Publishing for Pennies

Forgive me if I've mentioned this once too often, now, but back in summer 2014, alongside my second solo exhibition at the FotoForum gallery in Innsbruck, Austria, I was pleased to be offered a 10-day residency. I was accommodated in a hotel in a village called Mutters, situated a few miles up an alpine valley from the city with a convenient and regular rail service, and had been invited to photograph whatever I felt like photographing. As I was also taking (slightly) early retirement that summer, aged 60, it felt like a suitable capping-off of my life as a wage-slave, and with any luck would mark the start of a late flourishing as some sort of artist.

I had a great time wandering about in the city-centre and surrounding area in the guise of "a tourist from Mars", and as a solid outcome I was able to put together two Blurb books: one which compiled the blog posts and photographs I had published during the residency, and a further, later volume which assembled the actual eighty or so photographs from my exhibition.

Compiling that second volume was actually only made possible some years later, as most of the files for the exhibited images were lost when a backup drive failed, and it seemed the DVD backup copy I had sent to Innsbruck in case of postal mishap to my prints in transit had been discarded. However, to my enormous relief and gratitude, FotoForum director Rupert Larl found them again in 2020, when clearing out his own computer files when he retired, and sent them to me.

Here are both books rendered as Issuu PDF flipbooks (as usual, click the central circular device to see the book in full-screen mode):

At the time I was transitioning from a series of cameras – mainly Panasonic, but also Olympus – that used the "Four Thirds" sensor (in the so-called "micro 4/3rds" configuration) to the larger Fujifilm "X-Trans" sensor. In fact, it was just before leaving for Austria that summer that I had bought my first Fuji camera, the X-E1 with its surprisingly superb "kit zoom" lens. But I was still getting used to handling it and, as it seemed rather too bulky and heavy for my trip, I decided to stick with the totally familiar, smaller, and lighter Panasonic G3 with its own excellent kit zoom. So, for those who care about such things, all of the residency photographs and a high proportion of the exhibition photographs are micro 4/3rds images. In fact, a surprising number of the latter were actually taken with that pocket rocket, the tiny Panasonic LX3; not a micro 4/3rds camera at all, but an all-in-one zoom compact with a bright Leica-branded zoom lens and a comparatively tiny 1/1.63" sensor. I think you'd  be hard put to tell which is which, though, even looking at the A3-size prints I made for the exhibition. Make of that what you will, you pixel peepers and "full frame" fanciers! [1]

To return to the books, however. As I've said before, I decided to start putting my books on this blog as PDF flipbooks because, in common with the vast majority of self-publishers who use an "on demand" service like Blurb, I rarely sell any physical copies, but I'd like my efforts to be seen, at least, and this seems a suitable way to achieve that. I usually buy a few more than the mandatory single hard copy myself for my own use and to give away (as I did, for example, with the two Innsbruck-related books), but invariably precisely zero copies get bought via my Blurb "bookstore". But that is simply how it is: in time you come to accept the reality that, in an online world, people expect "content" to be free. But pity the poor authors, artists, and musicians who thought they might make a living by providing us with entertainment, information, and the occasional revelation. Dream on, guys.

It bears repeating that the great advantage of "on demand" publication is that you don't end up with boxes and boxes of unsold and unsellable books (see this post). I have so far produced 30+ titles using Blurb, all of which are for sale, but virtually none of which has ever sold a single copy. Alarmingly, if I had produced them as even very low-run editions of, say, 500 copies of each via a conventional self-publishing "vanity" deal, I would by now be sharing a house with 15,000 surplus books [2]. Although the truth is that without the option of on-demand publication I would simply have given up on the idea of making books altogether after the first few ventures proved to be a pointless waste of time, effort, and money. As it is, however, for a relatively modest outlay I have been able to compile a convenient and nicely-produced collection of my own best, carefully-sequenced work at home in book form, as well as donating a similar shelf or two to my old college library and elsewhere. I can live with the fact that nobody else seems to share my enthusiasm for my books; fortunately for me, as a retired professional with a decent pension, I can afford it, too. So ████ ███ ███ ██ ███ [Redacted. Language, sir, language! Ed.].

When it comes to the finances of real-world independent publishing, however, I was appalled to read this in the latest CB Editions Newsletter (March 2024):

Say the cover price is £10. Bookshops which have set up their own account with the distributor (in CBe’s case, Central Books) buy in books at a negotiated discount off the cover price. Most independent bookshops buy not direct from Central but from the wholesaler Gardners, which has a monopoly on this, and Gardners (quote from their website) ‘normally ask for 60% discount off the RRP’. Sometimes more. So in most bookshops a CBe book with a cover price of £10 will have been bought by Gardners from Central for £4 in order to reach the bookshop. Before passing on that £4 to CBe, Central will deduct their own fee (15% + VAT) and the sales agent’s fee (10% + VAT), which brings the amount payable to CBe down to £2.80. That’s my net income per copy, and I pay 10% royalties on that (I’ve already paid the author an advance on royalties when taking on the book, often £500). So CBe’s take is now down to £2.52. The printing cost is, say, £2.50 per copy. Which leaves CBe with 2 pence.

CB Editions is a one-man operation (the one man is Charles Boyle) producing a handful of books each year that feature well-reviewed, sometimes prize-winning poetry and short fiction. For a profit of 2p a copy sold, you'd think he'd be well-advised to pack it in; remarkably, he hasn't (or at least hasn't yet). If you buy your books directly from CB, of course, he makes rather more (in his words, "the difference between 2 pence and the cost of a flat white"). So I have two pieces of advice, or encouragement, really:

1. If you like unusual and beautiful books, books which were not produced according to some optimised sales formula or ghost-written for some celebrity, and think that the independent publishers who produce them ought to survive in competition with the giant conglomerates, then buy their books. It's that simple. Actually buy them! As in, give them some of your money... It's a win-win, after all. It sounds silly, but too few of us who could easily afford it actually do this.

2. Whenever possible, buy books direct from the publisher's own website. Sure, small independent bookshops are (were) a fine thing, but they rarely if ever stocked the Really Good Stuff, and TBH their days are numbered in the unfair, asymmetrical warfare with the likes of Amazon. Game over. But we need to keep good books alive at source.

For photography, check out Kozu Books, for example, or Atelier EXB, or TIS Books, or Peperoni, or any of the dozens of small, independent publishers struggling to survive out there. You'll be amazed at the quality and range of what is being produced, mainly for love, not money. Although (full disclosure) I should warn you that this can turn out to be an addictive pursuit. Did I mention that we've got a lot of books in this house?

1. For the uninitiated, "full frame" is the confusing name given to a sensor that is more or less the same size as a 35mm film frame. Now is not the time to discuss this, but you do have to wonder how long it will continue to make sense to treat 35mm as the measure of all things photographic. It has already begun to remind me of the more abstruse imperial measures we had to grapple with in primary school: acres, bushels, furlongs, and all the rest of it. The fact that there are 1,760 yards in a mile is permanently burned into my memory banks, along with the number of gills in a pint. A very long time ago I "went out" with a girl named Sandie Gill, and her father had named their house "Pint Size" because they were a family of four (4 gills in a pint? I know...).

2. OK, it's true that we might well already be sharing our house with a similar number of books – I've never actually counted them – but at least these are thousands of *different* books...