Too many backlinks from one domain?

[msphoto]

I've been in the process of creating a tourism-based website for the state of Kansas. I'm a photographer for the state, and have inked a nice little side income to my day job as a web designer by selling prints from Kansas (along with my travels elsewhere). I'm still in the process of developing it, but it's at least at a point that I need to really start thinking about SEO factor of the amount of backlinks I have from it going back to my main photography website.

The Kansas site is at http://www.kansasisbeautiful.com and my photography website is http://www.mickeyshannon.com.

This tourism website will serve a number of purposes:

1. To promote the state and show people it's not just a flat, boring place.
2. To help promote my photography. The entire site is powered by my photography.
3. To sell a book I'm planning to publish later this year/early next year of Kansas images.
4. To help increase sales of photography prints of my work.

What I'm worried about is the amount of backlinks I have going from the Kansas site to my photography site. Not to mention every image is hosted on my photography domain (no need to upload to two domains when one can serve the same purpose). I'm currently linking back to my site on most pages via a little "Like the Photos? Buy a print" link in the top right corner. In addition, when users get to the website map, all photo listings click back to a page on my photography site that they can purchase prints. And the main navigation also has a link for "Photos" that takes them to my Kansas photo galleries on my photography website as well.

The question I have: Is it really bad SEO-wise to have anywhere from 1 to 10+ backlinks on every page from one domain (kansasisbeautiful.com) linking back to mickeyshannon.com? Would I be better served moving all of the content from kansasisbeautiful into a subdirectory on my photography site (mickeyshannon.com/kansas/) and redirecting the entire domain there? I haven't actually launched this website yet, so I'm trying to make the right call before pushing it to the public.

Any advice would be appreciated!

[LauraSultan]

The backlinks shouldn't hurt you as long as you aren't doing anything spammy. This can happen quite naturally with a lot of websites.

The important thing to know is that 1,000 links from a single domain won't help as much as 1,000 backlinks from 1,000 different domains.  Try to balance it out with backlinks from a variety of different websites. That way you'll have a more natural backlink profile.

[msphoto]

Thanks for the reply! I will certainly try to build my content up in ways that get it linked from many different sources. I was just concerned that the large amount of backlinks from one domain would negatively affect me. That's great that it won't! Thank you!