Did you know that one of the easiest ways to sell fine art prints is to first sell the work to magazines? This is so counterintuitive, I know. However, time and time again I am reminded of this fact.

Recently a smaller regional publication purchased a photograph of a silhouetted wild horses on an island with a sailboat behind her. This was a special issue they were running that was all about boating communities and to the art director, this photograph perfectly encapsulated the essence of boating in the Crystal Coast region of North Carolina.

Although the photograph was created as horizontal composition, layout and design did what layout and design often does - they cropped the photo to fit their own personal artistic vision for the magazine. In this instance, they cut the photo vertically and turned it into a full page spread.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Many of my cover images, for instance, were actually horizontal / landscape-oriented photos when I submitted them. But the editors wanted just a piece of the photograph to be the quintessence of that month’s issue of the magazine.

No problem.

I shoot “loose” for a reason. I provide the largest file sizes I can for a reason. I don’t like to crop in on my photos when post processing for a reason.

Yes, when you are selling your work, you need to learn to shoot and process your photos differently than you did before going into business.

The issue of the magazine just hit newsstands last week and along with a check for the photograph, I received my complimentary issue of the magazine in the mail a couple days ago.

By this morning I already had emails in my inbox from people asking if they could purchase a print of the photograph.

This happens A LOT.

Me, I am more of a fine art photographer than I am a stock, editorial, or photojournalist type of photographer. It is the style I like. And although I absolutely love the experience of walking up to a newsstand and seeing my photography in magazines, my decision to prioritize art and creativity has cost me many sales to magazines over the years.

I don’t care, though. I am an artist. This is my style. While some editors don’t feel like it “fits” in their magazines, many others do. And best of all, I routinely sell large fine art prints afterword, thanks to magazines purchasing my work first.

If you stop and think about it, this is a pretty cool business strategy – at least I think so.

One of the biggest challenges all artists face in the world of business is getting their work in front of potential buyers at the right time. This is called marketing. Marketing demands forethought and strategy and time and work and money. But one of my marketing strategies is to let a magazine pay me to market my photographs for me.

While never once have I had a magazine editor come to me and ask if they can purchase a photograph they saw on the wall of a gallery or someone’s house, the reverse is one of the primary ways in which I sell prints.

Photo buyers are everywhere. They are on social media, just like you. They read magazines, just like you. They watch tv, YouTube, and stumble upon photography they want to buy in a myriad of different ways.

Several years ago, the same thing happened from a photograph I published in the exact same magazine – only that time it resulted in close to $10,000 in sales.

I have shared this story before here in other articles, but I am going to do so again to help make my point here.

The photograph in question was a simple black and white photo of a pair of hands holding a pile of clams. I had spent the day out raking up clams from an estuary and before throwing them on the grill on my deck, I thought this might be a cool photograph.

Years later, a magazine reached out to me and asked if I would write a short article about how intricately woven living on the coast could be with nature. The prime directive was that it couldn’t have anything to do with hurricanes, catching fish, or surfing.

Although I lived in Montana at the time, I had grown up around the Outer Banks of North Carolina – a fact that the editor knew well. So, I decided to write a story about subsistence living, harvesting shellfish like clams and oysters, and how that there is an anthropological theory that it was shellfish collecting, and the subsequent punch of omega-3 fatty acids that came with this, that may have helped modern humans evolve the big brains we have today. And the lone photograph they published with this short story was my black and white photos of clams.

A month later I received an email from an interior designer asking to purchase a 40x60 print of this photograph for an office building she was working on. While on the phone with this designer, she mentioned that the CEO of the company had grown up in Africa and was in love with crocodiles – so much so he had a crocodile skull in the middle of the boardroom table.

“Oh,” I remarked. “I have some very interesting black and white fine art pieces of crocodiles. Let me send over one for you to check out.”

This turned into a 6-foot print sale of my crocodile for the boardroom (a photo, I might add, that I created while working on another assignment). Which then turned into another 40x60 inch print of two red-billed tropicbirds to go next to a living wall being installed in the building.

All said and done, it was close to $10,000 in sales – after the standard 15% industry discount that is usually given to interior designers.

And all of this from seeing my photograph in a magazine – a photograph, I should add, that was little more than a snapshot I had created on a 12mp Nikon D300 camera many years before.

This is often how the business of wildlife photography works.

I want to share just one more example of this with you though, because I think it also helps to show yet another way in which magazine work translates into big sales elsewhere.

Years ago I did an assignment for a magazine that had me working alongside pinniped biologists (people who study seals and sea lions). The winter of 2011/2012 sent countless seals spilling south from the arctic and the Gulf of Maine down to southern beaches that winter, and researchers were trying to figure out exactly why.

Several years after the story ran, someone reached out to me from a university. This person had been the layout and design artist for the magazine at the time of the story and she now was a creative director at a major university. The university’s hospital was looking to do away with the institutional feel of your typical hospital and create an immersive experience of nature when walking down hallways. And the creative director reaching out to me was the one in charge of finding photographers and purchasing work. Given the size and extent of the job, and the fact that the work would need to be created specifically for the hospital, we were looking at a $30,000 gig.

And once again, all because of photos sold to a magazine.

While creating art is my true passion, I focused my efforts on selling work to magazines for this reason. The magazine pays me. Then, they show my work to potentially millions of people (depending on the magazine, of course). And although not all those people who see my photographs illustrating a story in a magazine are art buyers, some of them may very well be. And it takes just 1 of them to create a sale.

The business of wildlife photography is a complex web. Sales to a magazine today can turn into a major project for a hospital, steady work selling art to high end interior designers, or even just the random reader who wants to decorate their own house – as you have seen above.