Should I/you Do A Book? What Do You Think?

if you make a book, who will you show it too? it seems like a lot of time, effort, and money will go into it and you still have to promo it. just because others have one, doesn't mean you should. then of course there are issues with trademark names, people's faces, store locations etc, that may lead you into trouble down the line.making a book won't make buyers. get on to twitter and find people there. facebook is a place for cats and smiley faces.


---Mike Savad

I make many books of my photography because it becomes a log of what I am doing in that medim.
When I paint, I have the paintings and photos of them as they sell to keep track, but a bunch of folders on a hard drive seems like.....well..nothing.

Here is mine:

https://www.createspace.com/4070210

About $3 wholesale. Color quality is not the same as Blurb but at $10 retail it sells. Sold about 100 copies so far.

About 3 years ago, I printed a book using Blurb. As expected, the results were very good. I will say, that books are expensive to print. So, printed books are usually for personal use.... Meaning, they are for you / close members of your family Etc.

If taken to the retail market, there is a markup or profit margin that need to be added to the bottom line. These may make the books quite expensive for the average person to buy.

Only if you expect larger sales, then a large printing may make sense.

Of course, the process itself - even for one book - is a thing of beauty. Maybe compared to like giving birth to a new entity.....

In going over you website, I was immediately drawn to your work. it is superb and very well done. Each photo is like a "LIFE" magazine rendition.

I guess "Retail Books" are best if they have a theme - Like "New York City" or whatever other similar collection can be put together. Again, retail Books sell best when there is also accompanying text that describes each photo in detail.

Regardless of the above, you have produced very fine work that would look outstanding on any book.

If you have the time and energy I would encourage you to get a book printed. Your work demands it. ( be careful of printing people's faces without a model release )

Thanks !

- Carlos Diaz

Mike, I'm wondering if you have to have releases for people one sees on the street - I've read that if a company, for instance, wants to use one of our photos showing people in an ad promoting a product, THEN you need a release. For a book, I don't think you need a release. From many things I've read ...

I've seen some street photographers do a book and then promote it on Facebook, and fellow photogs seem to buy it. They promote it heavily but they already have an admiring following, it seems.

re: Twitter - yes, I've heard that's a great way to connect. But Twitter has that 2000-follower limit; how do you get around that?? I'm now waiting for my followers to catch up with the amount of people I'm following ... I don't understand how people get 10,000+ followers. Would love to hear more on this! (I use justunfollow - very helpful, but not the total answer.)

Separately, how do you zero in on the right target market, i.e., art BUYERS, on Twitter? i.e.,? I've got mostly fellow photographers and visual artists as followers, but can't figure out how to locate buyers. Those big sites that never follow you back seem impersonal and like you don't get noticed. Thoughts appreciated!!!

Marlene and Edward, thanks for your input ... I've actually heard of someone using a Xerox machine to make their book (!), but wondering what you think are the most affordable and user-friendly ways to make a book. Thanks!

as art, no, no releases. in commericial, advertisement, etc yes. chances are if they see themselves in a book - at the very least they will want a cut of that. of course if there are many people i think it's ok because it would be impossible to get a release from them all. i wouldn't take a chance in any case. if you self publish you have to do the leg work on this. you might want a copyright lawyer to look at everything (not a normal lawyer btw, but they will take your money). otherwise the editor would make the suggestions.

chances are people selling the books have a following for the images in those books. if the work doesn't have a fan base, neither will the book. that's how i see it.

twitter two ways -

1. pay
2. balance the ratio. you have to get followers back 2000 - and then maintain a 10% ratio

people that have 10,000 followers are following at least that many usually. or they pay. you don't want to follow just anyone, like all the people here won't buy from you and will clog up your follows. and you have to constantly remove the dead beats that don't follow back.

to find the people depends what you shoot and who you wanted the image to be for. if you shot garbage cans, you might want to find garbagemen, and related people. if you shoot a certain location, you look for people from that location and follow a bunch of them. if your shooting randomly without a focus, you may not get sales at all.

you can use amazon to make a vanity press type book, they have them print on demand there.
you can also do an Ebook. or a kindle book.

