Magazines?
There are a few options if you want to submit your work to be published somewhere. I’ll try to cover them here, how to submit your work and my opinion on whether you should do it or not.
If you would like to support me while I take the time to write this story and other types of blog posts, please consider purchasing my LR Presets, C1 Styles or PS Actions, following the links below:
PLEASE NOTE: I am not trying to start a discussion on this subject as I know people have different opinions on in and this is my view only.
Magazines you see for sale at the supermarket or news agency will most likely not take submissions, instead they will commission the work.
So if you want to see your work out there, in print, you’ll have to submit it to print-on-demand magazines. These are magazines available to be purchased online.
Alternatively, you can submit your work to online magazines, that don’t print anything. It’s like your social media but on a website. Most online magazines are actually based only on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Some of them charge a fee for your submission.
Print-on-demand magazines
So how does it work?
Print-on-demand magazines are magazines you can purchase online and they’ll be shipped to you. They often offer a PDF version as well.
The benefit of getting your work published in one of these magazines is to see your work beautifully printed in a magazine. And that, in my opinion, is the ONLY benefit.
These magazines are VERY expensive to purchase (we’re talking over A$35 + shipping, which usually costs the same as you pay for the magazine) and no, you don’t get a free copy just because your work is there.
For that reason, the only people actually buying these magazines are the ones getting published in it. They are often international so don’t expect your local potential client will find you there and give you some work. No one that matters to your business will “read” them. They are not like going to the news agency and buying the latest issue of Vogue. Art buyers will most likely go to the news agency and buy the the current issues of all major important magazines, ranging from A$10 to A$25, before they would even consider buying a A$35+A$35 shipping online magazine.
Also, from my experience, the “editors” of these magazine are often very rude. VERY rude. Most of them DEMAND exclusivity and you can’t use your own work until the magazine is released. That can take a long time, not to mention you might need to try submitting to more than one magazine as not always the first ones you submit to will accept the work, and you shouldn’t submit to multiple magazines at the same time.
And one final thing you should consider is that someone (the magazine’s editor) is making money off YOUR work.
I did all that when I was starting out and haven’t done it a long time.
So here are some of the ones I did:
If you do wanna try, there’s a website called Kavyar that makes it really easy to find magazines and submit the work.
Online magazines
There used to be some magazine style websites (and there still are) that were nice and free to read, so you could submit to them.
But reality right now is, everything is on social media. So these so called “magazines” moved to those platforms. With websites, you can make money from ads, but not on social media pages, so the way they found to make any money is to charge for submissions.
There’s a very popular one called Dark Beauty. Basically you have to go to their website and submit from there, paying their fee. It’s U$ 7.99 for ONE image; U$14.99 for up to SIX images; U$ 24.99 for up to TWELVE images to be reviewed. They can decline your submission and keep your money.
At least they have over 1.2 million followers so your work will have some reach, definitely more than print-on-demand magazines.
So if you really want to be “published”, that might be a better option.
Commissions
When you’re ASKED to shoot something for a magazine, that’s a different story, if that magazine will actually be read by people (the print-on-demand magazines asking you to shoot for them might make you feel good, but it’s still the same as you submitting your work).
You can get paid commissions to shoot magazine editorials, or some free ones. Whether you should take the free ones is up to you.
I shot two commissioned covers+main story for free and don’t do it anymore. And I shot quite a few paid covers+main story for a local magazine. But it doesn’t happen often it’s very hard to make a living just from that.
I can’t tell you what to do
I can’t really tell you what to do. Some creatives really like the idea of seeing their work printed so you could try to offer them to submit the work to magazines as part of your package. Maybe. I wouldn’t, this is to me a silly idea actually, I don’t believe there’s a market for it.
If you only do photography for fun, by all means go ahead.
And this is the bit that gets everyone REALLY upset when we discuss this subject: if you do submit your work and get published, please DON’T write “published photographer” (or “published model” for the models out there reading this). If you wanna know why you shouldn’t do this, feel free to message me and ask, I don’t want to stir things up over here!!!
What’s next?
Next I’ll be talking about networking events, keep an eye out for that!
If you would like to support me while I take the time to write this story and other types of blog posts, please consider purchasing my LR Presets, C1 Styles or PS Actions, following the links below: