How To Find Fashion Magazines to Submit To
Finding magazines to submit your work to can seem like an impossible task when you first get started. This world of fashion is vast, and if you're new to the industry, there's a lot to learn, and learning curve is steep. This industry is sooooo different from the wedding world, or the portrait world. So hopefully this little letter will give you an idea of where to go!
The first place to look, and my favourite, has to be Instagram. There are SO many indie fashion magazines which take either submissions, or are open to receiving pitches for editorials. The way I do research on magazines is I head to the page of a magazine I already know about, for example, Atlas Magazine (the magazine I co-founded many years ago). From there, if you hit the little downward pointing arrow on the far right of the accounts' name (as seen below), a dropdown menu will appear. This is Instagram showing you "related accounts" that it thinks you might like.
From here, you can go down a rabbit hole. Keep repeating the same process on the other indie magazines you discover. I personally like to do this on a desktop, where I can have a spreadsheet open and make a note of the names of the magazines that I discover, their email addresses, names of the editors, and any other specific notes I want to make (ie. do they only take film submissions?).
Second, is simply to head onto good old Google. You can search for lots of different keywords like: Indie fashion magazines, sustainable fashion magazines, submission based magazines... you get the idea. Get on Google, and start to do some digging.
Another thing I love to do is to look on the Instagram profiles of other fashion photographers, and see who they've submitted their work to! There are SO many fashion photographers on Instagram, and lots of them get their work featured on a regular basis. I am constantly discovering new magazines thanks to my peers. Whenever I find one I like, if I haven't got my trusty spreadsheet to hand, I simply save the magazine into a folder on Instagram (see below) or a I take a screenshot of it on my phone so that I don't forget what it's called. DON'T expect yourself to remember the names of all of these magazines. A lot of them have really random names, sometimes totally made up, so it's not easy to remember them all.
You may also have heard of Kavyar. This is a website that was created a few years ago as a hub for all of the submission based fashion magazines to live, and easily take submissions. While it is convenient, I don't agree with the business model that this website has provided magazines. It works under the premise that magazines now ask for payment from photographers if they want to submit to them, which is ridiculous. We as photographers are providing the content these magazines need. We already put our time and often cash into the shoots themselves, so we should absolutely not have to spend money to get these images published as well.
That being said, the platform is good, and does provide you with a place to easily search for magazines. So use it, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE never pay to submit your work.
