Magazine and newspaper publishers are always on a lookup for photographs that can make cover story for their next issue. If you are a freelance photographers thinking of selling photographs to magazine, you must know that some popular photographs are especially in high demand. In particular, sending celebrity and pet photographs to advertising magazine is always a great way to earn a profit from your photography skills.

Demand On Celebrity Photographs

If you have some unique photographs of your favorite celebrities, you could very well be sitting on a gold mine. People are obsessed with photographs of famous celebrities, anything from celebrities’ fashion to car to music, magazines and books are prepared to pay you a pretty penny for your work.

Magazines are always looking for quality up-to-date photographs of celebrities. You would not believe how eager gossip magazines are to get their hands photos of rock bands, TV stars and Hollywood actors. The bigger the star the more the magazines will be willing to pay for photos.

Demand On Pet Photographs

Taking pictures of cute little pets and compile the pictures nicely in a scrapbook or photo album can be quite an enjoyable activity. If this is the sort of thing that you like to do, you should consider selling your pet pictures to a magazine for a little extra income.

There is actually a huge demand for puppy pictures nowadays. There are several magazines out there willing to pay a fair price for your puppy pictures. For instance, you can submit your photos to magazines that cover stories about animals.

Promoting Your Photographs

A great way to promote your pet pictures is to set up a website to which you can direct magazine publishers and other buyers. Your main concern should be the quality of your photographs displayed in the website. Make it a point for every one of your photos to be crisp and clear.

Make sure that your pictures are updated regularly. If you are showing pictures of celebrities, do not waste your time trying to show old celebrity photos. Old photos will provide you more of an income if you send them to an online stock photo site.

The magazine industry is by far the largest market for a freelance photographer. Millions and millions of photos are published every month. Assuming that you have some photography skills, there should be nothing to stop you from sending your photos to magazine photo editors right now.

High End Photographs

Magazines generally pay different fees for photographs according to the size of the photo that is published and where it appears in the magazine. Typically, a cover photo is valued at anywhere from $200 to $700.

A full size photo that covers a page inside the magazine usually pays from $75 to $300. The highest quality commercial originals at 2000 x 3000 to 2900 x 4300 pixels (varies from 6 to 13 Mpix) are in high demand among publishers for books, car magazines, fashion magazines, music magazines, art magazines and sports magazines. These publications require maximum resolution and detail for graphics processing. The common price range for these photographs is around $200 to $300.

The cheaper alternative is commercial Hi-Res of about 1600 x 2400 pixels (around 4 Mpix) which is more for newsletters, brochures, product packaging, computer magazines, trade magazines and business magazines. Magazines would purchase them at $100 to $200.

Lower End Photographs

The fees get smaller as the photo size gets smaller. Each individual magazine sets their own price for purchasing photos from freelance photographers. Commercial Low-res photographs at around 800 x 1200 pixels (1 Mpix) are used for low end publishing. At $45 to $90, these photos are good for newspaper, commercial web sites, presentations and marketing blogs.

Personal Low Resolution photos at 800 x 1200 pixels are most common for online magazines, personal blogs, websites and presentations. These photos are not easy to sell as they can easily be found free of charge in internet by doing image search. However, if you believe that you photos are unique, the price tag of $25 to $40 per photos is reasonable.

Included In The Purchase

Many magazines will require exclusivity for any of your photos that you submit; others only ask that you do not submit the same photo to other publications for a certain period. Be sure to check the guidelines for the particular magazine to which you are submitting.

There are magazines all around the globe with articles and photographs on any topic that you can imagine. If you have a talent for photography, there is good chance that there are car magazines, fashion magazines, computer magazines, sports magazines, art magazines, music magazines, trade magazines and even business magazines that are willing to pay you top dollar for your photographs.

Choose The Right Magazines For Your Photographs

If you want to make a little extra income from your photographs, it is important that you approach it in the right way. Begin by choosing a market that you are interested in and want to photograph. Purchase a few of your favorite magazines or newspapers, study the images within their pages, and compare each one to your work. If your photos are just as good as the photos in your favorite magazines, then you should shortlist this magazine for your consideration.

Write a letter or send an email to the photo editor for each magazine and tell them all about your work. It is a good idea to have a website set up so you can include a link to samples of your work.

Submitting Photographs to Magazines

Always remember to stick to photographs that are relevant to the subject matter to which you are submitting your work. It is best to submit your photographs on a CD-ROM so the magazine’s digital team can clean up the picture to its best.

When you submit your digital photographs to a magazine, make sure to include your name and address as well as a brief description of your submission CD with printout of your images in high quality. If you are submitting photos by mail, be sure to include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) so that you can get your photos back.

Several magazines have photographers of their own. However, staff photographers may not always be able to get the best shots; this is where the freelance photographer gets his opportunity. Freelance photographers specializing in taking photos for cars, fashion, sports, arts and even music are known to be in high demand. There are guidelines that must be followed in order to successfully submit your photos to a magazine.

Picture Formats

There are several different formats for photos. The most popular are gif, png and jpeg.

GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) is one of the most widely used image formats on the web. It is most suitable for images with sharp edges and relatively few gradations of color, such as line art, cartoons, and text. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a bitmap image format to improve upon gif. PNG employs lossless data compression and it supports palette-based (palettes of 24-bit RGB colors), greyscale or RGB images. It does not support other color spaces (such as CMYK). For geometric line drawings, lettering, cartoons, computer screenshots, and other images with flat color and sharp borders, PNG and GIF image formats are most popular.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a standardized image compression mechanism with high compression ratio. GIF images can only achieve 4:1 compression on full-color data while JPEG can easily attain 20:1 compression. JPEG compresses both full-color or grayscale images and works well with photographs and artwork. It is the most popular format used by publishers and it is the most compatible format for operating systems of all types.

