Industry Insights: Please keep these photo submission guidelines in mind when pitching holiday gift guides

Hi, friends!

Thanks again to everyone who attended my recent Holiday Gift Guide Q&A Zoom with Jill and Alice. (And yes: You can still watch that Zoom recording and catch up on everything you have missed!).

During the Zoom event, Alice and Jill and myself all chose a few content areas to expand on a bit in our own newsletters in the future. For example, just a few days ago Jill did a great in-depth post on examples of holiday gift guide subject lines that work and Alice just did a few awesome posts on 5 essential details for your HGG post and another one on playing the long game.

Today, I wanted to touch on something that comes up often – from shopping stories to cocktail roundups to galleries, but especially in holiday gift guides. This is the process of submitting photos.

Believe it or not, the photo submission aspect of the pitch is incredibly important -- and, at times, a deal breaker. And yet, every single time I’m working on a story and give pretty specific instructions, I see people not following those instructions – and this can make it a lot harder to use that photo, and ultimately that product, in a story.

Here’s a few quick tips on the right and wrong things to do when submitting photos. This is something I've covered here before, but I'm going to try to go just a bit deeper today.

While some of these tips are a bit more evergreen – as they apply to my cocktail or food stories as well, I’d love if you can take the bulk of these tips into mind when submitting photos for holiday gift guides.

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