Feb 2004 - Issue 2
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Selling Your Portfolios
Maintaining your creative drive is hard work, we know. So what happens when you run out of inspirational fuel? Whether you've hit a creative roadblock or simply want to haul your brain our of a rut, give us a month and we'll get your creative gears turning.
Barbara Gordon
Barbara Gordon...
I decided to discuss one of the basics this month because of the many phone calls I’ve been receiving from recent art school graduates wanting to become freelancers. So many of them make the assumption that because they graduated from top schools or were tops in their class, their futures are assured in freelancing. While a good education can be the foundation of one's career, graduation is just the beginning of many steps one will have to take to establish that successful career. The first foundation, and always the ongoing foundation, of any freelance career — your public signature — your portfolio — is your selling portfolio. I'd like to share with you, especially the newcomers to the field, some of the advice I've been giving to some of these young callers over the past few months.
For purposes of discussion, this column will be about the portfolio for the general freelancer, not the specialist. By specialist I mean someone pursuing a specific area, i.e., fashion, medical, technical, although much of what I'm going to say will apply to specialists as well, but on a narrower basis.
The basic selling portfolio, the one that everyone starts out with is the inventory of what you have to sell in the marketplace. In some ways it’s like the windows in a retail store. You like what you see in the windows and you go into the store to browse further and perhaps to buy. The freelancer who specializes might be compared to the specialty store, i.e., shoe store, sporting goods, etc. But if you’re a generalist, like the retail stores, you want to appeal to the widest possible buying audience out there. You want to show the greatest number of prospective buyers your range and ability to handle their assignments. How do you do that? What should be in your window? Let me discuss some ideas of how to determine this.
To start, I look at what other mass marketers for the freelance buying audience are doing to sell this audience. What are the specifics of the inventory they are selling? What kinds of situations are they promoting to that buying audience? Where do you find these mass marketers? One of the first sources that come to mind are many of the stock houses.
All of you are familiar with stock houses that sell existing photos or illustrations of particular subject matter on an inexpensive basis to some members of that buying audience. Stock pieces are not custom pieces designed for a specific client or product, so most of the stock houses want to sell those same images over and over to get the maximum profit. To generate multiple sales of the same image, their catalogs show the areas and subjects that their research indicates are used extensively. This enables them to generate resale after resale of the same photo or illustration. So if you’re looking for some of the most popular subjects or situations to include in a selling portfolio, look at the stock catalogs for ideas.
Right now I have several stock catalogs before me, let me cite just a few of the categories at random: “Big Business”—corporate situations; “Families”—scenes of family life and activities; “Relationships”—couples of all ages and types; “Travel”—tourists and tourist areas; “Health and Medical”—medical, health scenes and persons...etc. This is just a infinitesimal start of a very long list of subjects and situations, but this can give you an idea of some of the areas that your buying audience is interested in, as well as some ideas on casting.
Current television commercials, magazine ads, direct mail are also good sources of what that buying audience is looking for.
For the publishing audience I often find the marketplace books (published by Writer’s Digest Books)—the ones written for artists, photographers, designers—a good source because they list what they are looking for as well as how much they pay. For example, two large publishers say they are interested in freelancers who do “children, historical, multicultural & self-help.” These books are inexpensive and a good way to add to, as well as better target, your mailing lists.
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