Sometimes a book choses you. I never expected to make a photo book when I self- published "Seeing / Insights and Images" earlier this year. The images were made over a 10 year period, and the words were things I had said over a lifetime. After a kind of epiphany on Mt. Nemrut in Turkey in the summer of 2013, I resolved to give up my commercial work (I am now a full time photography teacher at a prep school) and to concentrate on getting the Tarot deck I had created back in 2011, as well as any other personal project that would come along. That quickly turned out to be the book. It only took three weeks to design and layout for printing, but it took 7 months of sharing it with others and refining it. When I went to this year's PhotoAlliance portfolio review in SF this past March to try to find a publisher, I was surprised to find the consensus was that I should self-publish. I was told by everyone I spoke to that, for first time authors, the landscape was a pay to play arena. Publishers don't want to take a chance on unknown work for the most part. I was told, that they will publish your book for 10-15k and distribute it for you, but if it does not fly off the shelves in a year, they ship all the unsold boxes of books to you and you are back where you would have been as a self-publisher when you started, with no distribution and out a large sum. You can find your own distribution and get around the 10 titles threshold that is required by many distributors, but they want 45% of the take. And if the books do not fly off the shelves, the bookstores have the safety of being able to return your books to the distributor, because in the arrangement with them you have agreed to buy back all the unsold books. I guess only authors believe in themselves these days until sales make belief by the industry risk free.
I met David Bayles, coauthor of "Art and Fear" at the review, a top selling self- published book every artist should read. He loved my book and told me it was sure to find an audience, but that it needed time for this to happen, time I would not get from traditional publishers. He urged me to self-publish and graciously gave me a cover blurb in exchange for an advance limited edition hard cover copy.
So my own experience was not trying to make a book about my own photography, but to do my best to make the book that came to me, that I had been working on for many years without knowing it. I printed 300 copies and when these sell, I will print more. I hope it builds slowly so I can handle it. It is not about money for me but about getting the ideas in the book out there into the World to complete the communication that was given to me. There may only be a small number of readers this book is meant to reach, and i feel that I would have been remiss not to make the effort to make it available to them
All this said, the cartoon is dead on with most other things I have tried to make happen in my career, and way to close to home, with the exception of the self-medicating.
