Selling to France

[Bryan]

I've a growing number of shots taken in France, but their sales performance can only be described as mediocre to poor.

 

This month I was pleased to see 3 sales of French subject matter, but for poor returns. It turns out that one was a distributor sale to the Russian Federation, while two went to a UK newspaper. I am not selling to France! I can recall one sale to a French magazine, but that was of an image taken in the USA.

 

Now my French is pretty ropey, but with the help of Google translate and my wife (who is pretty good at it) I've recently tried to provide the most crucial keywords/phrases in both French and English.

 

Maybe I need to find an alternative outlet for this work, or perhaps I need to put more effort into the keywording?

 

I'm aware that my French collection is not huge, so maybe I expect too much, but I have had much greater success with shots taken in the USA, despite having fewer for sale. Is this what others have experienced, am I flogging a dead horse?

[MircoV]

Hello Bryan,

 

I dont know if you are talking also about distributors but i noticed myself one thing.

 

I also have as good as no sales to Poland despite living in Poland. I tried to take a look at the distributors. I noticed that many distributors that also sell RM themselves only take RF images from Alamy. This case i have with my Polish distributors. They only pick RF images what means that all my Polish editorial shots are not mirrored at the Polish distributors (They all sell also RM).

 

What i do is to contact them and upload my RM editorial photos directly.

 

But like i said i am not sure if you are talking also about distributors.

 

Mirco

[Guest]

I've a growing number of shots taken in France, but their sales performance can only be described as mediocre to poor.

 

This month I was pleased to see 3 sales of French subject matter, but for poor returns. It turns out that one was a distributor sale to the Russian Federation, while two went to a UK newspaper. I am not selling to France! I can recall one sale to a French magazine, but that was of an image taken in the USA.

 

Now my French is pretty ropey, but with the help of Google translate and my wife (who is pretty good at it) I've recently tried to provide the most crucial keywords/phrases in both French and English.

 

Maybe I need to find an alternative outlet for this work, or perhaps I need to put more effort into the keywording?

 

I'm aware that my French collection is not huge, so maybe I expect too much, but I have had much greater success with shots taken in the USA, despite having fewer for sale. Is this what others have experienced, am I flogging a dead horse?

 

Even though it 21 miles away (or so), I've found that French buyers almost always are buying from good French agents. My specialist agents sell well (usually half a dozen France sales per month) but commercial channel sales are dwarfed by places like Germany or South Korea. Alamy has had some sales in France for me but mainly a long time ago. It makes sense to shoot images of France for travel as it's the most visited country in the world IIRC but selling France to France seems very difficult...outside of France.

[spacecadet]

My best seller in revenue is French and my French images used to sell better pro rata than anything else but a good few are through Hemis as distributor IIRC. Ditto one to Russia. Only one I know of definitely went to France. Interestingly nothing in the last 2 years apart from things French and location-irrelevant sales.

As to keywords I put the accents in captions even though they don't affect search, and a few obvious words but I don't think they're often searched on with a couple of exceptions.

Of course there are some legal problems there with right of personality and privacy so perhaps only the French know how to bullet-proof releases. It wouldn't usually affect my images but it's a thought.