Establishing a target size for a body of work

[David R Munson]

I am in the process of editing a body of work and writing an essay. The two will eventually (within a month or two, hopefully) be combined and self-published as my first book of photography. Editing the body of work down to its final size is challenging, of course, but that challenge is made all the more difficult by not actually knowing what sort of size I am aiming for. This being for a book rather than a portfolio, I don't have any experience to which I can refer right now.

Right now the body of work is about 140 images from a period of about five years. How much I edit it down depends on a number of things, including but not limited to how I format the book (one image per page, blank facing page vs fully-saturated like an Araki book vs....?).

At this point I'm just sort of lost. Anyone here ever deal with this particular decision? How did you do it? What was the final decision?

Really, how does one decide how large of a body of work should be if it is meant to be published as a book?

 

[Leigh Youdale]

David,
I had two B&W books published by Blurb last year. One was on Paris, the other on ireland and UK. Not entirely travel either - more street photography.
I chose Blurb's 12x12 square format book with premium paper and one image per page and was pretty happy with what they did. Plus you can sell copies off their website as part of their service. Suggest you download their (free software) and have a bit of a play with the layout tools and formats they have to see if it works for you.
Just something to watch if using any book publishing software - some of them have an upper limit of 100 pages, so check that out before you get started!

 

[Sparrow]

I’m just finishing a history-travel-photo book, after about 2 years work

I ended up with 116 pages a little less than half of which are proper B&W photos the rest is a mix of narrative text and illustrative photos in colour, it is getting to the point of being too big but I couldn’t get it down any further.

Editing was a real struggle, I was lucky as a friend is a professional editor and he sorted out my English grammar and spelling, and tightened the whole thing up, it made a huge difference.

PS, I used Blurb too but not their clunky software

 

[David R Munson]

Stewart - what software do you use instead? I have their software, but it is kind of clumsy. I hadn't realized there was an option to not use that software.

 

[Sparrow]

I used Photoshop and saved as both psd and jpeg then created the book all in one go from the jpeg’s folder. That way I could use my own layouts and templates.

When I ordered the first draft copy I noticed one could also upload the whole thing as a pdf file, so if I do another I’ll look at that.

This is one of the draft pages, LINK it's a fairly big file

 

[payasam]

David, if you set 40 photos as a target, you will probably end up with 50 or so. Stewart's 50:50 division seems about right. Editing must always be a ruthless process. I do not trust my judgement where my own work is concerned, so I always consult other people.

 

[Sparrow]

David, if you set 40 photos as a target, you will probably end up with 50 or so. Stewart's 50:50 division seems about right. Editing must always be a ruthless process. I do not trust my judgement where my own work is concerned, so I always consult other people.

I had close on 4,000 photos to select from, and still had to go back to Corfu to re-shoot some. The idea of “publishing” made me ultra critical, and yes I agree the opinion of someone whose judgment one trusts is invaluable.