Once you start selling your work to magazines, you soon discover that there are enormous variations in the rates paid, sometimes with no apparent logic. For example, I have been paid just £20 ($35) for half-page reproduction by one publisher and £100 ($175) for postage-stamp-size use by another.
As a guideline, repro rates are related to the size of reproduction and the prosperity of the publication. However, in a bid to maximize profits, publishing companies are rarely more generous than they need to be. Editors are often squeezed by their publishers, and have an agreed budget to spend on pictures each issue.
Some titles run on a very tight budget; the payments they can offer hardly cover the cost of postage and certainly not the time and effort involved in taking the picture. Some publications are extremely cagey about what they will pay – leading one to the conclusion that it’s probably not very much. Others are open about this despite their very low rates, although it’s a wonder they get anyone to contribute when they pay a pittance. Fees are generally higher in the more prosperous world of mass-market publications, such as the women’s weekly and monthly titles. But since a high proportion of their pictures come from libraries or commissions, this tends not to help the average freelance. Generally, with magazines, it’s a matter of having pictures published at their ‘usual rates’. It’s a buyers’ market, and you have to accept what they’re willing to pay or they won’t use your work. Expect somewhere between £10 and £50 ($17.50–$87.50) for up to half a page and you won’t be far wrong.
KNOW YOUR STUFF
When submitting pictures to specialist magazines you need to be able to supply detailed, accurate captions. With garden photography this means knowing the botanical name of a plant.
NEWSPAPERS
Newspapers offer mixed opportunities for freelance photographers. It’s not difficult to get your work published in local newspapers, but it’s not easy to get paid for it. National newspapers, on the other hand, pay extremely well, but to get published you need a subject that is particularly original or newsworthy.
ACTION STATION
Action stations Dramatic images can have a market at both local and national level, but there’s a lot of competition to get published.
It would be great to have an image published on the front page of a leading national daily newspaper, so that millions of people around the country – or even the world – could see it. Hopefully you would get a sizeable cheque, too. But unless you happen to be on the scene with your camera when a bomb goes off or someone is kidnapped, you are extremely unlikely ever to take a picture that is sufficiently newsworthy. That is what the nationals are after – dramatic images that capture the attention of a notoriously fickle readership, and persuade them to pick up their paper rather than one of their rivals’.
Images for inside pages
The inside pages of newspapers are more mixed in content, with news pages at the front gradually giving way to general-interest features before running into the business and sport sections at the back. Unfortunately, the potential for freelancers in all areas is pretty small. Most of the news pictures come from agencies and staffers, and the features tend either to be illustrated with shots from libraries or specifically commissioned. However, newspapers are always interested in offbeat, quirky pictures to brighten their pages. If you take anything of that kind it’s work getting in touch, especially if they can be related in some way to a current story.
Most images for newspapers are sourced from staff photographers or international agencies such as Reuters, but occasionally an amateur or freelance strikes it lucky and grabs a once-in-a-lifetime picture that is splashed around the globe. It is always worth having a camera with you – a decent digital compact will do – and keeping alert for anything out of the ordinary. If you do shoot something with front-page potential, don’t hang about – call the paper immediately. If they like the sound of what you’ve got, they will send a bike over straight away, or ask you to email the image to them if you’re close to a computer.
Should the newspaper decide that they want to go ahead and publish, they will offer you a fee to sign the rights over to them. This is the time to keep a clear head and read the small print – don’t rush into things. That may be easier said than done, because they will probably put a lot of pressure on you to agree to their terms, especially if they are close to putting the paper to bed. You have to decide whether what you are being offered is enough. It may sound like a temptingly substantial sum, but bear in mind that if the picture is exclusive – no-one else has the image – and in demand, the paper will syndicate it around the world, making serious money in doing so.
What you really need to do, if you can, is to negotiate a percentage of any syndication earnings; that way, your return will be significantly higher. However, if the paper won’t budge, you may decide you have to take what you can get.
Another option, albeit a less glamorous one, is your local newspaper. Every town or region in any country boasts at least one, and some have two or more competing titles. By their nature, local papers are focused on news and events within a particular area. Many have a small number of staff photographers, so the good news is that most of them welcome pictures from freelancers, usually accompanied by a short report or caption. The bad news is that many have no budget to pay for freelance contributions, so the best you are likely to get is a credit. Even so, if you want to gain experience and tear sheets, perhaps as a stepping stone to a staff position or to give you credibility in other markets, you may be willing to work on that basis.
Make sure that you retain your copyright in any pictures published, as one of the ways in which local newspapers generate revenue is by selling prints to readers. That is why you see so many photographs of groups published. Leafing through the latest issue of my local newspaper, I see a shot of a nursery that has received a glowing report (16 faces); a poet opening a school library (9 faces); a report on a filmmaking project (11 faces); pupils at a grammar school hearing about industry (24 faces in four pictures) – and that’s just up to page 9. If you are intent on shooting for local newspapers, therefore, you need to know how to organize and work with groups. If you don’t have much experience in this area, simply look at the way the pictures that are currently being published are composed and do the same.
CRICKET
Whether it’s cricket,baseball, soccer or whatever, regional papers are full of pictures of local teams participating in sports – but you rarely get paid.
It’s the same for other subjects. Photographs in newspapers need to tell the story at a glance and, because they are printed on newsprint – relatively poor quality paper that doesn’t reproduce fine detail well – they are also often clichéd in style and content, so they communicate the