Recently I was approached on Flickr by Wendy, the pic­ture rep­re­sen­ta­tive for a lifestyle mag­a­zine called The Robb Report. She found my image of the Seat­tle Space Nee­dle and wanted to use it for the cover of their mag­a­zine. Hav­ing never dealt with this sort of thing before I was both excited and ner­vous. Luck­ily Wendy was very easy to work with : we agreed on a price and photo credit options and I sent her a high-res TIFF. A few weeks later I received the cover and a PDF of a magazine!

While set­ting a price for your pho­tos for the first time can be a lit­tle daunt­ing, there are lots of resources just a Google away. Pho­tog forums are *full* of advice and opin­ions, so soak it up and choose for your­self what price you want to go for. It doesn’t hurt to put the exact usage allowances in the email, if you’re not specif­i­cally sign­ing a con­tract, so you can go back and ref­er­ence if things get weird.

Ulti­mately it’s up to you how much you think your photo is worth, and how impor­tant it is for you to get the expo­sure some­thing like this will bring. If you’re a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, or aspire to be one, you have to take into account things like print run, cost of pub­li­ca­tion, bud­get of pub­li­ca­tion, and whether or not your pho­to­graph could eas­ily be replaced with some­thing from Getty Images.

I’m hon­ored that this spe­cific pub­li­ca­tion decided to use my photo. Thanks very much to Wendy and The Robb Report for mak­ing things easy on me the first time around!