There are magazines for just about every trade and business, including medical, oil and gas, engineering, motoring and tobacco. Some are sold on subscription; others are funded entirely from advertising. Many titles focus on news, making them a must-read for those needing to keep abreast of developments in their area – or looking for another job. Often these publications are full of ‘situations vacant’ advertising, which is part of their appeal.
A typical trade magazine in the UK, for example, is Local Government News, which is read by everyone from professional officers in technical departments of local authorities to civil servants in relevant government departments. Like all magazines, it needs photographs to illustrate its stories and to brighten up what might otherwise be slabs of impenetrable text. As such, it has a regular requirement for quality pictures of subjects such as architectural and building projects, road schemes, urban designs and housing projects.
But which ones? And what should they show? Once again, you need to get a copy and look at what is published. Sometimes the requirements are extremely specific, and only ‘insiders’ will fully understand what is required.
The plus side of shooting for trade titles is that, because they are less well known and generally less glamorous than consumer titles, they don’t receive as much unsolicited material, which means that you don’t have as much competition.
When making your first submission to a magazine, don’t send too many images – as the old saying goes, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. To make sure you make a positive impact, send only top quality pictures. If that means there are only 10 or 20, so be it. Trying to make up numbers by including second-rate material will greatly weaken the submission, and could lead to it being rejected – even if some of the photographs have the potential for publication. It may not seem fair, but that’s the way it works. And if the first couple of sets you send in are judged to be of poor quality, later submissions may receive only a cursory glance. They’ll see your name on the covering letter and not really bother looking at the material.
The most important thing to understand is that your pictures don’t necessarily have to be stunning to sell – they just need to meet the requirements of your market. But they must be perfectly exposed, attractively lit, pin-sharp and well composed. This is particularly true when submitting work to photo magazines and leading consumer titles, which naturally tend to have very high standards.
Magazine editors are busy people, and they need to be able to view images as quickly and easily as possible. When sending digital images, always include a hard-copy reference sheet, so there’s no need to put the CD in the computer to view the pictures. Use a good-quality inkjet paper and ensure the thumbnails are a reasonable size. Six images to a sheet of A4 paper (210 x 297mm/81/4 x 111/2in) is about right. If you go any smaller it’s difficult to see the content properly. Include a short covering letter, and make sure that any CDs and images are clearly marked with your name, address, telephone number and email address.
Don’t be in too much of a rush to follow up. A busy magazine can receive a large volume of submissions, and if you send yours in during press week – the obligatory panic when the pages of the next issue are being ‘put to bed’ – nothing will get looked at straight away. It’s only when things settle back down that unsolicited contributions tend to get considered.
Magazines vary enormously in how efficient they are in responding. Some will send an acknowledgment immediately, so you know your package got there safely. Others don’t reply until they’ve looked at the material, when you will get something between a curt ‘This doesn’t meet our requirements’ and a satisfying ‘We’d like to use some of the images in our next issue.’ If you haven’t heard anything within a couple of weeks, you could send the editor a friendly email to check whether the images have been received safely and whether they might be of interest.
CAPTURE THE MOMENT
Pictures don’t have to be stunning to sell,but they do need to be sharp, correctly exposed and capture the subject matter effectively.
Rejection is a part of the freelance photographer’s life – it happens to the best of us. If you can’t handle rejection, it’s best not to send pictures to magazines in the first place. Often you won’t know why the pictures have been returned, and it’s certainly not the responsibility of the editor or picture editor to tell you why they didn’t want them. If you ask politely, they may give you some advice and tips on making a successful submission next time, but don’t count on it – they’ve got more important things to do, like producing the next issue. All you can do is look at each rejected submission carefully and try to work out what went wrong.
One possible reason for being rejected is timing. A tremendous amount of planning and preparation goes into producing a magazine. The editorial process of picture selection, captioning, layout, proofing and passing the pages does not happen overnight. This means that pictures (and articles) are required well ahead of the magazine’s publication date. The ‘lead time’, as it’s known, can be just a couple of weeks in the case of a weekly magazine, but is more often a couple of months for a monthly magazine or a quarterly.
INSIDE STORY
Many of the pictures used in magazines about homes are commissioned, but there are still opportunities for speculative freelance submissions.
Pictures of fireworks, for instance, will typically go in a November-dated issue in the UK, which will be on sale early in October – and that means it will go to the printers at the end of September. Final picture selection will typically be in the first two weeks of September, so you need to have your submission with the magazine by the middle of August at the latest, and preferably earlier. Don’t send it too early, though, because staff won’t be thinking about that feature yet. They will either return your package and ask you to submit it later or suggest putting it on file. The problem is that a couple of months down the line they may have forgotten that it’s there and choose other pictures.
Some material, however, is timeless, and you can submit it at any time for the magazine to keep on file. This suits editors, because they will have a stash of material readily available whenever they need it. This can work well for the freelance, with a cheque falling through your letterbox every now and again without you having to do much for it. However, it can also mean that images are sometimes left to gather dust, so it’s a good idea to send further submissions if nothing happens for a while.
While there are exceptions, the editors of most specialist and trade magazines, and the features/commissioning/picture editors of glossy, large-circulation titles, are approachable. They need photographers as much as photographers need them, so you shouldn’t be afraid of phoning or emailing them to check their needs. It is usually a waste of time asking if they would be interested in seeing your pictures – they don’t know until they’ve seen them. So send them in anyway.
Once you have made a few sales from speculative submissions, you can ask magazine editors for their specific picture requirements. This considerably increases your chance of making sales. However, it’s not a good idea to ask what their current ‘wants’ are before you have developed a relationship with them – you could be from a rival magazine, after all, so they will often be cagey.
Further down the line – once they are