EDWARD THOMPSON
Self-Publish your photo book / zine
Since 2012 I’ve self-published three photo books and one exhibition catalogue. I am going to tell you how to do it yourself. I feel strongly that there is a never ending line of people waiting to take advantage of photographers who are trying to make photo books. The publishers I call the pay-to-play mob. I get it. Everyone wants to earn a living. But giving a publisher £20,000 in return for, at best, a few hundred copies of your book... well that’s a crap deal.
If you follow the instructions below you should be able to crowdfund and produce your own photography book. If you sell them all yourself, make around £12,000. This money can be used to keep you alive and make new work. If you think that’s worth something you can throw me some money via the link below or better still buy one of my photo books. But I don’t expect anything from you. I feel like this is a public service. Someone once said don’t fight the system, create a new system that makes the old one obsolete.
I hope if you are a photographer reading this you will choose to self-publish and not give your power away. Making the photographs for a book is a huge undertaking and you deserve to be compensated for your toil.
THE SUBJECT
For a photo book its best if you’ve created a really significant body of work That it has some underlying concept. Extra ‘cool points’ if it has a consistent visual aesthetic and style. Extra extra ‘cool points’ if the concept and aesthetic align together in some way. Of course some people like to make work that has no purpose, no ideology, and no aesthetic value, that’s their call. I’m coming from the point of view that you want to express an opinion about life, the universe and everything. To impart these experiences and wisdom to your fellow humanity. For a zine, well this is a lot easier. You might only have 25 photographs in your zine and its a lot easier to make a smaller project.
RESEARCH
The best way to make a photo book is to look at the photo books that have come before. And thankfully there are loads of them! Here are some ways you can look at photo books for your research, many of them for free. I’m not going to tell you what to look for as below I’m going to cover every aspect of making a photo book, from making an edit, design, layout, fonts, sequencing etc You can look through photo books and get inspiration for what to do (and what not to do).
Libraries
Libraries have loads of photobooks, particular university libraries with arts courses. The British Library is a great resource and so is the V&A Museum. The camera phone has been a game changer for documenting what you are looking at.
Online resources
Photo book histories by Martin Salter. A great resource of photobook covers and a selection of spreads from each one.
Josef Chladek: 300 pages of detailed photos of photo books:
Buy them in book shops
TPG Bookshop
Buy them online
Photobook Junkies
Photobookstore
Text about ediitng here.....
Editing video here
FIRST EDIT
Try and get the project down to around 300 photographs. You can do this several ways by first choosing photographs that have:
Great composition
A chance moment or happy accident
Some narrative element important to your project
They are related to or echo other photographs in the set
Interesting lighting or atmospherics
Symmetry or mirroring of the subject matter
Or just a gut feeling, you don’t know why, you are just drawn to them.
I would suggest printing those 300 photographs as small 6 x 4 inch prints.
If shooting film, get the highest res scans you can afford to do done before you do any post-production. The last thing you want is to have to rescan for higher res to make prints with later and do all that dust and scratch removal again.
SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH.... GETTING TO THE FINAL EDIT
I start going through the 300 or so prints with a more critical eye, really separating out photographs that bring down the quality of the project. You are only as strong as your weakest image. Somehow in this edit you may start to see a connection in the visual style of the project, try keeping these photographs together. The aim, at least for my last book, was around 70-80 photographs.
Sequencing video here
Now you have a set of photographs you can begin trying to sequence them. Sometimes this can be done because the project is time based, so a chronological narrative already exists. Sometimes the work is in chapters – work made with a particular approach in mind conceptually – photographs all made in a certain town or city for example.
I like to sequence to create narratives. Sometimes my approach to sequencing is related to the subject matter of each photograph, so that as the book progresses it can conjure its own story. There’s so many different ways to read a photograph I try and go through my sequences again and again in different mindsets, almost like a method actor trying to see the book from different perspectives each time.
The best aid of to this process is to use the small prints and start laying them out on the floor or a large table. You can imagine how each page will reveal itself and the photographs. By doing this you may also happen upon accidental associations you hadn’t even imagined, so its good to keep the remaining photos from your first edit to hand as sometimes they may be needed again.
With this Bilderberg series I started grouping the work into different types of photographs: establishing shots, wide shots, portraits, details, reportage. I also made some groupings for notable speakers.
