Getting your wedding published either in print or online is an exciting milestone for a wedding photographer.

Publication can lead to increased awareness, traffic, and bookings, all of which are great things.  Your brides love to see themselves in print, because let’s be honest, no matter how laid back the bride, she secretly wants to be the princess riding off into the sunset with her prince charming while the whole town applauds.

If getting your wedding photography featured is such a great thing, why don’t we all do it more often?  What is holding us back from having each and every wedding we shoot featured?

Over the next few weeks I am going to be talking about the subject of publication in depth, but today we are going to tackle the 5 most common reason that photographers avoid submitting their weddings for publication.

The process is non-standardized and confusing.

If, by some miracle or act of God, you do continue to pursue publication in the face of the aforementioned overwhelming odds it can be hard to know what is required of you because each site seems to have different requirements for submission.

One site accepts submissions via email and wants a zip file of 10 images.  Another site wants a minimum of 75 images uploaded via their proprietary software.  Yet another site wants a link to a blog post.

Once you nail down submission format, then there is file size.  Do they require full resolution or do they want images with a maximum dimension of 700px?

It can seem like a job in and of itself just to locate all of the requirements.

I am too busy.

As a professional photographer, especially those of us who work from our home studio, you are often called on to be gopher and chauffeur and copy repair man along with the office manager, marketing and PR department, and sometimes, if you are lucky, you might even get to take some photos.  Being a one man show can feel like you are on the treadmill at turbo speed – and someone else is holding the remote.

When you are kept so busy with the grind of running your own business, it can be easy to let tasks that will help meet your long term goals fall by the wayside as you are bombarded by the constant stream of  day to day urgencies that can seem more important at the time.

This problem is compounded when you do not have a good system in place to help streamline the tasks that will help boost your long term growth and outreach, like submitting weddings for publication.

If photographers do make the time to work on publication, it is often relegated to quarterly cram sessions or during the off season in the winter.  These marathon submission sessions can lead to stress and burn out and after hours of staring at your own work you can easily get sick of it and start doubting that any of it is any good in the first place.  You wish that there was a method to make submitting each wedding as you edit easy, but you just don’t have the time.

There are so many blogs and publications out there and I don’t know where to start.

For the sake of research  I went ahead and Googled “Wedding Inspiration Blogs” and in 0.33 seconds received back…36,900,000 hits.

When you are looking for a place to submit that can be a little overwhelming.  Photographers look at the near 40 million results and hit instant decision paralysis and information overload.

Oh.My.God.

How do I even start to narrow this down?  I don’t even know where to start.

Our brains don’t like confrontation, so when they come upon a situation where there are such an overwhelming number of options to choose from and no clear path, your brain is probably going to try to convince you that it will be so much easier to just go sit on the couch and forget you ever had this silly idea in the first place.

I’m not sure that my images are good enough.

This objection can be a big one for newer photographers.  We tend to spend a lot of time early in our career looking to others for  inspiration and guidance.

Don’t get me wrong, I love perusing Pinterest for photography inspiration.  Occasionally I will even see an image and spent some time reverse engineering the image to determine how the photographer arrived at that outcome.  This can be a great way to spark some creativity, but too much time spent comparing ourselves to others inevitably leads to self-doubt.

When you are submitting a wedding for publication you are essentially putting yourself out there to be weighed and measured by the world at large and that can be scary as hell.

Those images that you were in love with last week suddenly seem to dull a little bit in your eyes.  You start to doubt if that session theme that seemed so groundbreaking when you were deep in the creative process really has the chops to stand up to the work of others.

Fear of rejection in a biggie and we all face it at one time or another.

Once bitten, twice shy.

Other photographers had no problem submitting their weddings for publication – the first time.

They were so excited to send in their submission to their publication of choice and could practically see their wedding on that coveted inspiration blog each night when they closed their eyes.

A week went by.

Maybe 10 days, and then they received…the refusal letter.  You can always tell when someone is shooting you down because the first line that shows in the preview of your mail client is always so nice.  Then you read on to the part where they politely inform you that your event is not a good match for their readers at this time.

Ah, the crushing weight of disappointment.  It can seem like the rejection is a reflection of you as a person or of your skills as a photographer.

That first rejection can lead to self-doubt and hours of obsessing over each image and wondering why you weren’t selected.  Can’t they see how much time your client put into those mason jar centerpieces?  What do you mean the German Sheppard ring bearer is not a sure bet for inspiring swooning in their readers?  What are those people thinking?

All of the fears that we just discussed in the heading above seem to be realized.  How can you move past the rejection and move on?

Did any of those reasons sound like you?  Over the next few weeks I will be writing about how to combat those issues and increase your chances of publication.

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