Making a photo-book? Avoid these mistakes!
I know that lots of you will already making books, but probably more of you want to but haven't done it yet. Then of course there are zines, but that's a big subject on its own and we'll have a much deeper dive into producing books and zines in detail in a future article.
A photo-book is a great way to bring a project to life. Or perhaps to bring together a tight collection of work as your retrospective or your legacy. We can easily produce books using the likes of www.blurb.com or Cewe - or we can try to get them brought to market by a mainstream publisher - which is fraught with difficulties and not for the feint-hearted.
I see a lot of street photographers who self-publish using something like Blurb, whether it’s one copy of the book - or 10 copies - or 100. And when they’re doing this for the first time, I see people making the same mistakes and Iwanted to highlight those common mistakes so you can hopefully avoid making them.
Firstly, the content, and there’s a tendency to put pictures into a book which are, shall we say, less than ideal. I get it! You want a nice thick book with 120 pages but you only have 43 suitable images. So what do you do? You include too many also-rans, the equivalent of your B-roll, pictures which wouldn’t otherwise make the grade. And this is a big mistake because the ‘less good’ content dilutes the impact of the great content and you’re left with something - well, a bit average. But we’ve all done it! And if you’re producing a quantity of books, it can prove to be an expensive mistake. Only include your very best work and if that means a small book, then so be it - the book will be better for it.
The second mistake I see is that people get so excited about publishing their book they rush headlong into it and done give the process enough time. And I completely get it it - it’s exciting! Why wouldn’t you want to see your work in print quickly? But don’t do it!! When you think you’ve finished your book, you haven’t. You’ll almost certainly want to change the pictures, change the order of the pictures, change the text - whatever. When I think I’ve finished my book, I’ll leave it for 2 - 3 - 4 weeks, and during that time the book will improve considerably. So wait!
Thirdly, hardly anyone seems to pay enough attention to design. You’re producing a piece of art. It needs to be artistic - not thrown together using any old page layout or any old typeface or some random colour scheme - it needs to look designed. I’m not saying you need to be a designer - you don’t - but I guess you could always hire one if you wanted to. But most of us have a good enough creative eye to be able to get this right on our own. Many of the self-publishing platforms will give to template to design your book - which are great - but do remember that these templates are customisable and it’s nearly always better to tweak them. So think about the right typeface, the type size and spacing, the sequencing of the images, the sizing of the images on the page, how much white space to use - and so on and so on. There’s a lot to think about and it does need thinking about.
Then there’s the cover. According to a recent survey, 79% of people claim that a book’s cover influenced their decision to buy it. So yes, most of us do judge a book by its cover and this is something we need to pay particular attention to. Do we have a picture on the front or just text? Which picture, which typeface, what colour background etc etc. Like all of these things, it’s easy to get this wrong, but it’s just as easy to get it right!
Then think about not just the visual qualities of your book but also thephysical qualities. A big mistake is to skimp on the quality of materials to save a few pounds. Don’t! Someone sent me a book recently which had pages of about 90 gsm thickness and it felt dreadful. Upgrading the stock to about 170 gsm, or ideally a bit more, shouldn't cost a lot extra and would improve the look and feel of the book no end.
So they are just a few pointers for you. As I said, we’ll take a closer look at producing books and zines in a future article but in the meantime if you can avoid some of this common mistakes at least you’re on the right track.
