Welcome to Wonderful Machine!
Our Jumpstart page is here to help our photographers learn how to get the most out of their Wonderful Machine membership. Check back occasionally for updates and please let Bill know if you have questions, concerns, or suggestions.
When you hear from our Membership team that your profile is live, please sign in and check each of the tabs in the Account menu.
We initially populate your Bio with text from your About page, but you can revise it at any time. Your bio is an opportunity to express your interests, skills, creative process, and personality. Learn more about how to write a good bio in our article Expert Advice: Writing a Photographer Bio.
Please keep your Travel Plans up-to-date so clients can find you where you are and not where you aren’t.
We encourage you to share 5-10 photos from a single Unpublished project, provided that it’s available for (and appropriate for) licensing. Publications especially like seeing this content and we’re sometimes able to connect photographers to clients as a result of these self-assigned projects.
You can continue using the password that we sent to you or you can change it at any time.
We have 65 staff members around the world who are dedicated to your success. You can learn a bit about each of them on our Team page.
Since our staff members periodically change roles, it will usually be best to email our staff using these department email addresses:
Our associate photo editors select the pictures that we use on our home page each day. While we attempt to cycle through all of our photographers, our first priority is to find the strongest images to represent the group as a whole.
We have 10 publicists who research, report, write, edit, and share all sorts of content, including Photographer Spotlight articles about our member photographers that we post to our Published blog. Our main criteria for those articles is some combination of the following:
We share our blog posts and otherwise promote our member photographers on Facebook and Twitter, and of course we’re pretty active on Instagram too. We have an Instagram takeover at least once a month and we mix in a variety of other content. We use Pinterest to share the best examples of our photographers’ marketing materials (whether we designed them or not) including boards for Logos, Print Promos, Emailers, About Pages, PDF Portfolios, and Stationery & Business Cards. We can grab some of that stuff directly from your website, but please send us JPGs of your print promos, PDFs of your emailers, and copies of your PDF portfolio if you’d like us to consider adding them to any of our Pinterest boards. We also post Wonderful Machine news and business-y articles on our LinkedIn page. We share director’s reels and portfolio videos on YouTube.
Every other week, our Emailers person sends out an email promotion called Creative in Place, highlighting the geographic and creative diversity of our network of photographers to over 32,000 clients around the world. We will grab some photos directly from your website and we’ll usually also prompt you to submit additional images.
We occasionally place web ads. Sometimes we use photos and other times we’ll do text-only Google Ads.
We write Expert Advice, Specialty, Crew, and Pricing & Negotiating articles to provide you with useful intelligence about our industry (which is why we call our blog Intel!) Please contact our publicists if you’d like to suggest a topic that we haven’t covered before or if you see one of our older posts that needs updating.
We receive several Stock Requests each week from all sorts of clients, which we’ll pass along to you. Let us know if you need help negotiating any of those sales.
Over the past 17 years, we’ve been able to compile an unprecedented list of commercial and editorial photography prospects. We divide those prospective clients into three main types: publications, agencies, and brands. We have 16 people doing systematic research and individual email outreach to those prospects. Those emails promote individual member photographers and they sometimes lead to video calls where we can learn more about a client’s needs and share more about our roster of photographers and our shoot production capabilities. We’ll send you your “Promoted Notes” about once a year to let you know about all the things we’ve done for you in the previous 12 months. However, because we want to maximize our efforts for all of our photographers, we usually do not let you know each time we promote you. But we will let you know any time an individual client expresses an interest in you.
Our staff members are constantly interacting with all kinds of people in our industry, and as we gather valuable information we like to share it with you. Our Find Crew page makes it easy to search for assistants, stylists, location scouts, and more from all around the world. Our Find Agents page is the most comprehensive list of assignment agents, stock photo agencies, and galleries anywhere. Our Find Resources page covers intellectual property attorneys, workshops, festivals and more. Our Find Clients lists over 21,000 publications, agencies, and brands that regularly hire commercial and editorial photographers. In addition to the information that we share publicly (currently just our member photographers and select crew), we also offer subscriptions to our Premium Data for a small monthly fee. Please let Bill know if you’d like to learn more or if you have any crew, agents, or resources you’d like to recommend.
Wonderful Machine offers a wide range of expert Consulting Services for photographers including Design, Marketing, Photo Editing, Publicity, Pricing & Negotiating, and Shoot Production. No other company in the world offers all these services under one roof, which allows our designers, marketing specialists, photo editors, publicists, and producers to easily collaborate to give you comprehensive, integrated support. Your membership entitles you to a 20% discount off all of our normal rates (except for shoot production and data). Most of our marketing services are billed automatically each month. For one-off projects, we bill in advance. For our estimating services, we will bill you at the beginning of the month for time worked during the previous calendar month (whether that project has been completed or not). We use the credit card we have on file and Adrienne will send you an itemized invoice several days before charging your card.
Contact our consulting project managers if you would like help with any of our graphic design, photo editing, or marketing services. Contact our producers if you need help with an estimate or shoot production.
Wonderful Machine can be a valuable piece of your overall marketing plan, but it shouldn’t be the only piece. Every photographer needs to identify their target audience and consider all the tools at their disposal to reach them. If you’re not sure where to start with your marketing, we offer a Branding & Marketing (BaM!) Plan, where we take a hard look at your existing brand, marketing materials, and marketing plan. We then deliver a comprehensive report with specific recommendations to help get you where you want to go.
Since clients often contact our photographers directly, there’s no way for us to know about every assignment we get for you or every connection we make. So when you discover that someone found you through our site, please let us know. We recommend that you use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic coming to your site, both from Wonderful Machine and other sources.
Each month, someone from each of our key roles writes a Report Card article that summarizes the work that they did for you in the previous month. Please let Bill know if you have any suggestions about how we can further optimize the work we do to support you or the way we report on it.
If you decide to end your membership, please email Adrienne before 5 pm the last business day of the month. We do not offer retroactive cancellations.
We’re glad that you’ve decided to be a part of Wonderful Machine and we look forward to working with you!
Questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns about your membership? Get in touch!