making a bid

A couple weeks ago I was asked to submit a bid for an intl company with offices in DC. They wanted interesting images of the city (DC) for their website. I was given a 5 day deadline to submit the estimate, and final images were due exactly 12 days after the bid was sent in. I called my friend and AU classmate Tanya, who is a freelance photo producer in NYC. She recommended I use BlinkBid to create the estimate (also recommended by A Photo A Day blog, and was super helpful in helping me breakdown the pricing, especially the usage terms.

This part proved to be the trickiest because no photographer wants to give up the rights to the images they created. However, in this instance, I was encouraged by several photographers to include a buy out option, which basically means the client buys the rights to the image. This is often costly to the client. Again, I got some great advice from APAD - one of their Google group members suggested that photographers ask their client(s) if they want to be able to sell the photos to a third party. More often than not, they don't. That essentially means that they do not really want the buy out, but just freedom to use the images. The opposite of a buy out would be rights managed. In the bid I put together, I gave a usage term of 2 years, with renewal due at that time. This would require diligence in keeping up with your books and going back to the client to negotiate this renewal. For me, I thought that a buy out would be most appropriate for this job.

So I created the bid, broke down the usage terms in plain English and provided a cost of how much the buy out would be. The entire bid was submitted for $5000, perhaps too under-competitive. A few days later, I followed up with the point of contact - the due date for final images was fast approaching and at that point, I had about 10 days left to shoot, not including my full time job, Artomatic, and prepping my prints for the AOM show. I received a polite email saying that the deadline had been pushed back and that they would get back to me with more information.

It's now been a week and no word. I don't mind since it was a really good learning experience to put this thing together and understand how BlinkBid works. However, it does frustrate me especially since I can imagine the client balking at the price bid - which according to my NYC counterparts, is pretty damn reasonable for a short time frame and buy out. I'll post updates to this story if I hear anything back from them.