How Illustrators Get Work in Magazines

Winning illustration commissions in magazines involves more than just a strong portfolio. It’s about making the right targeted pitch to the editor who actually does the hiring, and getting that array of specifically titled illustrations that fit the brief. These matter for editorial illustration commissions. The money and rights questions are part of the commission from the start, so an illustrator must be ready to discuss usage rights, cancellation terms, and kill fees from the very beginning.

The Person Who Actually Hires

So, what does your average magazine illustration commission actually look like on the editorial buying side?

For example, in Girls' Life magazine, art director Chun Kim is the contact that a freelance editorial illustrator should actually be getting to, specifically: [email protected]. On a magazine masthead page, the art director is the most crucial hire-spot. And those contacts are crucial because just like with advertising, magazines don’t tend to do hiring from passive submissions or freelance illustration award issue contents alone: an art director is more likely to commission editorial illustration from an illustrator whose name they already have, and for a specific story – not to produce a crowd of so-so pitches from unknown artists

The Portfolio That Gets the Reply

Right now, how you assemble that portfolio so that the art director’s eyes are drawn to it remains elusive: the only advice out there is that an illustrator who emailed 180 art directors concluded that around 20 strong pieces were needed to show capability. There’s currently no primary source rule that an editorial illustrator needs to use. Instructions for assembling and focusing an editorial illustration portfolio have not yet been found.

Finding the Right Contact

So many freelance illustrators seem to put their portfolio into magazines without thinking about who they are pitching to, and via what channel.

The approach to illustration hiring is very specific at a magazine’s editorial level, and begins by profiling names, functions, and email channels. Contacting the right person will get your portfolio in front of a freelancer editor’s eyes, with the right illustration style. That magical person to introduce yourself to is the art director

Illustrations matter a lot in the end, and most commissioned illustrations that appear in the magazine at the end have benefitted from knowing someone in charge of hiring editorial art directly. In many places, that name is the Editor, the Art Director, or sometimes the Design Director. Unlike an illustration that won a design award some other way, connections with art directors can help.

See? This stuff isn’t so very weird, and matches closely how all the other kinds of illustration hiring happens too—including other creative fields. So if you’re starting out: spend as much time as you can getting to know the Editor, Art Director, or Design Director at the start.

The Pitch Email

Once you’ve found an illustration editor, independent freelance illustrator Matt Paden recommends hitting them with a targeted approach: a short subject line, a 1–2 sentence introduction, a quick value statement, and a link to your portfolio.

Make the pitch professional and say your availability, but don’t flood the editor with attachments and usage negotiation pressures. That editor wants to hire on pure talent and specific requirements after all. Only bring up tricky topics like fees or levels of image rights after the person has named your design interests at the start.

Rights, Usage, and the Kill Fee

So how much will your skills earn you, and what happens if a commissioned illustration is killed before publication? Rights and usage terms like that are weighed up based on the predicted interior usable dimensions in the magazine itself.

In many cases, the first freelance editorial illustration assignment that you’re given will be a fixed project with a flat fee, but the rights will be determined based on that experience level. This just happens because magazines want control, and so they use up an illustrator’s rights when it first becomes convenient.

To be fair, this amounts to a kind of trade-off from the editorial side. A flat fee is simple and it's fairly good for the artist’s cash flow. If the illustration is a perfect fit with the magazine’s design style, more people may eventually see and value the illustrator's work.

But you keep copyright, and the payment for each illustration includes usage rights That's right, in some cases an editorial illustration assignment will actually be killed before publication for one reason or another. In cases like that, the editor will typically reimburse 50% or possibly full costs, a restitution price often called a “kill fee”, based on the stage of completion. The kill fee is seen as covering cancellation money as well as canceled assignments. But as specialized as it sounds, the exact fee percentage varies by situation. So with this kind of illustration, this can be challenging.

For the purpose of showcasing my understanding of the metaphor, “Everybody around here, business-class aspirants, is a glutton for kill-fee kinds of places. Around the globe it turns out, the kill fees get trashed and the boiler-room illustrator keeps losing more works to the killed project scrapheap.”

Was that something like what you had in mind as a usage metaphor? About the nature of editorial work?

Look, from a magazine's perspective, that’s fair enough. But somewhere, some time, things should tip because it’s in the artist’s interest that a fee is set. The 2018 Letters of Agreement issued by the Graphic Artists Guild suggest a range from 20% to 100% – of the negotiated amount of the agreed total fee – based on stage of completion of the illustration, for the canceled pieces.

And reversion to the illustrator is super-important here: because even though a client may still use an editorial illustration if the payment for it changes, it keeps rights back to the editorial illustrator artist, and all original drawing materials.