We just started a pre-launch campaign for my newest project and distribution channel: Stocksnippets. And I can’t stop being excited about it.

When I became non-exclusive, I decided that I want to offer my images on as many channels as possible, in different price categories and to different markets.

I also think that agencies are a good offer to clients looking for a wide choice of imagery and allowing me to reach customers I would never be able to find myself. However, as we all know, agencies – or distributors – nowadays are becoming less the “partners” of photographers rather than treating photographers as (replacable) suppliers. And they consider themselves the ones doing the important work by marketing the images and finding the clients. That’s why from their perspective it is quite logical to keep the bigger piece of the cake.

Well, yeah, in a way they are obviously right. The reason why many photographers are not selling direct is the difficulty to find clients. And that will be a challenge for me, too. But then again for all customers that I will be able to find, I get to keep 100% of the license fees they are paying. That alone deserves to give it at least a try.

Luckily, I am blessed with a family of talented people around me. My girl-friend Maartje (you might know her as mammamaart on iStock) is an excellent designer and defined the look and feel of our upcoming website. Her son is a very talented drawing artists, so we decided to include some of his drawings as part of our offer. And obviously Maartje has also put in a lot of work helping me getting the imagery ready, from coming up with lists of ideas, lighting issues, processing and cataloging pictures. And me – well, I always enjoyed spending quiet days at home taking pictures of random stuff. But most of my professional career I’ve been spending in software development and project management, so building the technical foundation for the site was in my hands.

So we have come up with a plan to develop a site specialising on useful images for designers. The site is not fully live yet but we are in the process of getting all pieces together. And until then we will keep it to ourselves what exactly the offer will be. But we love to have at least a splash page online, and next on our list is to design a newsletter template, so we can keep you informed about our progress. And I think it’s safe to say that we are counting down the time to the full scale launch in days rather than months now. Wish us luck.