootblicensing.com

www.artlicensing101.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Disclaimer: While the author has made every reasonable attempt to obtain accurate information and verify same, occasional address and telephone number changes are inevitable, as well as other discrepancies. We assume no liability for errors or omissions in editorial listings. Should you discover any changes, please write to the author so that corrections may be made in future publications.

ISBN: 978-1-54392-897-6 (ebook)

Table of Contents

LICENSING ART & PHOTOGRAPHY 101

About the author

Introduction

Chapter 1 An Introduction to Copyright

Chapter 2 Getting Organized

Chapter 3 The Licensing Industry

Chapter 4 The Licensing Marketplace

Chapter 5 The Greetings Card Market

Chapter 6 Stationery, Gift, Home Accessories and additional Products

Chapter 7 Fine Art Publishing: Including Mass Market, Direct Retail and Hospitality

Chapter 8 Marketing Yourself

Chapter 9 The Art of Licensing Art

Chapter 10 Trends, Styles and What Kinds of Work to Produce.

Chapter 11 Trade Shows

Chapter 12 Art Licensing in Overseas Markets

Chapter 13 Practical Guidelines for Licensing a Brand:

Chapter 14 Trademarks

Chapter 15 Licensing Agents

Chapter 16 Self Publishing

Chapter 17 Book Keeping – Tax, Insurance, Record Keeping

Chapter 18 Final thoughts about the licensing industry

APPENDIX

Art Shows

Copyright Basics

LIMA

Fine Art Publishers in North America

GCA UK 2014

GCA Artists Guidelines

Licensing Agents

Useful Licensing Industry Associations and Organizations

(Sample) Artist Licensing Agreement

Stationery Publishers

Greetings Card Publishers

Calendar Publishers

Trade Show Artist Guidelines:

Trade Magazines of Interest

Trade Shows

TESTIMONIALS

Introduction

Becoming a Licensing Professional

By purchasing this handbook you have made the first step towards increasing your income from the art and photography you produce. I will endeavor to equip you with all the necessary information and knowledge, to allow you to earn a better living from your illustrations, paintings or photographs.

One thing must be said right at the outset - while I have personally licensed over $600 million worth of retail product, there is no guarantee of success, unless you are producing work to a good commercial standard. This is one aspect I have no control over, although I will attempt to guide you on how to assess what to produce and what not to produce.

There is one fact we cannot escape from and that is I have no control over your actual talent. Suffice it to say that you need to ensure you continually strive to improve your techniques and develop your styles. Being versatile in this day and age is essential, as styles change and it is an ever changing market. Trends come in and then they fade away. What’s trending has become the new norm whether you like it or not, so be aware of the current, and more importantly, the future trends.

The fact that you have taken the trouble to purchase this book is a certain indication that you are determined to learn about the licensing industry, and I will do my best to leave you with enough expertise to present your work with confidence to publishers and manufacturers around the world.

To succeed you need 100% determination and perseverance, and the ability to never give up in order to succeed. This goes for most other things in life as well. I have represented artists who have earned $3,000 one year and $50,000 the next, so there are no hard and fast rules to achieve success. You must learn to produce work that has a market. I am therefore addressing the businessman or woman in each of you so that you can make a business out of your ‘art’.

If you are a ‘purist’ and only want to produce what you want, despite the fact that you’ve only sold a couple of paintings in the last year, then this industry is not for you. Some of the greatest artists who have lived were purists, such as Van Gogh. But please remember that most of them starved for most of their lives and Van Gogh actually only sold one painting in his lifetime.

This is not to say it is wrong to produce what you feel right about – far from it. If an artist is willing to put 100% into his art, and his belief in what he is doing is absolute, then he should follow his heart. These are the true artists and they should be admired for what they do. This book however is aimed at those who are endeavoring to earn $10,000 plus per year.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

Licensing has gone through many changes over the last 40 years or so, as the world has changed in so many ways. Technology has changed our lives forever and I am sure we will see some remarkable new inventions in the years to come, like free energy, healing machines, cars that run without gasoline, over self driving Uber cars, 3-D printing, Hyperloop 600mph trains and much more. The internet, more than anything, has changed the world of licensing and made it more accessible to artists and photographers across the world. It has leveled the playing field but it also presents challenges that need to be considered.

Firstly I would like to explain a little about the history of licensing art and photography which, if you bear with me, will help you understand why you need to get up to speed and educate yourself thoroughly in order to have any real success at this current time.

In the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s most licensing activities were done through photo libraries, or as they are now more commonly called, stock agencies. In those days if you wanted to find a photograph of an oil rig at sea for a corporate brochure, or a picture of an aeroplane flying against a sunset for a travel brochure cover, or say a picture of the Eiffel tower at night - ie pictures which cannot be commissioned, except at huge expense or due to logistics such as weather, far off location or being out of season - you called a Stock Agency. Historical pictures of an event like a coronation, an assassination, a film star, a snow storm, a cheetah running or a roaring lion are the kind of requests Photo libraries received. Art Directors are always working to a deadline, so time is of the essence and there will be a maximum budget allowable for these images.

