An excellent blog I have been reading lately, Drinking with a Dead Man by John Loomis, has been documenting the growing pains of the author in the Miami market. Always very frank, I hope he doesn’t get ‘dooced’, and me also for writing this response…A recent post about the economic difficulties went like this;
This post is about what comes next. You are comfortably in a place where you are shooting 60-100+ days a year editorially. You are being paid for your services and customers are satisfied and returning for their next jobs as well. You are traveling more, extending your geographic range of potential commissions. You have built enough flexibility into your finances to accept short-term debt fairly easily when assignments require it (last minute trips to very expensive French islands, perhaps). You are saving money, paying off old debts, planning for the future. You are running a business!
But at the same time, from month to month, you know that if a few checks don’t come when they should (should: cynically calculating they will only be late by 30 days), and if, God forbid, your car needs any significant repairs or you get sick, you are right back to the dramatic, wind-swept edge of the cliff, nervously looking at the impending due date for your Platinum business AMEX (a bill swollen by the up-front expenses of your clients) and rent check.
And this is the big rub… in photography, wealth (or even being comfortable), seems to be an illusion. If you are working a lot, getting paid handsome fees, selling a few stock images here and there, and not blowing your cash or working within a ridiculous amount of overhead, you should be making some coin, right?! Well, maybe.
I agree with many of his conclusions, but I wanted to explore more of this.
Good post, seems you are doing the math and realizing that editorial is not a business. Let’s say that again, editorial is NOT a business.
My advice is this: don’t get on the plane. Don’t take any jobs with significant expenses. It makes no economic sense. Here are the facts. Lets estimate that you can work 100 days for clients for example. If that were all editorial, and the average invoice is 1500$, that is 150,000$ in gross income. Here is where the delusion sets in, most of that is not your money. In reality, it is the fee income only, and only a part of that. Because the “business’ part of you has to make money too, as well as paying yourself.
So what is the reality? Less than half of the 150,000 is yours, more like 40,000, and out of that you have to pay heath insurance, insurance, taxes, rent etc. And you have to revolve credit cards that probably have close to 20,000 in debt at any one time, all the while waiting on cheques that come in 90+ days.
So is it getting any clearer? This is absolutely not a business. And it is two factors, the ratio of expense to fees, and cash flow as you have identified. Which is why I say “don’t get on the plane.” When the fees are near 500$, any expense money is dragging you down. Even meals are dragging you down.
So what are the solutions, well, obviously diversification is the only way, but also refusing to do those travel jobs, and also finding clients that have moved to online invoicing, where the turnaround is closer to 10 days. For example, working those same 100 days a year for the New York Times, at 200/day, sounds like it is crazy right? Only 20,000/year, But, and this is the big but, there are no expenses-mainly because they don’t pay expenses, which is funny and cruel at the same time, but with the online billing, and the direct deposit, in 10 days, that is pure profit. And it is only 2 days out of every week, leaving the other three days to get corporate work at significantly higher rates. Alright you say, why not limit yourself to 2 days a week for magazine clients-again, the answer is those jobs take significantly longer, and the expenses kill you, plus, this is not the days of marking up film and rentals, those are all gone, so there is no value beyond promotion in working editorially.
I think what is the problem is that you are a talented photographer in a satellite market. So you can command an outsized share of the editorial jobs in that market because your work is better than other players in that market. But I feel this is only hurting you in the long run, perhaps in a short run it is not so bad, a way to build a reputation, but long term, editorial, it will put you out of business.
My advice is to abandon editorial until they figure out what their model really is, how the internet is going to affect their publication strategy. Already some signs, LIFE is moving online only. Look for other publications to do the same, it is not hard to imagine Fortune and Business Week there, we are all getting our news online, it is a short step to imagine getting analysis online too. The consumer magazine space will be left as a pure marketing space, a way to promote products and lifestyles and consumerism. The things that you and I are good at photographing have no value in that arena.
It is great that you have a rep behind you, but prestige aside, the value that they derive from you exceeds the value you derive from them, looking only at it on a monetary basis, long term. Honestly, in years gone by, magazine clients would have flown a talented photographer like yourself from New York to these locations because there was a dearth of talent in smaller markets. Or at least it “seemed” that way, the internet has made it possible to find the great photographers that do exist, but it is a mixed blessing. And in years gone by, the NY shooter would have marked up film and processing, padded expenses, and maybe just have gotten by on that kind of job, plus added tears. I don’t believe that is the case anymore, costs are controlled too tightly (strangled?) there is no economic sense to sending a NY photographer when as good or better is found locally, aided by the growth in representation and the long tail of the internet in finding those shooters.
