Another take on self-publishing a photography book
There is another route to self-publishing that readers of Luminous Landscape might want to take, one which I discovered when I wanted to self-publish a couple of years ago.
I should explain that I have been a professional writer for over four decades, and that I often shoot photos to illustrate my professional work. I had previously successfully self-published a book on airguns called Elliott on Airguns that has sold hundreds of copies at a profit. A couple of hundred pages long with a color cover photograph and B&W photos inside, Elliott on Airguns is digitally printed on demand by a local printer.
My photographic passion, however, is photographing the sky . . . mainly the daytime sky but sometimes the night. My continual quest is to capture its epic grandeur. But when I wanted to self-publish a short (less than 30 pages) book that combines my passion for sky photography with my Christian faith, the economics at my local printer simply didn’t work: the cost for digitally printing a 24-page full-color book would be more than $20. I figured this was more than most people would want to pay for such a short book, and there was no room for profit.
I investigated several digital self-publishing services, including Amazon’s. The costs were reasonable, but I could not get the format that I wanted, which was 8.5 x 11 landscape.
It looked like there was no way forward, but then I asked myself what really was my purpose in producing the book? Was it to make a buck or to share my enthusiasm for sky photography and my faith?
Then it occurred to me: if I dropped the profit motive, I could digitally publish the book online and give it away. Through a great deal of trial and error (I am, emphatically not a designer) I combined the words and pictures in a Word document and converted it to PDF. Airguns of Arizona, for whom I write, graciously agreed to host the book as a downloadable document, and I was in business. It can be found here:
http://www.airgunsofarizona.com/blog/about-jock-elliott I posted items about the book’s availability on several forums, and people began downloading.
I shared the link with Don Streeter of
www.theinspiredeye.net and he offered to host the book as well. Then, in an act of extraordinary generosity, Olivier Duong of The Inspired Eye did a professional re-design of the book before offering it (again, for free) here:
http://www.theinspiredeye.net/product/heavens-declare/The Inspired Eye does not maintain a counter on its link, but as of this writing over 700 people have downloaded my book from the Airguns of Arizona link.
The point is simply this: if you want to self-publish a photography book for the sheer love of what you do, there is a way to do it, and it doesn’t have to be expensive.
- Jock Elliott
