Photo-Text Packages

In 1998, Jim started packaging my photography and text into single articles for British Heritage Magazine. This turned into a winning combination, and the series has now extended to 27 articles and 5 columns.

Key to this is Jim's ability to produce both text and photography to your order, on deadline, at a very high quality. For an example of this, view his photo-text package on Lady Godiva, commissioned by British Heritage and published by them in January 2001.

This is a strong approach that can work well for you. Normally, only the biggest magazines can send a reporter to Europe on a feature assignment; most magazines simply pick up what they can, and scramble to find appropriate photos they can afford. British Heritage shows how you can break out of this rut. When they send Jim to Great Britain they dictate the content and approach, make sure that the photos are exactly the ones they want to illustrate the article, and expect the highest quality in both text and photos. Best of all, they pay no more for this content than they would if they had purchased it from so many newspaper writers on vacation — less, if you count the staff time saved by not having to scrounge for images or rewrite text. By combining multiple photo-text packages of this sort, we can make the economics work.

The game changes when you need a book-length package — and Jim has done two of them. Countryman Press, WW Norton's travel imprint, used Jim's talents to produce two titles in their Explorers Guide series, The Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains (now in its 2nd edition), and The Shenandoah Valley and the Mountains of the Virginias (issued in April 2005); each of these approaches 200,000 words and 100 images. When you need to produce a package of this sort, organization and revision take over as the primary challenges. In this, Jim is a tested and proven commodity.