October Sales Updates:

 A steady month in October with no great surprises -good or bad.

WW2 ration book -sold on Dreamstime

A well deserved first place for Alamy with 3 downloads. a high $$ magazine sale of my archive shot of Jimmy Knapp (then General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen) and a couple of small travel image sales to web site The Culture Trip. There are sometimes grumblings on the Alamy forum about low value sales to this travel site but you only have to look at it to see the vast number of Alamy images they download. Hardly a mystery why they have a good (for them) bulk deal in place. I just take the view that the higher value sales elsewhere more than make up for the odd low ones. No different really to how it has always been in stock. Back in the seventies/eighties you could easily be seeing £40 sales from a National Daily newspaper whilst some of the Regional ones thought they were being generous paying £5. It all adds up.

Second place went to Shutterstock with a good sprinkling of On Demand sales pulling up the total.

Istock took third place with 31 downloads. As always here travel and music festival images were well to the fore - a sure sign that some degree of normality is starting to return.

Fourth place went to Redbubble with 2 product sales (both throw pillows featuring the Greek island of

Small boat on Halki island, Greece

Symi). I'm hoping there will be a late Christmas gift rush here as in previous years.

Adobe took fifth place with 5 downloads including two editorial ones - a Shell petrol station and my image of a Government letter giving information on Covid.

In sixth place were Dreamstime with 6 downloads. I was pleased to see that one of them was from my recent set of WW2 ration books/identity cards. These are starting to gain some traction with several downloads of late.

Finally we had Bigstock with just 2 downloads. Still, as I always say, my images just go there automatically after being accepted at Shutterstock so there is zero effort involved. Whether or not they keep that scheme going forever remains to be seen. I doubt that I would bother with Bigstock if I had to upload directly.

Bar sign at Mikro Chorio on Tilos island, Greece

Recent uploading had me firing up my Epsom film scanner again to work on some London buildings from 1991. These archive images have done well on Alamy. They also do well on Shutterstock but in this case they all just got rejected for being grainy. Really? Archive film images with grain? Who would have thought that? Their loss.

In the absence of new travel I also revisited my back catalogue for some new images from my trips to the Greek islands of Halki and Tilos. These included a little fishing boat which always seems to be moored in the same place on Halki and a sign pointing to the late night music bar in the mainly abandoned village of Mikro Chorio on Tilos.

November hasn't got off to a stellar start but we'll see how the rest of the month pans out. Regards, David.