When at photography trade-shows and workshops, one of the most common things I hear from photographers is that they don’t want to take the time to pre-design albums because the clients might not buy them or that they don’t want to outsource a pre-design for the same reason. I have a knee-jerk reaction to this, primarily because I know from experience that it does work!

As most of my Willow Album Design clients know, I’m also a photographer. I deal with wedding and portrait clients on a regular basis. When I pre-design a portrait album, guestbook, or wedding album, I sell them about 90% of the time – those are numbers that don’t lie. Do I have the occasional “wasted” album? Yes, I do. But if you average that time out across the albums I do sell, it’s more than worth it.

A great, hard numbers example is a guestbook filled with engagement images. Personally, I use Vision Art Albums 8×8 and 10×10 albums for this purpose. If you go with their book cloth covers, they’re very reasonably pric guestbooks ed, though I use the regular image wraparound covers at the next tier of pricing. Last year, Turn Loose the Art sold a whopping two guestbooks. This year, we pre-designed a guestbook for most of our engagement sessions (a few slipped between the cracks and never happened). Since May, we have sold eight, and that’s even with a few of our engagement sessions occurring too close to the wedding date to fit in product printing time.

Would you like to quadruple your guestbook sales, too?