It's also advisable to keep on getting into new magazines all the time.
It's no good having a superb relationship with one magazine and getting £
600 a month on a regular basis.
Apart from anything else, if you succeed with an editor and get your work published as a result of a lead two things happen. You immediately pay for your annual subscription and because the editor knows your work you stand a good chance of getting further work published.
It's also advisable to keep on getting into new magazines all the time.
It's no good having a superb relationship with one magazine and getting £
600 a month on a regular basis.
What happens when the editor moves on and the new one wants to revamp the publication? You're £600 a month down and in deep trouble because you "didn't need to look at other markets." (£600? You mean our entire editorial budget? - Ed)
One solution is to subscribe to a market newsletter which tells you who's looking for pictures, which new magazines are to be launched, and what stock subjects major libraries are short of.
The important thing to remember is that these publications will not bring you success on their own. You have to obey the rules of presenting your work to editors. You've got the rifle, the sales leads are your ammo, but it's up to you to make sure you hit the target.
There is also a "member to member" for sale and wants section covering enlargers, cameras, and accessories in which you can pick up some good bargains.
The newsletter has undergone changes in its format lately and now is a lot more punchier with extra leads in it.
At £40.00 a year for UK members and £50.00 for overseas it represents exceptional value for money.
The BFP also has a correspondence course which you can take. It will teach you how to get results but it cannot teach you persistence and patience. You are going to need quite a lot of both if you decide to take up freelancing.
It appears fortnightly and is not as lavish as the BFP newsletter in as much as the leads are fewer and there are no photographs.
However it is still excellent value for money at £34.95 per annum. What is good about it is that the leads are not duplicated elswhere. A trial offer of six issues for £18.95 is also available.
CFYC is actually a newsletter that gives you leads of a different nature from the BFP. In fact it was designed to be complementary with it.
Run by Steve Bavister and Lee Frost (our regular writers for the Cash Column), CFYC offers tremendous possibilities for the freelance, however as stated before you will need to learn how to sell your work. CFYC can't do that for you. CFYC is now updated to four pages every fortnight.
You can try it on a monthly basis by Standing Order for £4.00 just to get the feel of it. An annual subscription will cost you £45.00 a year, which once again you can get back with one sale.
Again there is a lot less in this publication than CFYC, and an awful lot less than in the BFP Market Newsletter. However, it is still worth getting in my opinion, as it seems to have a lot of pointers in it that the other two don't have. In fact my most profitable lead last financial year from came from this newsletter.
Now that may not happen with you as the leads that appeared were ideally suited to my type of photojournalism, and I had one very lucrative client that resulted as an offshoot from a telephone enquiry. That's the thing you need to keep in mind when looking at these publications. A single sale can make all the difference. In my opinion you should be getting all three.
Any one of them can make you a lot of money and by getting all three you cover just about every need for the forthcoming months. It makes sound economic and business sense to subscribe to all three as they complement each other. To do anything else means you are missing out on an opportunity to make money.
It is important to realise these are average statistics which by there very nature can be misleading. The amount of leads per publication is not proportionate to the amount you are likely to earn. That depends entirely on the leads themselves and your efforts.
However even allowing for duplication, which is bound to occur at some time, for approximately £115 per year you are going to get at least 40 sales leads per month.
They're not all going to be applicable to you but I hope you can see that only someone desperate not to succeed would not be getting all three publications.
Many of you who read this magazine are amateurs who want to stick with their day job and sell a few photographs to supplement their income. One other way of doing this is to put your work in with a photo library.
One specialist travel library, J Allen Cash, provides pictures for radio and TV listings magazines, holiday brochures, books, magazines as well as design and advertising companies. A regular newsletter and wants list is sent out - which many libraries now do. Some are starting to 'publish' on Internet... and maybe this is where sales-lead services will eventually go too.
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