I Have Read About 200,000 Magazine Submissions. Here Is What I'd Never Do Again If I Were Sending One

I run five independent print magazines. Since 2019 roughly 200,000 submissions have passed through our inboxes, and for a long time I read most of them myself, at night, with the cat on the keyboard. The cat has strong opinions on beauty retouching. So do I now.

What surprised me most is how rarely talent decides anything. Most declines happen for reasons that have nothing to do with how good the photographer is. Here are the ones I'd fix first if I were on the other side.

The folder called FINAL_final_2

Every week someone sends thirty of their best images from five different shoots. A beauty close-up, a street portrait, a wedding, a moody forest, a dog. All good. None of it is a story. A magazine prints spreads, and a spread needs images that belong together: one shoot, one idea, one light. Six to twelve frames that argue the same point beat thirty frames that each argue their own.

If you're not sure, do what our editor Leo Marchetti does: put the images in a row and say out loud what the series is about in one sentence. If the sentence has the word "and" in it three times, it's two series.

The watermark across the model's face

I understand the fear. But editors can't evaluate what they can't see, and we're not going to steal your photo of Mia Laurent in a yellow coat. If a magazine wanted to steal work, it would have cheaper ways to go out of business.

Credits: "me"

Who did the makeup? Who styled it? Who is the model and does she have a release signed? "Me" answers none of these. Credits are part of the work. They also protect you later: when a client, an agency or an immigration lawyer asks "who did what on this page", a clean credit list is the answer, and a missing one is a problem that only grows with time.

The email that starts with "Dear Sir or Madam"

Nobody at a fashion magazine has been a Sir since 1962. Write to a person, or at least to the magazine by name, and say in one line what you're sending and why it fits. Then stop. The images will do the rest or they won't.

The 47 versions of the same frame

Your favourite image, in colour, in black and white, cropped, uncropped, warmer, cooler. Pick one. The editor is choosing a story, and you're asking her to choose your edit for you. She has 400 other emails. She'll choose none.

Sending nothing because "it's probably not good enough"

This is the one that actually hurts. I know people who've shot for years and never submitted anywhere, because a rejection would be proof. It isn't. A decline means this series didn't fit this issue of this magazine this month. That's all the information it contains. We say no to work we love every week because the issue is full.

What I did about it

After enough years of this I built the thing I wished existed: a place where creators submit a series once, an editor replies within about a week, inside pages cost nothing, and every published page gets a verification link anyone can check without logging in. It's called Artells Media and it holds all five of our magazines. There's also a monthly award with no entry fee where the community rates work blind, and the top three get covers.

If you've got a series sitting in a folder called FINAL_final_2, this is me asking you to send it. And if you want to try the whole thing properly, your first month of PRO is on me: artellsmedia.com/pro/redeem/ARTELLSMEDIAGIFT. The cat approves.

Marina Abramova, publisher and editor at Artells Media