Pricing your photography

Well, it finally happened. I had someone come to me with an order that did not fit in any way into the photo pricing tables I have built into my site. My knowledge of stock photography pricing oustide of my tables is limited. My tables are good - I was fortunate to get them from professionals - but they do not cover everything. Additionally this customer was interested in multiple usage of some night sky photos - ranging from banner ads to brochures to prospectus'.

I sought advice from others in the industry who indicated I should cost each use individually (as best I could), add them all up, then present the customer with the total. This is what I did but I could not help wondering that if someone buys an image for multiple uses should I be offering some kind of discount? I did not offer a discount and did not get the sale (alhtough in this case I do not believe these two things to be related - read on...).

After searching the Internet and talking with folks about "potential discounts" it strikes me that this is an industry with few defined rules. The answers seem to be "No", or "Possibly, but only a small amount and this depends on x, y, and z". In this particular case however I was pretty confident that if my costs were "near" their budget then they would have asked for a discount. As it turns out my costs were significantly higher than their budget (thus the reason for the loss of the sale - I was not willing to provide a large enough discount to get near their budget).

This entire experience just highlighted to me that this is an area one must brush up on when entering the industry (I guess that is pretty obvious in hindsight). I still view this as a positive experience as it indicates that selling photos online has potential.

I recently visited a bookstore and after perusing the photography section I came across the book "Pricing Photography: The Complete Guide to Assignment & Stock Prices". I did not buy it but I am considering doing so. It appears to be one of the few books that tackles this issue and provides some insights into how much photos should cost and how to deal with folks asking for bargains, etc. The book can be viewed on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.ca/Pricing-Photography-Complete-Assignment-Prices/dp/1581152078

If anyone has used this book I would be interested in hearing your input/comments.

Also after grinding through Google searches for hours I have found a few free stock photography pricing resources online one may find useful:

http://photographersindex.com/stockprice.htm
http://www.editorialphoto.com/resources/estimator/estimator.asp
http://www.sethresnick.com/price/price.html

I also ran into a few Photo Pricing software tools. While I did not purchase any I did try a few demos. So far the demos are so limited in functionality that they are useless and do not provide a good insight into the potential of the tool - although I have not tried fotoQuote and I've heard it is not bad (but it is not cheap at 140USD - although maybe ok if it really helps nail down a few sales). They have a demo as well which I have not gotten around to trying:

http://www.cradocfotosoftware.com/fotoQuote-Pro/index.html