Wondering how we decide what weddings we’ll print in the magazine versus what ones will be published on? Keen to find out how you can join our directory? Before you drop us a line be sure to have a good read of the below. We’re pretty confident that we’ve covered most bases and will be sure to add to this page through out the year.
If you take the time to write to us, we will certainly honour that by taking the time to write back to you. Even if your submission is unsuccessful we will still drop you a line to let you know. We get hundreds of emails a day and it’s because we make the effort to write back to each and every one, it can sometimes take us 2 -4 weeks to respond.
If you have not heard from us in two weeks and you are anxious to know about a submission please send us a follow up email. But sending us a follow up email every second day doesn’t help us get through the emails any faster. Your submission is important to us and we will get to your email as soon as we can.
We are pro same sex marriage. We’ve been campaigning hard for equality since our launch in 2012 and we enthusiastically placed a big beautiful tick in the YES box when the ABS same sex postal survey appeared in our letterbox in late 2017. We welcome same sex marriage submissions, or as we like to call it ‘marriage’ because to us love is just love and we’re here to celebrate it in all its forms.
The short answer to this is you CAN find them! Since our launch in 2012 Hello May has strived to share a diverse range of weddings here on our website and across our printed pages. Race, religion or sexual orientation has never factored into our thought process when deciding what weddings to publish on our site.
To us a wedding is just a wedding, and we are of the personal opinion that tagging a wedding “same sex” would only further single out the LGBTQI community when they have fought so damn hard for so bloody long to be treated as equal. After all, we don’t tag weddings ‘heterosexual” do we.
So before you send us an abusive email because you typed in “same sex wedding” or “Indian wedding” or “Vietnamese tea ceremony” into the search bar and nothing came up – take the time to read the content of our site – you’ll find loads of gorgeous weddings in these so called ‘categories’ and many more – they are just not tagged as such because all weddings are the same to us – we see two humans in love and nothing more.
We get thousands of submissions a year. Of these we feature 100 real weddings on the blog through out the year and only 70 real weddings in the five printed issues of Hello May magazine that we produce annually. The sad truth is there is simply not enough days in the year for us to feature everyones work.
Some submissions are simply not of the quality or style that we like to feature but more often than not it comes down to too much of a good thing. For example, if we already have several South Coast weddings in our schedule we won’t accept any for a month or two. Or if we already have two Victorian weddings ear marked for a printed issue of Hello May magazine we will start to look for weddings from other states for that issue.
Should your submission be unsuccessful it doesn’t mean we don’t love it to bits, it simply means we already have similar content in our schedule and we encourage you to keep on submitting.
The answer to this is simple. Some vendors simply submit to us on a more regular basis. They know what kind of weddings our readers like and send them our way frequently.
As we schedule posts in advance, once a submission has been accepted and all relevant information has been collected it could be anywhere from 4 – 12 weeks before your submission goes live on the site. If your submission is timely, ie: the launch of a new collection or a giveaway we will work with you to develop a suitable timeframe to roll our your post.
We often get asked where the submission will appear – in the magazine or on the website. All content submitted exclusively to Hello May will be considered for placement in a printed issue of Hello May however we only accept submissions for the website. What goes in the magazine is at the editors discretion.
Please bare in mind we have a limited amount of pages each issue where we make every effort to offer our readers diverse and balanced content, should your submission not make the magazine it doesn’t mean we don’t love it to bits, it simply means we already have similar content in the magazine in which case it will appear on the website where it will be promoted heavily across all of our social media platforms, schedule permitting.
The magazine comes down to balance really. We only publish 8-10 real weddings each issue and first up we try to ensure we have one from every state, in an effort to support and promote vendors Australia and New Zealand wide.
From there we have to make sure we have a good mix of indoor and outdoor weddings, casual and more formal ones, long dresses and short dresses, big and small budgets, different races and religions etc etc in order to provide our readers with inspiration wide and varied. It’s quite the balancing act and a damn tough job!
We also like to make sure we have built up awareness of the photographers work first, so we rarely publish a wedding by a photographer unless they have submitted and featured a few weddings on our website first.