BOOK DESIGN
Book Size
Format (landscape, portrait, square)
Font Style
(https://blog.hubspot.com/website/font-types)
https://www.jotform.com/blog/a-crash-course-in-typography-the-basics-of-type/
Adobe Fonts https://fonts.adobe.com
Serif
Sans Serif
Script
Decorative
Font Size
Layout Photographs
Texts
Captions
Talk about five-six different layouts of design maximum
Cover Material types
Photograph
Text
Layout
Headband
Paper Type
Weight
BOOK DUMMY
If you follow the instructions below you should be able to crowdfund and produce your own photography book. If you sell them all yourself, make around £12,000. This money can be used to keep you alive and make new work. If you think that’s worth something you can throw me some money via the link below or better still buy one of my photo books. But I don’t expect anything from you. I feel like this is a public service. Someone once said don’t fight the system, create a new system that makes the old one obsolete.
I hope if you are a photographer reading this you will choose to self-publish and not give your power away. Making the photographs for a book is a huge undertaking and you deserve to be compensated for your toil.
INTRODUCTION
THE SUBJECT
For a photo book its best if you’ve created a really significant body of work That it has some underlying concept. Extra ‘cool points’ if it has a consistent visual aesthetic and style. Extra extra ‘cool points’ if the concept and aesthetic align together in some way. Of course some people like to make work that has no purpose, no ideology, and no aesthetic value, that’s their call. I’m coming from the point of view that you want to express an opinion about life, the universe and everything. To impart these experiences and wisdom to your fellow humanity. For a zine, well this is a lot easier. You might only have 25 photographs in your zine and its a lot easier to make a smaller project.
RESEARCH
The best way to make a photo book is to look at the photo books that have come before. And thankfully there are loads of them! Here are some ways you can look at photo books for your research, many of them for free. I’m not going to tell you what to look for as below I’m going to cover every aspect of making a photo book, from making an edit, design, layout, fonts, sequencing etc You can look through photo books and get inspiration for what to do (and what not to do).
Libraries
Libraries have loads of photobooks, particular university libraries with arts courses. The British Library is a great resource and so is the V&A Museum. The camera phone has been a game changer for documenting what you are looking at.
Online resources
Photo book histories by Martin Salter. A great resource of photobook covers and a selection of spreads from each one.
Josef Chladek: 300 pages of detailed photos of photo books:
Buy them in book shops
TPG Bookshop
Buy them online
Photobook Junkies
Photobookstore
THE EDIT
Text about ediitng here.....
Editing video here
FIRST EDIT
Try and get the project down to around 300 photographs. You can do this several ways by first choosing photographs that have:
Great composition
A chance moment or happy accident
Some narrative element important to your project
They are related to or echo other photographs in the set
Interesting lighting or atmospherics
Symmetry or mirroring of the subject matter
Or just a gut feeling, you don’t know why, you are just drawn to them.
I would suggest printing those 300 photographs as small 6 x 4 inch prints.
If shooting film, get the highest res scans you can afford to do done before you do any post-production. The last thing you want is to have to rescan for higher res to make prints with later and do all that dust and scratch removal again.
SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH.... GETTING TO THE FINAL EDIT
I start going through the 300 or so prints with a more critical eye, really separating out photographs that bring down the quality of the project. You are only as strong as your weakest image. Somehow in this edit you may start to see a connection in the visual style of the project, try keeping these photographs together. The aim, at least for my last book, was around 70-80 photographs.
SEQUENCING
Sequencing video here
Now you have a set of photographs you can begin trying to sequence them. Sometimes this can be done because the project is time based, so a chronological narrative already exists. Sometimes the work is in chapters – work made with a particular approach in mind conceptually – photographs all made in a certain town or city for example.
I like to sequence to create narratives. Sometimes my approach to sequencing is related to the subject matter of each photograph, so that as the book progresses it can conjure its own story. There’s so many different ways to read a photograph I try and go through my sequences again and again in different mindsets, almost like a method actor trying to see the book from different perspectives each time.
The best aid of to this process is to use the small prints and start laying them out on the floor or a large table. You can imagine how each page will reveal itself and the photographs. By doing this you may also happen upon accidental associations you hadn’t even imagined, so its good to keep the remaining photos from your first edit to hand as sometimes they may be needed again.
With this Bilderberg series I started grouping the work into different types of photographs: establishing shots, wide shots, portraits, details, reportage. I also made some groupings for notable speakers.
BOOK DESIGN
Book Size
Format (landscape, portrait, square)
Font Style
(https://blog.hubspot.com/website/font-types)
https://www.jotform.com/blog/a-crash-course-in-typography-the-basics-of-type/
Adobe Fonts https://fonts.adobe.com
Serif
Sans Serif
Script
Decorative
Font Size
Layout Photographs
Texts
Captions
Talk about five-six different layouts of design maximum
Cover Material types
Photograph
Text
Layout
Headband
Paper Type
Weight