One of the frustrating aspects of creating art is how do you make any money from your talent. One way to do this is to license your images as Stock Images. The way a stock agency works is fairly straightforward. They act as your agent and present your images on a website to the public (this includes graphic design companies and advertising agencies). You retain ownership and the copyrights to your images. The stock photo agent sells a license for a specified use to the client to use your image. When a use of your image is negotiated, you get a fee the stock image company gets a percentage of that fee. In return for the fee the stock agent receives, you get exposure to a large audience. It is up to the stock agency to build traffic. The more traffic they direct to the site, the more sales they make, etc.

Chris Dickman, who heads up Graphics.com (and was the founder of i/us.com which became TalkGraphics.com) passed this opportunity along to me.

I wanted to encourage the Xara community to submit their images to our Stockxpert.com microstock site. There's quite a few illustrations on there now and I think the Xara folks could make some sales. I was discussing this with one of the Stockxpert people and he encouraged me to make the suggestion.
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This link is on the Graphics.com website and features one of the artists who markets his images on Stockxpert.com.

And as a reminder for those who are not familiar with Graphics.com, Chris has a series of Galleries where people can show their work, including The Xara Gallery. The site and galleries are free and you might see some familiar work already there.

Gary