Making the Most of your Creative Output by Ian Shipley

Author:Ian Shipley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: licensing, music, contracts, making money from art, making money from photography
ISBN: 9781782342977
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Licensing

Some people have trouble getting their head around licensing as a business, but for me it really is the simplest business model going and one that has helped to build and sustain many creative brands such as Conran (Household products), Laura Ashley (textiles) even Banksy the graffiti artist has licenses that allow replication of some of his designs as wall hangings posters and stickers etc).

Firstly lets clarify:

The Licensor is a person or company that owns the rights to a property idea and can sign those rights to other parties.

The licensee is the person or company that acquires the rights to reproduce your idea/designs onto a specified medium. More of this later

The principal is simple, you as the creator have a unique design, concept or body of work that another party wishes to reproduce normally onto an existing range of products that they make.

Lets use the example of an artist who creates fun looking designs and a Greeting card company that would like to produce a range of greeting cards with your designs on. your designs can sometimes be referred to as IP, this is Intellectual property, simply put your creation, that you own.

The greeting card publisher could obtain the rights to reproduce your IP by a number of methods. For the purposes of this book let look at the two most common. One is to obtain designs from an image or picture library, some creatives submit their content to these libraries who then in turn make the images/designs available to commercial publishers for a one off licence fee. So for example the greeting card publisher may trawl the image (usually on-line) banks until they find an image or range of images they like, then they pay a one off fee to reproduce this onto a fixed quantity of cards.

The upside of this method:

You have had to do nothing other than create and then submit to the library, often the first you will know is when a payment arrives.

You only have to concentrate on creating content

No interaction with the actual companies using your content (some people like this)

It can be a great part time hobby way of making money

You have been paid regardless of whether they sell one greeting card or the full 2000.

The down side of this is:

You don’t get a say in the reproduction and in some cases never actually get to see the finished product

You have no right of audit to check if they produce more than they originally asked to produce (the majority of manufacturers are honest and true, but as in all areas of life and business there are some who will ask to produce 2000 items but may actually produce 20,000, once they have your designs what’s to stop them?

You may not even be credited on the finished product as the creator, it may be the image libraries name that shows.

If you have produced a recognisable body of work you may well lose out on a lucrative on-going royalty deal

The other way that the greeting

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