We have a little saying in the Hello May office. ‘We don’t choose the cover image, the cover image chooses us’. This simply means the image that jumps out at us the most, the one that, whilst flicking through thousands and thousands of images, makes us stop and go ‘wow’ – that’s the image that will end up on our cover.
We only feature real couples on our covers. We do this to further support Australian vendors and we are proud to say, besides colour correcting before going to print, we do not photoshop our images in any way shape or form.
Like any magazine we have a set style guide we like to follow. We always feature both the bride and groom (or groom and groom or bride and bride) full length and side by side. You’d be surprised how many different ways a couple can stand side by side together, and if you take a look back at our previous issues, you’ll see what we mean.
We tend to shy away from images that are too posed or serious looking. Preferring to showcase a sweet moment between the couple instead. They can be looking at each other, or cracking up laughing or looking forward at the photographer. We are not after staged too-cool-for-school photos and more often than not the cover image we choose is the frame AFTER the more serious portrait one, the one where the couple are relaxed and have let their guard down a little.
There are of course a few technical things, composition wise, we suggest you keep in mind should you be shooting a portrait you hope to see on a cover of Hello May one day but we just kindly ask you not discuss this with the couple on the day.
- You can shoot horizontally or vertically but you need to ensure there is enough ground at the base of the couples feet for cover lines and bleed.
- We also need enough space either side of the couple to be able to size and centre them as we see fit. For this reason most of our covers are often horizontal frames. Sometimes we have to pass up on the perfect cover image simply because it’s shot too tightly and there is not enough room for us to play around with the positioning on the cover. For this reason horizontal images tend to make the cover more often than vertical ones.
- There needs to be quite a large clear area above the couples heads for the Hello May masthead and issue details. We encourage you to check out past issues to see what we mean. A good rule of thumb is to have the horizon line fall somewhere below the couples shoulders.
- We are open to all kinds of settings and backgrounds here at Hello May. Your couple could be standing against a rocky outcrop with nothing but dark and moody clouds in the background, on a dirt road with golden hour sun glistening through the trees or on the beach with a bright blue sky and majestic ocean behind them. We are open to photo’s taken indoors too but clutter free images with nothing too distracting in the background always seem to win out on the day.
We are stocked in over 3000 newsagents through out Australia and New Zealand. You’ll also find us through out The United States, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand along with many other countries. Head to our stockists page, where you can search by postcode or suburb for your nearest stockist. If your local doesn’t stock Hello May, you can request they order it in for you. Alternatively you can pick up the current issue, and any back issues not sold out on our online store.
We are independently owned and run and producing the magazine is very much a collaborative effort between Hello May’s team and the many talented vendors that make up the Australian wedding industry. We are currently producing two per year – the Hello May Real Wedding Special and an annual edition of Hello May (ISSUE 40), which will be out this September.
Advertising on Hello May is via invitation only. We pride ourselves on seeking out the best of the best the industry has to offer, so should you choose to spend your carefully saved, (and hard-earned), advertising dollars with us you’ll know you will always be in good company. If you would like a media kit, simply drop our Head of Partnerships a line with MEDIA KIT in the subject line. Her name is Tara, she’s super lovely and passionate about what she does and you can find her at tara@hellomay.com.au. Should your product or service be the right fit for our readers, and/or a space be available in your category, we will happily send you out a media kit and we can chat from there about the joys of joining the Hello May creative community.
We get asked this all of the time and the short answer is no. The media industry is saturated with paid for editorial (or advertorial, as it’s called in the magazine world). The wedding industry has set a particularly bad standard for this. Photographers are asked to cough up $1500 to simply have a wedding featured in a magazine, or designers charged to have a gown included in a fashion editorial. Things like social media promotion and blog posts are being charged out at a premium and we simply refuse to take part.
Ad’s are clearly ad’s, and a great way for our vendors to promote their product or services to our engaged and active readership. We don’t try and trick and deceive our readers into thinking it’s editorial and every single product and vendor featured on our website and in our magazine does so for no other reason than we think they are a bit great.
We are advertising by invitation only, so if a business or vendor has been invited to advertise with Hello May, then naturally we think they are totally awesome and would there fore feature them editorially anyway, regardless if they advertise or not.
