I have to make a living as a freelance photographer and to survive you really need to be aware of a) the different avenues to make money out of your images. And b) WHICH avenue to use to sell YOUR type of images.
The best way to look at it is that photography pays in two stages.
The first stage is the initial commissioned work, being paid once-off by a magazine, company or customer to do a shoot. This is "active income".
The second stage is where you keep copyright ownership of the images, and continue making money off your existing library of images. This is more passive income.
I like to think of it like that your images are forever income generating assets, if you do it right you can make every one of your existing images generate a bit of income for you. As you shoot more and add more to your library you eventually make a decent supplementary income out of it.
There are many avenues to sell your images passively (which IMO is the best way cause you don't have to do anything at all
) but it all depends on the type of photography you do.
DON'T put your images up through ALL the different avenues, research and choose your selling outlets carefully and just focus on them. For example putting your images on stock libraries will nullify your ability to make money through licensing royalties. Why should big paying companies pay you thousands to use an image when they could get your same shot off a stock library for a fraction of the cost?
There are obvious things like selling prints through local retail stores and online. Putting them on a stock photo library is another avenue but you really need to be actively shooting things which work well for stock photography. Something which I don't do, none of my images would really work in a stock library. But there are shooters out there whos style fits stock libraries so well they make enormous money out of it.
There are less obvious avenues as well, you can put them on sites like DeviantArt.com and get 50% of the sales profits made through that site. Which would suit if your photography is REALLY great and people GLOBALLY would be willing to buy them.
What I do is license my images through international merchandising companies, all I do is sign a form to let them put my photos on posters and other merchandise, and I get a small percentage of the royalties. You can get really good supplementary income out of this (nearly HALF of my annual income comes from these royalties, where I do nothing but send them invoices!) but this is an especially niche area.
Whichever way you go it will ultimately depend on your style photography, personally I don't think going local is the way to go. Online is where you'll get the most sales but I wouldn't suggest ebay. I don't think ebay is a good way to link potential buyers to your work.
One thing you must do however - like everyones been saying.. is to build yourself a website. Make it clean but professional - nothing fancy and just let your images shine. My photography website is
http://www.eastonchang.com/ but it's buggy and i'm looking at replacing it
You can make solid money out of great photographs, but you can make more if you know how and where to sell them, you can make even more still if you do this and go "niche". (i.e you specialize in landscape, cars or glamour photography, or pet/animal photography etc)
