A new announcement today from Shutterstock about the Facebook version of their Twitter app, allowing you to share your daily sales or acceptances with your networks:

There's an interesting thread over at MicrostockGroup regarding how to leave your royalties to your loved ones after you die. Not something you have probably thought about very often! The short form is that your beneficiaries will have to provide relevant legal paperwork to the agencies in order for the accounts to be transferred to them, so if you have a will, make sure to explicitly include the copyrights to your images in it.

Most people who are considering whether or not to upload to microstock sites are curious how much money can be made by doing so. (There are other reasons, too, but this is a biggie). The short answer is that it depends on how much time and energy you put into it, and it depends on the quality of your images. The top earners can make hundreds of dollars per day, but most people will not achieve that. For an overview of my experience, see below. I update the stats about once every month or two so you can get a sense of what I have earned -- without devoting a ton of time to it, to be honest.

I've written a short introductory article for eHow entitled "How to Make Money With Your Digital Camera (Selling Microstock)" -- take a look here. It is a short overview and I'm interested in any feedback you may have -- either to improve this article or for ideas for future articles you may be interested in.

Excerpt:

MacWorld has seven tips for would-be microstockers (see below). It's always helpful to read other people's summaries of the things that they find important. This is a decent list of basics.

1. Understand how it works: "...Selling stock photos is not easy money. It will take time to build up a decent sized portfolio (at least 100 pictures) before you see any sizable return..."
2. Think like a designer: "...Designers want photographs with ample amounts of uncluttered negative space so make sure you leave room for a headline or other text..." [Click the title above for more]

Shutterstock and Dreamstime allow you to sell images on an editorial license, meaning that purchasers will only be able to use the images in editorial formats (e.g. magazines, newspapers, etc). This is useful for images that you have taken which are of specific interest (famous people, places, current events...) and may not have model or property releases.

This sample editorial image from my collection was taken on the day of George W. Bush's inauguration and depicts items that might not normally have passed as royalty-free for various reasons. It is usable as editorial imagery because of the public nature of the event and the public interest in the event.

Shutterstock and iStockphoto are now allowing video submissions to sell short video clips to local news stations, documentary producers, and the like. If you can produce video footage that would be useful to these types of projects, it could be well worth your while to upload them to Shutterstock or iStockphoto.

This is a short sample clip I took to submit to Shutterstock. I can imagine local newscasts  using this clip in a story about recent Supreme Court proceedings, or documentary filmmakers using it in a commentary about a particular case, and so on.

Here are a number of news items about Shutterstock's recent acquisition of BigStockPhoto. Each has an excerpt and a link to the full article.

Photo District News: Microstock Site Shutterstock Acquires BigStockPhoto

Shutterstock, Dreamstime, and iStock allow you to sell your vector illustrations on their site in the same manner as the digital photography. This means you can create imagery in Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, Xara Xtreme, or Inkscape (free download). You earn money for every download from their subscriber base, with additional incentives for referring buyers or sellers to the site.

This sample image is one of my most popular vector images on Shutterstock, from a series on road signs I made. I drew it in Illustrator and saved it as an EPS.

It's interesting to look back on the microstock experiment I started a few years ago. I have been quite lazy this past year about uploading anything--and expected my sales to dry up because of it.