01/19/2023
Never have and never will submit to those vanity magazines.
I don’t submit my photos for publication because I looked at the numbers and came to the unavoidable conclusion that vanity magazines are a making money with YOUR art. Kavyar, in particular, is a technologically sophisticated platform designed to take advantage of aspiring photographers and models. Consider Vigour magazine (a vanity magazine). Specifically, let's look at what they published in November 2022.
Vigour is what's known as a "vanity magazine", and is one of several hundred magazines on the Kavyar platform.
Each month, Vigour publishes magazine issues in different categories. They have the Open Theme category, the N**e & Bo***ir category, the Fashion & Beauty category, etc.
Open Theme: 11 issues
N**e & Bo***ir: 10 issues
Fashion & Beauty: 30 issues
The Black and White: 4 issues (it was a slow month)
The Fashion Art: 5 issues
Add it all up: In the month of November alone, Vigour published sixty (60) different magazine issues!
Each issue is approximately 50-60 pages, so this vanity magazine is publishing around 55 x 60 = 3,300 pages monthly.
Each issue has ten photoshoots, so SIX HUNDRED aspiring photographers and models were published in November alone, just for Vigour magazine.
There are hundreds of vanity magazines, and almost all of them are on a site called MagCloud where anyone can purchase issues for somewhere around $35 each.
Need another example? How about Kavyar’s “SELIN” magazine. In December, 2022, they published an astonishing 80 (!!!) volumes. That comes out to over 5,000 pages of photos and nearly 1,000 aspiring models and photographers.
One of Kavyar’s “elite” magazines, called Malvie, has published over six hundred issues since April, 2020.
It goes on and on. Thousands upon thousands of volumes published every single month, relentlessly.
Have you figured it out yet? Do the math, how much money have they made on all of YOUR content?
The only sources of revenue are from people who purchase these issues, or people who pay to be featured or "fast-tracked" in the review process. Since each issue of a magazine like Vigour has ten photoshoots, there are about ten models and ten photographers who *might* be incentivized to purchase that issue at $35. And maybe their parents, grandparents, and a few hair and makeup artists.
With only 20-ish potential customers per issue, vanity publishers like Vigour need lots of issues and they need to publish them fast and cheaply. As more and more people submit images for publication, they keep adding more and more issues for the appropriate category that month.
Their business model requires them to publish at extremely high volume at near zero cost. The only way to do this is by accepting and publishing mediocre images. Thousands of them, month after month.
I promised to explain what they mean by "vanity magazine". You probably figured it out by now, but here it is. The people publishing these rags are taking advantage of (mostly young) people's vanity. Ouch.
Getting published alongside six hundred photographers and models who were also published that month, in the same magazine, is about the lowest bar imaginable.
That, my friends, is why I do not submit my pictures to vanity magazines like Vigour.
