I'm new to selling photos directy - how to proceed?

[Tandem]

I'm new to the sales aspect of this business. I had been selling my photos off of the internet and letting schools and nonprofit organizations use my photos free for photographer and website credit. I've been generating a lot of e-mail traffic from this policy. This is from a lady on one of the amateur teams I shot. What are your thoughts about it? I'll leave out the personal details.

"Anyway I am a graphic designer and I am working with a small local company that promotes youth sport teams, we create trophies, medallions, t-shirts, and other products to promote the local club teams and to help them fund-raise and market their club. I've looked at your web-site on smugmug.com and there are many great pictures that would be very usefull to our projects. Since I am a graphic designer, I don't have much use for the printed versions of some of these photos, so I was wondering how I can purchase single digital photos from you or if there is any way we can work together. We are really trying to promote youth teams and help sponsor clubs in the local area and hope that you and your work can be a part of these projects. I am looking forward to your correspondence. Thank you and please feel free to call me."

[IndyJeff]

First warning..........If she will be using these images to promote leagues/clubs for fundraisers then this may be an advertising use. You will need a release from the athletes parent before the image can be used.

Second warning........ Check with your state high school association about athlete images in advertising. This can result in them being declared inellgible to play in high school. It is also an NCAA rules violation.
Lets say you have a great action shot of some kid at 12 years old making a diving catch and they use it to "promote" a league by using that image to advertise sign ups or to recruit sponsors. Five years later the kid turns out to be a star on the HS team. Then somebody brings the newspaper ad featuring this kid to the attention of the Colorado High School Athletic Association, that may be a rules violation. Now comes the kicker, remember that article in the newspaper about the kid accepting a full ride scholarship to play for the University of Colorado? Well he may now be inellgible to play NCAA sports and the scholarship is revoked. So now you have one pissedoff set of parents, one heart broken kid and one mad university coach. Someone is gonna find themselves in court explaining why this kids image was used in an ad campaign without a release and no one mentioned the possibility of CHSAA or NCAA rules violations.
Wanna take a guess at whom one of the parties named as liable in this lawsuit will be?

[Tandem]

Thank you both for taking the time to reply to my question. Perhaps I should let her know that I can work with her in the future with clubs that already have the model release details worked out.

Most of my work has been done with schools. It's one thing to have my photos posted on the school's website or to have my photo's used in a football program, but this is an entirely different situation. I appreciate you both pointing out that fact.

[Boxer_kidd]

Originally Posted by matthewlrigdon

It sounds like she wants to use your images as stock. The pricing and terms for stock photography are a lot more complicated.

Is she going to be selling products with your images on them? If so, you may want to work out a deal where she pays you a percentage of revenue or a fixed amount per product produced.

She's going to want royalty free stock, i.e., she pays you once and uses the image as many times as she wants, but even these contracts have limits on commercial uses (check out places like iStockPhoto or shutterstock to see their policies). Generally, you can use stock images as much as you want as long as it's not for monetary gain, ie you can use the image as much as you want in advertising, but you couldn't make the stock image the focus of a product for sale (i.e. you can't sell prints of a stock photo you've licensed)

Yes it does.You need to be careful here.