A new art service for publishers: illodeli.com

[Jon H]

Hi All,
Gosh I haven't posted hereabouts in a very long time(remember me from the Dust Devils cover, or Spione cover, or maybe even George's Children?).  Myself and my partners have just launched a new art on demand service, which struck me as of particular use to Forge members.  One reason being we as the artists keep our rights on what we are selling, maintaining the status of your publications as truly creator owned.  Secondly we offer our artwork at small press friendly prices, with licenses which hopefully suit your needs being for non exclusive single use.  Why pay for more than you need?

We have all kinds of fancy banners we're using, but we shall on this occasion (and of course all others!) respect the rules on posting images!

Here's the official press release:

Illodeli.com: Pick your Own

Illodeli.com is a new online store which offers publishers the chance to buy artwork for their publications and immediately download it at print resolution.

Illodeli.com features the work of industry illustrators Scotty Purdy, Andy Hepworth and Jon Hodgson.

We have a range of work from full colour covers right down to black and white spot art, all at great prices, and unavailable anywhere else.

Illodeli.com is launching in public beta mode, so currently our catalogue is a small selection of work, with plans for expansion on the immediate horizon. Regular updates are also in the pipeline, so check back often or sign up for our newsletter.

Our licenses are extremely simple. Each purchase allows the non-exclusive single use within one product. This is the barest baseline of use we could come up with, which allows us to give the cheapest possible price. Our filler and spot art is sold under a wider license which allows reuse within one product. Which seemed only fair!

Please point your browser to http://www.illodeli.com for more information.

[iago]

Holy moley!

Good stuff here. I'm torn between wanting to tell the world about it and wanting to keep this fantastic stuff for myself.

[Gregor Hutton]

I can't recommend Jon, Andy and the Scott's highly enough!

I have already fingered an image from the deli for a forthcoming project by myself and Epidiah Ravachol. :-)

[Jon H]

Thanks fellers!

All of us realised we had various pieces ranging from old practice works, studies, software experiments and so on, right through to recent finished works that we owned the rights to, sitting around doing nothing, with no place to really set it on to good effect.   And it made sense to fill that particular niche between clip art, which can be a bit too generic and lacking "the special" and full on bespoke work, which let's be honest can be really pricey when you're trying to illustrate a book on a personal budget.  So Illodeli was born!

Obviously we would much rather you told everyone about it Fred!  Hopefully there's a range of stuff there right now which could inspire games in itself, whilst also being completely affordable.  I was just looking at this one: http://www.illodeli.com/?page_id=3&category=7&product_id=69 thinking "hmmmmm..." 

[jag]

Excellent idea, guys -- it fills a niche which is, in retrospect, blaring obvious and underserved.

However, looking through the site I'm somewhat unsure of how far the Single Use license goes.  You say:

"When you buy a piece of art that is not a spot or filler piece, you can use it once in a single publication, including reprints of that publication."

How about second editions/etc?  With the move towards web/PDF publishing, the line between a reprint/edition is blurry -- things are constantly evolving tiny amounts, and it's not clear when the license would expire.  Similarly, if i'm providing both an HTML and a PDF version of my book, can i use it on both?  And the print version?  Am i allowed to use it on a web page at all?

James

[Jon H]

Excellent idea, guys -- it fills a niche which is, in retrospect, blaring obvious and underserved.

However, looking through the site I'm somewhat unsure of how far the Single Use license goes.  You say:

"When you buy a piece of art that is not a spot or filler piece, you can use it once in a single publication, including reprints of that publication."

How about second editions/etc?  With the move towards web/PDF publishing, the line between a reprint/edition is blurry -- things are constantly evolving tiny amounts, and it's not clear when the license would expire.  Similarly, if i'm providing both an HTML and a PDF version of my book, can i use it on both?  And the print version?  Am i allowed to use it on a web page at all?

James

Hi James, and thanks for the kind words!

A good question!  Just as a preface, as you know we've tried to keep things as simple as possible, and the thing that underlines all of that is  "talk to us".  As the site stands all the work on the site is owned by the people who own the site, so much like indie publishers we're readily approachable and accessible.  But that doesn't answer the question does it?  As you say, its a grey area when it comes to the blurry lines between POD/PDF editions and reprints. 

Speaking specifically of pdf and POD products, the kinds of minor revisions and updates we often see in those products do not require the artwork to be repurchased.   Cleaning up some typos, rewording a couple of sections and so on we do not consider new editions.   If a revision was a complete overhaul, heavily revised text and completely new content then we would consider that to be in practical terms a different book and not a reprint.  Which means we would ask you to purchase the work you required anew.  However, that said, we are reasonable people who are (or at least try to be) switched on to the needs of our customers - we all work in publishing too, after all.  And our boundaries are open to negotiation.  One of our core values from the start is operating in good faith, and trusting that our customers will do so also.  I have to say so far the communications I have received in response to our launch show very much that faith is justified.  Of course, people can chose to pay once, and reuse the art as much as their conscience allows them, and chances are we won't be looking at every single publication out there to catch people abusing our terms.  But actually, you know what? I don't think the vast majority of people want to trade that way. And this, as said, is borne out by the questions people have asked us, which have all been concerns to stay within the license.  Which is a really positive outcome thus far!

Due to the blurriness you mention its very hard to give you absolute concrete answers here on grey areas, for which I apologise.  I guess a flippant sounding solution (but a seriously meant one nonetheless) is if you think you will require more than a single use license then you might need to invest in more than illodeli.com offers in terms of rights.  We took some time to find the baseline from which we wanted to sell - and that was the simplest usage we could identify, and thus the cheapest.  Of course where more than that baseline might be required we're happy to talk over individual cases. 

