My Self Publishing Mis Adventure
With all the photographer centric sites like Lens Culture and Japan Camera Hunter What photographer hasn't seen a cool self published book or zine and thought "I could do that!" Well I did. Sounds cool right? Looks awesome! But there is a lot more to it you don't see flaunted on all the fan sites namely this, the after math.
After creating my own digital book in Adobe Indesign and sending it off to an independent publisher I ended up with 50 paper backs chronicling my travels from Gibraltar to Ceuta. The images are cool, the production value of the books is great, and it was a very fulfilling experience to me personally, this was the culmination of my photographic skill, design skill and a major project all around. But! To be totally honest it was a total waste of money. Of the fifty books I sent three off as demos to sites that regularly featured photo book plugs. the only one to get featured was on Japan Camera Hunter. My deepest respect to mr. Hunt for and his kind words. These demos were linked to an Etsy shop that sold copies... or would have if anyone cared enough to buy them.
About 12 books were given away to prospective clients or to try and gain some kind of job opportunity. Only one low paying engagement gig came from this effort. The rest take up space on the bottom shelf of my gear cabinet. with a few recently being traded away for some zines made by other creators. This little experiment cost me near $500 and the company I bought them from, while very speedy and competent in their production of said books, tried to stick me with a massive shipping fee at the end of the process. I had seen no prior mention of this fee and thus I disputed it, they quickly dropped the fee. This made me lose a lot of respect for them despite the quality of their work.
Photo books are cool, no doubt and I will continue to buy them. I have about 40 on my shelf right now (and they are all by different photographers). In retrospect the time, effort and money involved in making the whole process work. I strongly suspect that every photographer out there could find better things to do. As for my book, it was a failure as far as finance goes, but I still carry one with me on most days and am still proud to show it off and some times give it away. Much like the Gideon and their hotel bibles some one has to pass on the good word of photography, so it might as well be me.