January Sales Updates:

Mark Barty-King, Bantam Press publisher

A lively month in January with an unexpected winner in first place and, sadly, a not so unexpected taker for bottom place.

Straight in to first place were FineArtAmerica with a large print sale of Thin Lizzy leader Phil Lynott. This follows on from my couple of sales in November after a void of nearly three years of no sales at all. Not sure why this sudden activity is happening but long may it continue!

Alamy took second place with three sales. Two from my B/W archives and a landscape image from my trip to the Greek island of Tilos last year. Alamy is certainly starting to repay my time in uploading my back catalogue to them -even if commission for non-exlusive images will shortly drop to 40%.

In third place were normal frontrunners Shutterstock. About 40% of my total income this month was from On Demand sales but with no Single downloads at all this time.

Fourth place went to Istock with a slow 28 downloads but a much improved RPD (rate per download) over December.

At the lower end were Bigstock in fifth place with 6 downloads.

Sixth place went to Redbubble with a single product sale (a mug featuring former Prime Minister

Megalo Chorio, Tilos island

Tony Blair).

Just behind in seventh place were Fotolia/Adobe with 3 downloads. Uploading via the Fotolia site will end soon so the time is coming for me to get the hang of the Adobe site.

Sadly, in eighth and final place were Dreamstime with just two $0.35 subscription sales. I suppose I could claim that as a 100% increase on December when I had just the one sale but it's still a pretty dismal picture at DT. Maybe 2019 can see a turn around for this likeable and contributor friendly agency.

Sacred Heart temple, Barcelona

Recent uploading saw some images of the Temple of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the summit of Mount Tibidabo in Barcelona. I also uploaded a new image of a Bougainvillea filled street in Megalo Chorio on Tilos island. Turning my hand back to scanning I uploaded an archive image of book publisher Mark Barty-King. As head of Bantam Press it was he who decided on the UK publication of Professor Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time. This was taken at a press conference marking the success of the book. Success didn't follow through to my image which got rejected (twice) at Shutterstock for "film grain". I suspect that the days of SS accepting these old archive images may be in the past so I'm glad I got all my main images in some years ago! Never mind, it's on Alamy and elsewhere.

Too early to make any predictions for February so we'll see how the month pans out. Regards, David.