Picture Resolution And Pixels

Before submitting your photos to any publication, make sure that they are in the right resolution and pixel size. This way your photos will be viewable to the magazine regardless of which operating system they use. Commercial photographs for books, magazines, newspapers, billboards, posters, calendars and any other applications that require maximum resolution for detail uses 2000 x 3000 to 2900 x 4300 pixels.

You may want to consider purchasing a good graphics editing software to help you with the bitmap and image manipulation. Many photographers are well-versed with Photoshop which is the most popular graphics software used by publishers for preparing quality pictures.

Magazine editors are generally writers, not photographers. What they look for are stories, not photographs. Finding subject for a photograph is to give the magazine a story to feature and write. This is the most challenging task for photographers who want to submit their photographs to magazines to earn good income. A photographer who has the same mind as an editor can make handsome income by submitting photographs to magazines, newspapers and book publishers.

Photographs With A Story To Tell

To ensure that your photographs are all inspiring, interesting and related to a subject topic, one simple approach is to shoot everyday people and objects from a child’s perspective. Be it car, computer, art, music, travels or fashion, shoot everything for the height of a three-year-old and you will achieve photographs that depict an emotional, mental point of view. Work continuously to improve your macro photography, perspective and field depth. Do not be afraid to experiment with all of the different focal lengths and shutter speeds.

Do not see obvious, easy-to-shoot subjects as they are. Think of what a child who be wondering on the subject and put together a storyline on what you can photograph to be featured in the magazine. If you can write well, try packaging your photos with the story that came to you when you were shooting the photographs.

Know The Writing Style Of Your Target Magazine

Shoot your photographs according to the subject of your storyline, with interesting and unique angle to let your pictures tell the thousand words. Your article needs only to tell the minimum once your picture becomes alive. Write in the style of the targeted magazine, with similar word count. Many freelance writers re-purpose the same article for different magazines as this will create competition to your advantage. Depending on the size and placement of you photo subject, some magazines pay as high as $1,000 for the photographs with 600-word article. Photographs are charged around $50-$500 per image and so the more photographs of the same subject would get you more money.

Taking photos on a consistent basis will prove to be beneficial to ensuring that you always have great photographs with good story for your magazine.

Many beginners dream to be engaged by a magazine or newspaper on a long term writer. The secret of making the first step is to write a query letter to the publishers to get them interested in you. A well written query letter will definitely attract the publisher’s attention and you stand a good chance to be offered an opportunity to write a trial article for them.

Do Your Research For Your Query Letter

Before you submit a query letter to do an article for any magazine, buy a few issues of this magazine to find out what kind of pieces are typically printed. Whether the magazine is on car, computer, travel, sports, music, arts, fashion or trades, there are always some niche area that you can do better than others. Identify that particular niche subject and check their website and read their archived articles on this subject matter. This will give you good knowledge on how to approach the editor of that magazine and ensure that you get the writing assignment that you want.

Another key thing to remember is that editors will only print articles that they think their audience will want to read. Therefore, you need to know the target audience and promote an article in your query that will appeal to the magazine’s readers.

Writing Effective Query Letter

Your query letter is not the only query letter that a publisher receives. You must therefore do everything within your power to make your letter stand out from all the rest. A query letter can make or break a writer, it is vital that you write a query letter that makes the editor remember your name.

The first step towards successful query letter is find out the name of the editor. This can be obtained easily from the most current issue of that magazine. Avoid addressing your letter with “Dear Editor” or “Dear Sir”, which gives the impression that you did not put forth much effort with your query.

Give your letter a strong opening that will encourage the editor to read more; quickly and professionally make your point. A query letter should only be a single page featuring a single idea. If you are a published writer, you may wish to include a clip as a sample of the quality of your work.

Sending Your Query Letter

Finally, you would want to deliver your query letter properly. Before you send a query letter, ensure that you use the correct submission method. Some magazines disregard email queries, where as others insist you use them. Avoid calling an editor on the telephone unless you have worked with them in the past. If you do send you letter via email, do not put the word “query” in the subject of your email to avoid being deleted if the editor is having a busy day. The only problem with email submission is the risk of you mail being delivered to the “spam” box. It is therefore important for you to b.c. a copy of your email to another email address to know whether your email is indeed treated correctly by the mail server.

Writing articles is as good as creating products. The basic rule of marketing is that you cannot sell products that no one would buy. Even if you are a wonderful writer, no editor will want to publish articles with subject matter that no one wants to read.

Finding Subject Matter To Write

Before you pen your first word, think about the magazine to which you are going to send your article and consider what would interest that particular editor. Finding subject matter for your articles is hardly any effort these days with the help of the Internet. You can easily find niche interest in arts, books, car, computer, fashion, music, sports, trades and travel. The World Wide Web is the best place to research just about any topic on which you plan to write.

Confirm Subject Matter

However, the best way to ensure that the subject matter is of interest to the publisher and the readers is to approach a magazine with a query letter. A query letter should briefly describe yourself and point out your education, experience and qualifications. The letter should also provide a description of the content on which you wish to write your article, giving the magazine publisher an idea of who you are and the type of content you can provide. It is also good to attach a small sample of your writing to your query letter.

Getting Reply About Subject Matter

A good query letter gives the magazine publisher a good impression of you and they would normally want to explore the opportunity to try you out. If you have written a good query letter, you should receive reply from the publisher on how they would like to include you into their writer list. Usually they will also let you know what type of subject matter they are looking for and the length that they require. All that is left is for you to write your first article on the subject matter that you have already researched in. If the publisher is impressed with your great article, this will be beginning of your handsome income as a writer.