I thought I'd share some of the feedback we've received from our survey sent out to contributors initially, to help guide us on our way forward into future editions. We want to make this magazine even more special and we need YOUR help to do that by filling in our reader survey.
Here are some of the points made - things readers liked and where we have room for improvement:
"Colorful and jampacked full of beautiful images. The magazine also stayed true to its title and 'mission' 'This Detailed Life'."
"The tactile feeling, the colours and the content!"
"I love how it flowed through with the themes. I also liked the different voices that were used throughout."
"Yes, definitely inspirational! I particularly liked the photo projects - lots of photos and just the right amount of text to set them off"
"Beautifully set out and great quality"
"I loved the quality of the prints. My photo was very true to its colours so it was perfect. I also loved the contributors index."
"Variety of images and artists"
"Beautiful layout, good quality thick pages."
"I loved the variety of images, the stories behind the projects and just pretty much the whole thing really."
"Lovely quality paper, interesting photos"
"The flow of the images, the articles, themed sections"
And where we can improve:
"Seemed like there were lots of images by a few photogs, I think more diversity would be better. Wasn’t huge on the rainbow trend, a little cliche. More articles!!"
"Lack of diversity. Limited text/article to read."
"In some pages, the images seemed to disappear into the gutter and felt a bit cut off, maybe a bit more space for the next one?"
"Would like to see articles by some “unknowns” too"
"Maybe a few more articles? I loved what there was and was eager to read more!"
"I think the balance was pretty good but I wouldn't complain if the galleries were larger"
"I felt like a lot of the photos were all very similar in style, dark and moody."
Everyone said they would recommend the magazine to a friend which is fab news! You can also read some of the lovely reviews we've been sent on our reviews page like this one from Lyndsey Bowman:
"I just wanted to take a minute to tell you how amazing I think your magazine is! I got mine in the mail yesterday and I laughed, I cried, and I smiled a ton. You and your team have created such an emotionally powerful magazine and wow was I ever inspired! So so many amazing artists and stories. I love love loved it and I am beyond grateful to have my work in such an incredible magazine! Thank you again for including me and I can not wait for the next magazine."
We've also had some good suggestions for future themes, some of which will work well as categories within an overall theme as we'd like to have a wide scope within each edition to showcase a good variety and include as many photographers as possible. To help us reach more photographers, do please share about us on social media to help spread the word! Submissions will be opening for Edition Two in September and our Cover Contest will be announced very soon! (Sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear!)
Here at This Detailed Life we are committed to making the magazine and blog as vibrant and diverse as possible whilst maintaining quality, design and feel.
We'd love to include more variety in genre for example. I've had a chat with wedding photographer Tash (Love Luella) this week who is going to write a blog about wedding details for us and we just recently shared a post about Melani Joubert's street photography, she documented the homeless in South Africa during the pandemic.
We hope we continue to receive plenty of family, documentary, macro, nature and still life images all telling their own stories for each theme but do let us know in the comments what genres you'd like to see more of and who we can approach to encourage submissions in each area. We only have a limited amount of time to source more diversity so we need your help sharing the magazine with others who may submit in order to share other voices.
Similarly, when it comes to racial diversity, we hope to share voices from any and all ethnicities from all over the world in TDL. I have been working on diversifying our Instagram feed in the hope of attracting more black photographers to tag #thisdetailedlife since searching our hashtag it does appear to be predominantly white, therefore so too is our feed. A few examples of some of the amazing images by black photographers I have found and featured recently are in this gallery:
Row 2: Murielle Cascone, Chaneen Saliee
Thank you so much to all the photographers (linked above) who were happy for me to share their images when asked. I would recommend you follow them all - SO much inspiration!
I started writing about the Black Lives Matter movement back in June and will be publishing that post this evening with a few resources I found helpful as well as how we're working on being anti-racist.
We asked for ideas for themes and categories in future issues and got some great responses! For now, we'd still like to keep our overall theme fairly broad and see what kind of work we get sent, how people interpret the theme and suggested category ideas. We want to see if we can attract more genres and styles as we'd like to be eclectic and diverse as mentioned above. I for one dabble in many kinds of photography and love to get ideas and inspiration from various genres even if I don't shoot them myself.
If you'd like to have your say about the magazine, you can fill in the feedback form here (it can be anonymous) or leave us a comment below.
A few statistics about Edition One:
227 cover entries
Appx 200 photographers submitted
Over 1600 images received
47 project/article proposals (240 images)
114 photographers from 18 countries featured
208 images published (including articles and interview)
12 projects/articles printed
(more projects/articles to come on our blog)
Magazines shipped to 20 different countries around the world
55% of sales were within the UK
45% international sales
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