The important things is to develop trend information for a particular agency. If revenue starts to decline, it may be because the agency is adding more images to its collection and your sales are a smaller percentage of the total. There is nothing you can do about this, but it is important to know it’s happening. When RPI start down it’s nice to have some idea as to the number of images you need to add just to stay even.

When revenue goes up it is also important to know whether it is because the number of your sales are going up, or because the average-price-per-sale is going up. This number is probably not that useful on a month to month basis, but it is worth tracking on a semi-annual or annual basis. We hope prices and the number of sales will always increase. But, there will come a point where it is no longer possible to raise prices without losing sales. If prices are flat or going up slightly, but the number of units sold (downloads) is going down that’s something about which to be concerned. Are sales going down because there is less demand for the kind of images you produce, or because there are too many new images competing with yours? How much new production will you have to generate in order to keep sales level? If you are already adding a lot of new images to the collection and the units licensed are going down it is really a problem.

I wouldn’t worry about trying to include unaccepted images in your RPI calculations.

The really important thing is not RPI , but gross revenue minus expenses divided by hours worked. Your RPI with iStock may be high because they accept so few images. But, lots of photographers earn more from Shutterstock, Dreamstime and Fotolia because they accept more images into their collections. The bottom line is gross revenue, not RPI.

It seems to me to make more sense to track profit and hourly rate of return on a semi-annual or annual basis rather than monthly.

It is interesting that you keep your expenses low, but you must have some expense besides a new camera each year. I hope you’re keeping good track of those expenses for tax purposes, if nothing else. If you’re buying food to photograph you can deduct those costs from your income for tax purposes.

I’d like to see some figures on total income minus expenses including all the cameras and software. The first year loss is acceptable given the capital investment required, but the big question will be in January when you’re able to figure the profit and average-pay-per-hour for 2009.

Your computer, internet access and home office expenses may be covered now by other income streams, but if you were really allocating properly you should assign one-third of these costs to your microstock photography business. This is particularly important if you have any thoughts of becoming a full-time shooter because these costs would then become part of your business expenses. It is good that you’re doing so well in your other lines of business that you can afford to devote one-third of your working time to something you enjoy.

Jim Pickerell, Editor, Selling-Stock

While flipping burgers or baby sitting may earn as much or more here and now the time invested in adding to a stock photography portfolio will hopefully generate significantly more over the portfolios effective lifetime in passive income.

Alex

cheers and thanks for sharing your journey, that can now be called a very successful business!