Great Escape Publishing

Posted December 11th, 2009 by The Photographer's Life & filed under Travel Photography.

Want to sell travel photos to magazines? Before leaving on a photo trip to Puerto Rico, professional photographer Efrain Padro had an idea. He’d seen articles about lighthouses in magazines before… but never an article about lighthouses in Puerto Rico. So, he found two publications he thought might buy his idea. With these in mind, he left on his trip…took some photos…and wrote a paragraph or two to describe each image. When he got home, he sold both the pictures and the captions to two different magazines – Photographic Magazine and Lighthouse Digest. Here’s his article/photo package as it appeared in Photographic Magazine… How to Sell Travel Photographs to Magazines The trick to publishing your article and photos when you get back from a trip, Efrain tells me, is to think up story ideas ahead of time, so you’ll know what to shoot while you’re there. And to research publications that might buy your idea ahead of time, too. “Before I leave for any trip,” he says, “I do some research and actively think of possible article ideas. Together with a shooting list of subjects, I write down general ideas for articles, which I will pursue once on location. “Sometimes my ideas work. Sometimes they don’t. Specifically, as I was researching my trip to Puerto Rico, I ran across a website about a land trust in Puerto Rico that had purchased and remodeled a lighthouse in Fajardo, a town on the northeast corner of the island. “I then read up on other lighthouses and learned that some were still in very good condition. Since I’m a history buff, I looked into the overall history of all of the island’s lighthouses, and, somewhere along the line, decided that this was the article idea I was going to run with. ” I can’t remember the exact fees, but Photographic paid by the page which worked out between $700 and $800 for the piece. Lighthouse Digest paid less, but they agreed to include a small blurb in the magazine’s table of contents about my business, Padró Images.” Tomorrow, I’ve asked Efrain to tell us more about how to find saleable ideas before (and during) your vacations and also how to sell them to multiple publications. If you want to sell travel photos to magazines, stay tuned. — Bonnie Bonnie Caton Great Escape Publishing [Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can turn your pictures into cash in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel. Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Selling Photos for Cash: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.]