Many of the first picture libraries were created from collections of press pictures, ie pictures taken by city desk photographers for a story, or they came from commissions for magazine articles or fashion, travel or human interest pictures which were sold to magazines or newspapers. Pictures accumulated over many years, until someone had the bright idea of creating a business/Agency by renting out the pictures for other uses, for advertising, greetings cards, calendars and a myriad of other uses. Hence the beginning of the Picture Agency or Photo Library. Once the business model was created it gave other innovative professionals the idea of setting up their own agencies. New agencies with collections of engravings, flowers, wildlife, astronomy, glamour, travel etc sprang up mainly in London, New York and big cities where there were plenty of buyers. Some were one-man photographer enterprises and others much larger businesses representing dozens of photographers. New photographs were commissioned by the Agencies after compiling information from the requests they had received for particular images.

The concept was simple. A client requested a selection of pictures and if they wanted to use one the Agency requested what the usage was. The price was determined by the level of exposure. In simple terms the bigger the use the larger the fee. In those early years it was a very lucrative business.

I set up a Photo library in 1974 in the UK with a partner. It was the first major agency outside of London and we became very successful. Being small initially we had many requests that we couldn’t service, as our stock was just building. So I went to London and visited many of the major Libraries and did deals where we split commissions so we didn’t have to turn the work away. This allowed me to go after jobs that we wouldn’t ordinarily be able to handle. I actually found when visiting some of these large libraries that they had huge archives of material, of which only a small percentage was ever used. The reason was simply that they only responded to requests and they had no time whatsoever to exploit the bulk of their assets. From a shoe box in 1974 we built a studio, a small duplicate processing lab and within 4 years we were doing almost $200,000 a year with just a part-time lab guy and my business partner, who was the backroom tech genius, while I handled the sales.

In 1979 I saw a huge gap in the market. Everything up to this point was the licensing of photography and the only art archives were basically old engravings, lithographs and historical illustrations. Products that needed illustrations and art were basically commissioned or bought outright by the large product manufacturers like Hallmark, American Greetings as well as the poster, print publishers, jigsaw puzzle manufacturers etc. All art was purchased outright for a flat fee. This often included the copyright so that the manufacturer owned not only the art but the copyright as well for a very low fee. Whereas in the photo library business, photography was being rented/licensed for a one off usage or a flat fee. Art or illustration, in comparison, was being purchased outright, which to me, seemed very unfair as the publisher could use the art over and over again or even use the art for additional products, make huge profits but the artist simply was left with his meager $100. The big greetings card companies operated this way for many years and accumulated vast archives of original art.

Even so I saw this as a great opportunity and unexplored territory, so in 1979 my business partner bought my share of the partnership and Michael Woodward Associates was launched. I started recruiting artists and illustrators, but as this process would take a few years I set off to London every month and with the contacts I had made I scoured the archives of the large picture libraries, often spending two to three days wading through thousands and thousands of images. I looked for images I could sell i.e. license, to the customer base I was nurturing. Basically many of the products I was licensing were outside the general scope of these agencies i.e. products such as greetings cards, calendars, posters, chocolate box tops, jigsaws etc. I took this new art along with the art of a few artists I had taken under my wing and started licensing the rights on a one off use basis, which had never been attempted before.

This was the birth of ART LICENSING. And, I don’t think many people know I was the very first person, as far as I am aware, to coin the phrase. Over the next few years I traveled throughout Europe and the USA with two camera cases containing 5x4 transparencies (digital images were not invented yet) visiting clients, exhibiting at, or walking through trade shows and by 1985 I had a $1 million dollar business and was, apparently, the most successful art licensing Agent in Europe.

By the early 90’s computers were becoming a necessary fact of life and I equipped my offices, now with seven or eight staff, with a sophisticated library system which managed the printing of delivery notes with a bar code system and an automatic follow up procedure. Even in those days it cost me around $25,000. We also got involved in Character merchandising and animation for television. I learned a great deal in those years about all kinds of licensing and had lots of successes, as well as failures, in the TV/Character Licensing arena which, to be frank, is shark infested territory. I got out in 1999, to return to my roots of licensing Art and Photography. I am still here today over forty years after starting out in a totally different world from those early days.

Around 1996 I produced some of the first CD’s ever seen showing artwork and images -but it was very premature - Art Directors didn’t yet have their own computers, so getting them to look at the CD’s became a major problem and it took quite a few years before everything went Digital. Most of you younger generation reading this don’t know of any other system except the world of jpgs and tifs and psd files. While this has created many more opportunities, it’s also created many disadvantages and problems, which negatively impact certain aspects of doing business. Not least of which is a surplus of designs.