---Mike Savad

Blurb.
They have a marketing program in place. Good product and reliable.

Mike, thanks for those thoughts - very wise, and have provided several directions that I hadn't considered. Will immediately try to put those ideas into place as far as finding people who follow a location, a topic, etc. Really not sure how to look for those folks on Twitter, as I'm fairly new there - would a hashtag search under (for ex.) #taxi find people interested in taxis, etc.? I notice a lot of photographers put #photography in their tags, but that seems too wide.

When you say maintain a 10% ratio, you mean I can be ahead of the amt. of followers I have by 10%? I guess I can google how this works. Not sure what you mean by pay: some people "promote" themselves (is this what you mean?) and then there are those spam twitter things that promise you x amounts of followers. I would definitely not do those. I don't even let them follow me.

I'll check out amazon's book thing, as well as any others people recommend. Not sure if I want to do a book - would rather just stick to prints on demand, but need to increase my sales. Have total faith in my images but again, need to find the market and get noticed. Got a local museum show going on but those don't really generate sales. Looking to go up to the next level in promotion/publicity, perhaps to another gallery or museum. Still don't see museums really generating sales unless you become a hot item.

Marlene, thanks for the Blurb suggestion - yes, a friend does books there - i heard they cost about $70 each - pretty high cost, though good quality. If they market for you, it would be good to do a sample and see what the demand could be. Can they do that?

Also heard that ppl try to get their books into a museum collection. Again, is that useful?

Carlos, Thank you so much for your very kind comments!! I'm especially grateful, since I grew up on Life Magazine and Magnum Photos and it was always my dream to "be" one of those photographers. Still is.

The problem with books is nobody seems to be buying them anymore. A book of images, maybe a coffee table book, will have a limited market of people willing to pay what it cost to print high quality books (like Blurb).

Like Marlene said, you can sell them directly from there so you don't have the overhead of buying them and then trying to sell them.

Thanks, John - good point about Blurb selling directly.

When in pubic and selling the book as art there is no consent needed, the same for anything that is in view of the public. I have seen many items on here that sell which clearly violate trademarks (sports logos the big one) that could get you in the hot seat but they still print and sell them here. Remember when MLB were going after kids sporting their favorite teams logo on line?

Interesting points, Bonfire - Yes, I read, and I agree with Mike that if you're in a crowd and someone takes your pic, i/e/, in a public place where you might expect people to be taking photos, you don't need a release for artistic or editorial work.

the hashtags are used to attract people that like taxis. so if you have a taxi mention #taxi #taxidriver #cabbie #etc in there and those types of people will want to follow you or at least look at it.

the first 2000 are free. but then you have to have 2000 people follow you back. once your there, its the 10% balance. the more that follow you, the more you can follow. i forget how the math works exactly. there is a service where you can give twitter money and you can follow who you want. also don't get involved in #teamfollowback. they will follow you back, but you won't get quality people. just more losers that want to build really high follower numbers.


---Mike Savad

Thanks, Mike. Really really good tips on Twitter. Right now I'm carefully choosing the last few people to follow, then have to wait for them to catch up. Will look into the paying twitter thing; if it's reasonable, it may be worth it rather than wasting time waiting.

I have a book on Blurb also - It's expensive. I think I have it for sale for $35 - 24 pages. My mark up is just a few dollars. But the quality is great. Never sold one. But I can say I have one.

In contrast the quality of color images in my Createspace book is poor but I can sell it at the impluse buy level. Createspace is owned by Amazon. Integration into Amazon is seemless.

I've also bought my own Createspace books to hand out at the Vet, pet boarding place, friends. At a few bucks a copy its better than a business card.

blurb is a POD for books