With great tools come pros and cons and now magazines and blogs are having to compete for content and many want exclusivity. Both sides of the coin have valid points and here are some things to keep in mind as you consider where you want your work published:
1. If you want your work published in a magazine, most will require that it cannot be published online anywhere at all, including blogs, Facebook, Twitpics, Flickr, etc, including your own. While this may seem unfair, think about it: magazines are expensive to produce and rely on original content in order to stay fresh. Also, would you really want to pay $6.50 only to see material you've already seen online? Probably not.
If you have a rule that you have to blog every wedding you shoot or that you produce, you may want to rethink it if your marketing plan also includes being published in print. Ask the people you submit your work to how their magazine or publication works and what, if anything, they allow to be published online prior to them going to print.
2. Consider your goals in getting each particular wedding published: would it be more beneficial to leverage a brand's name to further your credibility or would being in front of more eyes and allowing that work to go viral help your business more? Both options have a time and a place in your marketing efforts. Also, and this is no offense to any of the wedding bloggers, but the Martha Stewart brand currently carries much more weight than many of the other media outlets in the wedding industry. If a wedding has an opportunity to be published in Martha Stewart Weddings, and the professional has the chance to have the Martha name in their press credentials, then that may certainly win out over being featured online. On the other hand, if your goal is to use the wedding to build a lot of buzz and traffic to your website, then submitting it to blogs may be the way to go.
3. If you submit work to a blog, be sure to ask if they have any exclusivity clauses as well. Many wedding blogs operate as a business and also rely on original content in order to maintain traffic that will support their ad revenue. While it is harder to control where those photos may end up because of readers spreading the word (and really, when it comes to social media and the Internet you can't control it) it is certainly important for both the blog editor and yourself to make any expectations clear as to the specific actions both of you will take. If you submit to a blog that requires exclusivity, I would recommend asking them to notify you within a certain and reasonable (to them and to you) time frame if they are NOT going to use the images. This will help you determine if you can submit them elsewhere and avoid any sticky situations later on.
4. If you are a planner and you want to submit a particular wedding for publication in a magazine or a blog, be sure to communicate with the photographer BEFORE the wedding so that you are on the same page as to how the images will be handled afterward. If you are a photographer and want to submit, do not release the images to the other vendors until you are ready to do so. A florist posting one photo on their private Facebook page could cost you getting published - yes, it's happened before. Have a publishing strategy going into each event and openly communicate with the other professionals you are collaborating with.
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8 comments:
Excellent advice Liene! Thank you for sharing.
This is great advice- and at a perfect time to boot. We are already faced with the decisions of whether we'll be putting our advertising money towards print or online media this upcoming season.
Thanks Liene, as always!
Great info Liene! I just wonder how this issue is going to continue to form in the future. The web is increasingly becoming a very powerful tool for photographers. It seems if the magazines require that absolutely NO images end up online before printing they may end up with a VERY shallow pool of weddings to choose from as time goes on. I just wonder if there will come a time when they will have to re-assess their policies to be able to continue featuring great content.
Great post Liene. I personally have not had any magazines decide to not publish any images of mine previously featured online, at least on my blog. Every wedding (or individual images) that I've ever had published has also appeared in my blog posts and occasionally on other web-based industry blog sites. I think the important thing, as you mentioned, is to communicate with all parties and see what the limitations may be. I agree with Melissa that in this social media/online world we live in, it would hard for magazines to limit what may also appear online since almost all photographers now post their weddings to their blogs, and subsequently other blogs then often grab them and feature select shots.
Also, I've heard through the grapevine that Martha Stewart only publishes weddings in her magazine that she is personally connected with -- and typically ones she also attends. Im not sure if that is true or not, but if it is, then it would make it hard for 98% of photographers to ever be published in her magazine. Have you heard anything similar to that?
Jen, I just sent you an email, so keep an eye out for that. :)
Magazines can't sell ad space or their magazines if the content has been seen before - and from a business perspective, that makes perfect sense.
Bottom line: If you want a particular wedding published, don't blog or post it anywhere online. Make sure the couple and the other vendors know this prior to the wedding so that they don't post anything either.
It may be annoying, but it is what it is at this point.
As Melissa said, more and more photographers may focus on magazines that do not mind if the photographer has posted images on their blog. One issue--all too often a magazine will express interest only to sit on the images for up to a year or more--at which point the photographer and
event designer have received no exposure at all. Food for thought all around and a great article Liene on a topic that is going to become bigger and bigger. (posted by Linda)
You're spot-on, Liene.
I wanted to chime in that this info applies not only to magazines but to books as well. If you have aspirations to get a book published, publishing houses won't touch the manuscript if you've already released the info online.
That is great to know about book publishing, Khris. Makes sense, just had never thought about it. Thanks for bringing it up!
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