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.

2009 in Review: The Year for Creatives
PC World
Microstock companies such as Vivozoom and iStockPhoto took steps this year to protect all clients and customers from legal problems (such as copyright, ...

2009 in review: The year for creatives
Macworld
Microstock companies such as Vivozoom and iStockPhoto took steps this year to protect all clients and customers from legal problems (such as copyright, ...

MacNN
iStockphoto offers legal protection for copyright disputes
MacNN

MacNN
iStockphoto guarantees its collection
Macworld

Microstock, like most things, disproves the old saying, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." (Ralph Waldo Emerson?). If you want to make a sale, you need to get the image in front of people's eyeballs, and to do that, you need to find as many relevant keywords as possible. The more searches that hit your keywords, the more that your image comes up in front of designers. (Note that it is important not to "spamdex" your image in an attempt to get your image viewed using keywords that don't match the picture.