When it comes to POD, online and PDF versions of books if they are all identical in terms of content then we consider that to be one book.  Again, we're reasonable humans, so minor differences for formatting and so on would not be considered enough to make it a different book. 

We allow you to use the artwork in the promotion of the book which contains it.  Thank you for mentioning that, since it looks like that clause has slipped out of the edit in one of our many site revisions over the last few months before we went live!  I shall head off and correct that right now!

I hope that clearly things up, so much as I am able to do!

[jag]

Jon,

That helped a lot.  I agree in principal with your stance, "We're all reasonable people so we can figure it out," which is a nice break from ridiculous contracts.  What you just wrote goes a long way to clarify what the license means -- i suggest putting up a version of that somewhere appropriate on the website, so that a casual visitor would have a better idea of the license.  That way, they'd be more comfortable buying a piece on the spot, or at least asking you more specific questions about their desired use.

I'm harping on this because, when i read "We're reasonable people" without a list of acceptable/not-acceptable cases, I got flashbacks to when we've had difficult conversations with contactors who, although very reasonable people that we like and respect, had a very different interpretation of some terms than we did.  No one was out to cheat anyone, and those cases have always worked out, but a common starting point would have been useful.

James

[Ron Edwards]

Jinkies!

Sticky'd.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Ha haa, such a great idea. An easy way for artists to turn a long tail profit, and for art to find customers. I especially love the no-nonsense pricing scheme, coming from a non-bargaining culture; just deal with the price or go elsewhere, without non-explicit bargains, "contact me for pricing" or other bullshit. I expect this to become a hit - better start thinking of storefront commissions for when artists start clamoring for a spot in your store!

A question, actually: how did you manage to coordinate the prices? I notice that most art in each individual category is priced very similarly with each other; did you agree on some hard category-based prices, or did things just work out this way on individual basis? In other words, did you agree to set price points to not undercut each other?

[Jon H]

Thanks guys!

Jag - Thanks for all your input, its been most helpful and we're planning some blog entries about these issues right now!

Ron - Thank you very much! Most kind!

Eero - Simplicity is king for this project!  Because its very definitely an add-on or side to all of our contributors core businesses, we didn't want to get into finickety pricing details, or anything that would take up too much of our time which could be spent painting commissions.  We also wanted to make it easy for customers to get a feel for what kinds of prices we charge, and be able to fairly quickly assess what they can get for their money.  I know if I were a customer at Illodeli, if I had to do too much paperwork just to see what I had spent, on what, from what categories I probably wouldn't make it through the whole process.  And sure, we are operating very much form a "this is what we have, this is what it costs" stand point.

How we coordinated was to have a chat on our private forums, and we all pretty quickly agreed.   Since its all work that otherwise wouldn't be doing much it wasn't too difficult. We had no desire to undercut each other really I don't think - in general the guys behind this project have a high regard for mutualism.  We looked at clip art prices, we know our own commission prices and aimed somewhere in between, that felt right for both us and our customers. Hopefully we've got it about right.  I'm sure we'll learn as we grow too.

Thanks again all!

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Jon

What plugins do I need to be running to view the larger versions of the samples?

I'm suspicious that it's a plugin problem on my end.  However, for whatever reason, when I click on a thumbnail, I load a new page with no enlarged version.

I'm running IE 6.0 on Windows XP Pro v 5.1

Cheers,
Darcy

[Jon H]

Hi Darcy - Sadly I can't answer that myself right now, but I shall check that out for you with our web boffins and pop back as soon as I know!

[Jon H]

Hi Darcy,
OK, as I suspected (but wasn't entirely sure of) its just javascript that opens the thumbs.  So that would indicate a browser problem at your end if its not working.   An alternative is to right click the thumbnail images and select 'open in new window'.

[Jon H]

Hey all! 

Something of vital importance has just recently come to my attention, and I felt it especially important to bring it here where this thread has been so kindly stickied.

Its vital that before you make purchases on Illodeli.com you make an account on our system.  We've been somewhat remiss in not making that more abundantly and absolutely clear.

We've made some changes to the front page, and some small ones to the back room gadgetry to make that more clear and more rigid, but I thought it was important to stress that.  Our system needs an account to connect you with your downloads. 

I've also just written up a new piece on the illodeli blog about the most exciting of topics - shopping carts!  If you're already signed up it might be worth checking it out!: http://www.illodeli.com/?p=131

In more regular news things we have been streamlining the service, adding new artwork and generally responding to feedback we've received.  Elsewhere we've been showing off some examples, but we're still managing to respect The Forge's no image policy, so you'll have to come and dig around the site for the eye candy!  We've had some very satisfied customers, some customers we've had to work a bit harder to hopefully make happy (thoruhg no fault of their own I must add!), and one incident of someone robbing us already! Ahh the internet, how you inspire and confound!  As I mention in the blog, we're battling on in our quest from public Beta to SHINING GOLDEN WIN.   Hopefully!

Cheers!

[Jon H]

Hi All, and a happy new year!

I'll spare The Forge the ad-speak, and just let you all know we have massively expanded the Illodeli.com stock. We have new server space, updated FAQs, an updated blog, and some really great new things available. Even if I do say so myself!

The stock has expanded beyond fantasy fare into some other areas. Well worth a look.

It's also well worth signing up at the site to get our newsletter which gives details of when we make additions to the site.

www.illodeli.com

Thanks!