Become Better Photographer: Do you need to sell printed products as a photographer? with Vanessa Joy

October 21, 2019

*For more information visit AdoramaTV YT page, and of course you can keep up with Vanessa on Instagram @VanessaJoy

Are you selling albums to your clients? According to famous photographer Vanessa Joy from Adorama TV album sales are not only great course of additional income but also an essential part of a complete photography service.

According to Vanessa Joy: “if you’re not selling wedding albums… I honestly think that you are not completing your job as a photographer. Your job is to be a storyteller from start to finish, and part of telling that story is finding a way to document that story in a tangible form, so that later your client can sit down with their friends, family, kids, grandkids and recount the story of their wedding day… When I sit down with my clients, it’s not a sale session, it is me trying to help them create a final product that they’re going to love and cherish…”

“I will be honest… yes I do make more money by selling albums… because I do sell more pages than their original package but it’s all part of the service that I’m offering them. They don’t have to buy anything additional… but they usually do, because they enjoy the story the way I show them it can be laid out… The first thing that you want to do with albums is …. You need to pre design.”

“Now I know that sounds like a sales tactic and you are going to design it bigger than the album that they have… but hear me out, if you’re doing wedding albums you already know that if your clients are picking the pictures they are taking for ever… and you have clients that it’s been a year, two years, three years from their wedding, and they still don’t have their album, and that’s your fault, because you don’t have a process for creating that album that is painless and convenient for you. When I first started, I would let my clients pick their wedding pictures and it was disastrous…. they didn’t know what to pick… they would never pick any details, they didn’t know how to tell a story with images. Now I have a designer that works with me, so I’m outsourcing this, she picks all the pictures that tells the story best. I don’t even tell her how many, you know pages they already have in their package towards their albums. I just say tell this story best even if they cut out and delete all the pages that we added in to tell more of the story… the images that are there are better laid out… They’re better laid out, better chosen. We go over all of their pages one by one either in my studio or via video chat.”

“As we’re going through them I use keywords. I reference pictures and moments of the day with vocabulary that I know is about their relationship style. If they’re taking pictures out I’m not gonna use kind words like remove or take away I’m going to say what it actually is .. delete -you want me to delete these pictures ….because while they do get a USB and all the digital files they’re never gonna look at them. Your goal is to finish that album design during the album session, it’s usually a two or three hour session… yes I know that seems like a lot, but you know it’s a lot more two three years later, when your clients still haven’t ordered their album, and you lose money that way, so take the time sit down with them. Don’t do those emails back and forth… because then are just sending you a list of changes. You can make the changes right there in front of them.”

“I use on the Alpha Designer… it’s amazing, it’s fast they just see the page… I make changes and they see an update on their screen. In addition they’re also understanding what it’s like to make changes, and they started seeing what looks good, what doesn’t look good and their changes are less because of it.”

“And then finally create packages that make sense for your clients, my clients a lot of people in Manhattan… a lot of people in North Jersey… they don’t have a lot of wall space, so i’m not selling huge 35-40 metal prints or anything like that. By the way, don’t think that you have to stop when you have maxed out the number of pages that can go into the albums. I’ve been doing two volume albums all year… it’s been great! My job is to guide them towards whatever story they want to tell and however they can tell it, with whatever budget that they have. “

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