I said that the value they derive from you is greater than the value you derive from them-what do I mean? Well, the main misconception about representation is that you are working for the magazine in this relationship-really you are working for the representative, it is the rep, or the “aggregators” who make the most in this equation. The reason is that the cost of adding additional photographers in smaller markets is amortized by the value added to the agency, they get to capture more jobs and offer a more valuable service, dependable quality in more markets. When photo editing staffs are being cut, one-stop-shopping becomes more valuable. In days past, a large photo editing crew made reps less necessary, since there were more editors with more time and more knowledge to deploy individual freelance photographers. Now there are fewer editors doing the same work, and having an agency to essentially “sub-edit” and procure photographers is invaluable.
The second misconception is that editorial can be a “loss-leader” for promotion and as a way to secure other better paying work. That might have been true in the days where editorial was a break-even proposition, but now it is a significant drain on finances, and honestly, being able to stay in business long enough for the halo effect to kick in will likely drive you into bankruptcy. Jobs need to be profitable as jobs, not as leverage to other work. Hardly any other business would dare operate in this way. This is not something that anyone wants to acknowledge, but look at the magazines themselves, they refuse to lose money on any of their properties-news divisions have to be profitable, and more profitable year over year. There is a Frontline PBS documentary on the news media, and at one point the CEO of the LA Times is confronted by the interviewer with the fact that newspapers are indeed profitable right now, and have been for many years, and his response is that, while that is true, it is shrinking and that enough is not enough anymore when there are shareholders. As photographers for us to accept incurring a loss on work to get work should not be acceptable when it is not acceptable to our clients either.
There is no “middle” any more, there are only “emerging” photographers, a term that makes me laugh-emerging to what? The same rates everyone was paid 30 years ago? And there are the established names. I find it very euphemistic to describe inexperienced college graduates and even unknown veterans as “emerging” when there is no plateau to emerge to. I think PDN invented the term to replace their ageist 30 under 30 marketing campaign. When you have a situation where the emerging photographer will do anything to get exposure, and even the talented name will take jobs for nothing to increase exposure, then there is nothing left for the working pro, who in past years did the bulk of the work. (If you haven’t figured it out already, yes that is me). I think the talented middle needs to move on, leave this space to be fought over and get on with earning a living, which enables things like long term projects, exhibitions, and the satisfaction of not being exploited for their willingness to do good work. Certainly take those jobs that peak the interest, do them for free even, but ignore the shiny carrot. It is an old saw that the good old days of photography are over, they have always been “over”-we have always complained about rates, but I do believe that the accelerated pace of change we are experiencing now due to the corporatization of media and digitization of media products is moving us in a direction where the old rules do not apply, so lets not get stuck in a legacy model of business practices.
Back in 97 us 12 fools in SF tried to force the business to turn editorial into a viable business by negotiating better rates with the magazines. It was called Editorial Photographers and it was a miserable failure primarily because photographers in LA and NYC did not follow thru what we were trying to do.
Photographers are as guilty as the magazines who hire them for failing to turn editorial into a business because we bought into the BS philosophy that editorial is a way to brake thru to other more lucrative parts of photography. Essentially always give their clients the stick to beat them with. We are a sorry ass bunch of fools if you ask me but as they say,”divide and conquer” and we were more than willing to jump right in. Sure that model will work for some but the overwhelming majority will fail, regardless of their talent or the efforts they put in it. I, personally have been rather blessed, but like John Loomis says, it can be gone in a hurry. We have only ourselves to blame. Way back when a part of the site was called “cost of doing business”, it said it all. AS interesting as Robert’s musings are, they are old and sad news but don’t blame others for this state of affairs, blame yourself. In the meantime, the mags keep crying wolf but laugh all the way to the bank. Those execs in the publishing, they are the ones running real businesses, we are the ones running fragile egos.
http://www.editorialphoto.com/
Well said, it is a sad story that bears repeating I think. 97 was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away…
Far far away indeed but anyone working for Businessweek and Forbes has us to thank. We were on our way to Time Warner but the other shoe dropped. Dot com busted and that was it.
I thought BW rolled all the increases back eventually?
I think many newer photographers get up in some kind of self validation with working for many magazines. Seeing your work in print is cool, staying in business, is priceless.
Back when I managed a bike shop, we often joked about some of our competitors that would take losses to get business. We always said their business plan was to take a loss on each sale, but make up for it in volume.
There’s nothing I can do about other photographer’s business practices, but I certainly can make mine as profitable as possible.