Why You Should Self-Publish Your Photo Book

by Joe Farace
(Brighton, Colorado USA)

Most photographers dream of accomplishing two things in the publishing world: Having their work appear in either National Geographic or maybe Playboy magazines and showcasing their photography in a coffee table book. I can’t help you with the first one but can with the second.

As the author of thirty books produced by many different book publishers, some of my recent work has been self-published and the reasons for doing so are the same reasons I’m going to suggest that you should try self-publishing.

Except for photographs made on the moon, everybody has been almost everywhere and photographed just about everything. Your chance of getting any publisher to take seriously a book on landscape photography featuring classic USA locations such as Arches National Park or Yosemite—no matter how good they may be—are slim and none. The first shots at books like this are given to “name” photographers but you can happily self-publish that very same book and even sell several thousand copies.

My new book “Digital Monochrome Special Effects” will take two years from when I originally submitted the material until it’s finally published in early 2009. My editor tells me this is a “normal” production schedule for this kind of book and I am told that scholarly or books for academia take double that amount of time. Do you want to wait two to four years to see your book in print? You don’t have to if you self-publish it.

Why does it take so long? After you finish your book the manuscript and all the illustrations are sent to a technical editor for content evaluation. After that it’s fact checked and copy edited. Each of the three different people who are responsible for these parts of the process take their time (and are sometimes not well paid) but more importantly also add their thoughts in the process, which might not always match your original concept. Conflict about text and even selection of specific images are not unknown during this phase and this part of book publishing has become so contentious and onerous to me that it’s the main reason that most of my new books will be self-published.

The various copy editors, technical editors, and proofreaders involved in publishing your book don’t agree. They see it as their book too. When changes were made to my books that I have vehemently disagreed with I’ve asked them to put their name on the book cover so they can share in the bad reviews but that’s not how it works. If the book is a best seller, it’s to the publisher’s credit; if it’s a flop, your name is on the cover. Self publishing takes all of these buttinskys out of the process but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have someone sympathetically proofread your book.

Sometimes a publisher simply doesn’t understand your original idea and after you self-publish your book you might consider sending a copy to a traditional publisher and see if they want to reconsider. One of the many, many publishers who turned down my book on photographing cars is reconsidering that decision after I sent them a copy of my self-published “How I Photograph Cars.” It would be nice if they decided to publish it but the book is available now regardless of what their decision might be.

The self-published book “How I Photograph Cars” features an Introduction by Brian Berk who interviewed me for Studio Photography magazine. The 80-page book features more than 100 photographs of classic, sports, and racing cars along with tips, tricks, and techniques for photographing cars at a Concours d’Elegance or racing at more than 100 miles per hour. It includes a section called “Insiders Tips on Photographing Cars” as well as step-by-step sequences showing how I create special effects using Adobe Photoshop.

The number one reason for self-publishing your next photography book is that you can. Self-publishing has always been an option for photographers but has also been expensive. Modern “print on demand” technologies have freed writers and photographers from the stranglehold traditional publishers have on the photography book market. Website such as Blurb, Lulu.com, WWAOW.com, let you publish as few as one copy of your book and make it available for purchase at their on-line bookstore. Just as with traditional publishing, it is also highly unlikely that you will get rich publishing your photo book via Blurb (or any other similar site) but you may be able to make a few bucks and have the satisfaction of seeing your work in print.

Visit Joe's website.