In my early days there were very few agents and we had to travel to see clients as well as exhibiting and attending trade shows all over the world. We also had huge mailing expenditure, sending selections to clients and we had to employ staff to do all the tremendous admin necessary to run a successful agency. We duplicated transparencies at a huge cost annually so we had copies to send out, as often pictures didn’t come back for months, thus losing income particularly if the picture wasn’t selected. The industry in those days allowed artists, photographers and agents alike to make a good living if you worked hard and some made exceptional incomes. The industry attracted more and more agents and more and more creators. As an industry, it grew from $ 2.8 billion in 1980 to $27 bn in 1990 and then to $185 bn in 2013 (last figures available). Part of this total figure is broken down as follows:

US - $112 bn at retail ($5.5 bn in Royalty Revenues)

Europe - $38 bn at retail

UK - $12 bn ($600 million Royalty Revenue)

Art and photographic licensing makes up 3% of the US total i.e. $3.36 bn at retail

So what does all this history mean to you? In simple terms the pie grew very large but the digital revolution meant that now images can be sent via email instead of expensive mailing of transparencies or original art: every client has a website, so they can be found more easily: there are directories listing manufacturers/licensees all over the world: digital cameras and software like Photoshop allow more and more artists and photographers to create more and more work. So the industry is awash with new imagery from thousands of creators, who all have access to the same clients through the internet.

The outcome of this is personified by one of my clients, a greetings card company, who sent out a memo recently basically saying as we estimate we will receive at least 70,000 images this year, we are only accepting PDF sheets of new images with the artist’s name on every sheet so we don’t lose track!

The key info you must take in from this is that they will only choose perhaps 2000 images max!! That means 97% will be discarded!! Did that register with you? 97% will not be chosen simply because of the sheer volume. So even if you had some amazing images you still have only a 3% chance, on paper, of getting your work accepted. No wonder the licensing world has been turned upside down and inside out. This is similar for many products.

Does this mean licensing is a waste of time? For wannabe amateurs and photographers and artists that don’t educate themselves about licensing and just send images out with the vague hope they will sell something- then YES they are wasting their time and energy and, in my humble opinion, they flood the market with substandard work taking up valuable time, energy and valuable resources when the work is often ill conceived, far from relevant and often totally unsuitable for the client in the first place. Artists often don’t have a clue about licensing and neither have they researched what the client needs or sells.

This handbook is for those of you who are serious about licensing and who will study this book and will make the effort to understand all aspects of licensing, how it works, what clients need and look for, so you will stand out as a professional. This will increase your chances ten-fold and hopefully allow you to make some serious income instead of pocket money, now and then!

However let’s deal with first things first. I am initially going to deal with copyright and the importance of understanding the basic principles so you become more informed. If you know most of this, please don’t skip this next chapter as there may be just one or two facts you may not be aware of and it’s a good reminder.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to Copyright

Congressional Hearings on the Review of the Copyright Law

In March 2013, Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante delivered the Horace S. Manges lecture at Columbia Law School. Her lecture, The Next Great Copyright Act, provided a historical overview of the development of U.S. copyright law and explained why a comprehensive review of our law is now needed. On March 20, 2013, Register Pallante conveyed her views to Congress in a hearing titled, The Register’s Call for Updates to the U.S. Copyright Act. There, the Register urged Congress to take a comprehensive and informed approach to copyright review over the next few years. On April 24, 2013, Chairman Bob Goodlatte of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee announced a comprehensive series of hearings on U.S. copyright law. Since that time, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet has conducted a series of copyright review hearings listed below. This is the latest at the time of writing from 2015. Check if there are any further reviews on website.

https://judiciary.house.gov/hearing/hearing-the-register-s-perspective-on-copyright-review/

If you want to study in detail copyright law then log onto:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/

There was an update in 2011 and you can download a pdf of the whole copyright law or there is a list of each chapter.

Here you can read everything you need to know about copyright. From July 1st 2007 they introduced an electronic filing system online for just $35 for a single image or $55 for other filings i.e. collections of unpublished works.. Copyright Law can be pretty heavy reading and it may confuse you, so here is a simple guide to the main aspects of copyright law that applies to you and your clients.

What is Copyright?

Under the present copyright law, which became effective January 1, 1978, and the subsequent 2011 update, a work is automatically protected by copyright when it is created. It is not actually necessary to register your copyright with the Copyright Office for copyright protection under the present law.

Advantages of Registering

There are, however, certain advantages to registration, including the establishment of a public record of the copyright claim. Copyright registration must generally be made before an infringement suit may be brought. Timely registration may also provide a broader range of remedies in an infringement suit. This can be done by registering the copyright with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress in Washington. Forms can be downloaded online if you want to submit by mail.

If there is, in the future, an infringement of your rights, the fact that your ‘work’ was registered would provide physical evidence in a Court of Law.

Reviews for Licensing Art & Photography 101

[Moken Marsai · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good read. I appreciated that the author spoke in specifics and used examples . I would've wanted more depth on pricing strategy. But the resources at the back are excellent and it's a good first start to understanding licensing art.