Experiment 14: Distributing and selling your audio on microstock

In addition to pictures and HD videos,  I started this month distributing  audio to different agencies. My goal is more to have recordings to support my  pictures and videos than rather to increase my microstock earnings. After looking  for a suitable recorder, I ordered a Zoom H2 from Amazon. The zoom H2 has a low price tag ($150) and a great sound quality, capable recording at 360-degree and comes with a 1GB SD card and earplugs. If you are looking for a more advanced recorder you can have a look at the Zoom H4n.

Wav files recorded at 44.1 kHz 16 bits are accepted pretty much by all agencies although some are taking 48 kHz 16-bit as well. As the Zoom H2 can record at 96 kHz 24-bit, I use these settings and downsample files before submission.
Like with pictures, agencies are looking for noise-free high quality files and Istockaudio even specify that the signal should be in the final range of -4db to -6db.  I use Audacity, a free and open source software, to  remove noise if necessary and amplify my audio files.
Like any submission in microstock, quality is preferred over quantity so sounds with a different twist have more chance to be sold. Keywording is quite different than in video and photo and it is advisable to add words to describe the mood of the file in the metadata.

For information, I put in a table below a list of  agencies I upload to, along with some, I hope, useful informations.  Being an Isyndica user, I take the advantage of their platform to distribute my audio files in few clicks.

I am far from being a sound expert so please feel to post a comment if you find any mistakes on this post. Thanks and happy recording!
If you want to sign up to start selling your audio, feel free to click on my affiliate banners below:

 

Experiment 9 : find your pictures on line with Amazon.com

In a previous post, I was talking about several ways to find your pictures in action. I recently found few of my microstock images on Amazon.com, mainly in books published along with their credits.

What you have to do is perform a search on books using your first name and last name as keywords and you might get some relevants hits. If you have a Amazon account, you can take a peek inside the book and do a second search to land on the credits page: putting the page number as keyword will hopefully bring you to the page with your image,. You just have then to do a printscreen et voila!
My published pictures I found so far were purchased from Istock and Dreamstime and it was interesting to see in what context these pictures were used, always unexpected. Copernicus statue was taken in Warsaw Poland in 2007, offices building in battery park Manhattan in 2001 if I remember correctly. Religious mural in the Shrine of Lourdes in 2007. Cat scratching on the wall in 2008.