publishing – Page 3 – Quiet Light Publishing Blog

February 17, 2009February 22, 2009

Choosing the Cover Image

For the last few months I have been hard at work editing the images for my next book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. Part of the process of course is editing your work, both in deciding what images to use in the book, and then in working with each image individually to achieve the best possible printed piece. While this later part is done in Photoshop – it is much like being in the darkroom and making sure the “print” you end up with is what you had pre-visualized in the field.

I recently was on a friends blog where he talked about editing film and how there was a space of time between when you took the image and when you finally had a chance to see the image in film form after processing. His thought was that the distance in time helped you make better decisions about the images because the emotion of the day when you shot it was not as fresh. There may be something to that, especially in the day of digital photography where folks tend to edit their work even while it is still in the camera! This is never, never to be done! How can you tell what it really looks like on a 2” low resolution screen? It’s great for making sure your close on the exposure – although the histogram is better – I would never delete an image based on what I see at that point. But I digress.

Having worked on images from over a thirty year time span I have found the same emotions, or at least ones close to them come streaming back as I look at the images. I happen to be able to remember almost everything about a photograph I have taken – too bad I can’t remember things like that in real life – but it makes it easier for me to remember what I wanted the photograph to say and thereby make the correct adjustments to an image. Creating an image which comes as close as possible to what I was feeling and intended the image to look like in the first place.

The hardest part of editing is deciding which images should make the grade and be in the book. An example is the cover shot. Because of its importance it also has some additional requirements which must be met. It has to pull people in, take it off the book store shelf and make them want to open the book. Therefore, I tend to look at the covers of similar books, in this case other photographic books on Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I do this because I don’t want my book to look like theirs. I look for an image which will say something about the book but also have a more artistic bend to it. I had a working cover image for a long time from a shot I really loved. But when all was said and done it did not make the grade. Another shot seemed to work better and had a more emotional pull for those who saw all three covers (hey we started with a lot more ideas but narrowed it down to three before subjecting folks to give their opinions).

I think in some ways, my friend might have been right about distance and time in editing at least in this case. I let go of an image I really liked and had an emotional attachment to. And now that I see the new cover image I like it even better than my first choice. So what is your opinion – let me know – I’d love to hear your opinions too!

Peace,

Richard

November 19, 2008

ORPHANS WORKS BILL MUST BE DEFEATED!

Once again, and in that spirit I talked about last time of getting political, there is no better time nor cause for photographers or publisher’s to make their voices heard over than the Orphans Works bill in the House and Senate. Very powerful lobbying groups have pushed this cause to the detriment of individual artists, be they photographers, painters, illustrators, writers, poets, film or video producers or musicians.

YOUR WORK IS ON THE LINE!

Your copyright will not stand much ground if this bill is passed by the Congress. They have come back into a lame-duck session and while they say they won’t bring this up again there is also talk of killing the entire Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, where this issue currently is in debate. Then it would be taken up again by the full Judiciary Committee, where it was hatched many months ago.

Why do we need to abolish this bill? Because, it will take away your copyright protections without any due process. If some says they tried to find out who the artist was, they will be protected. How can we prove that?!? We will also be required to not just register our images with the copyright office, but also pay to have them listed with some new company – and this will be fee based depending on the number of images in the case of photographers.

To see the news release from the Advertising Photographers of America (APA) and the Illustrators Partnership use this link: OrphanWork.

Then write your congress person and Senators. But do it NOW! It will only take a few minutes and you can follow the links on the APA & Illustrator partnership pages to get it done in minutes – they even have the letters written for you – which you can customize to your liking.

Do it now, before you loose your rights.

April 14, 2008

A Sad Day for Publishing

I returned from my shoot last week in Great Smoky Mountain National Park to learn the very sad news that the finest book printer in the US, The Stinehour Press, had ceased operations. They have been lauded by, among others, the Washington Post, as the finest fine book printer – and by the many printing industry awards they have won over their 50 year run. Their client list included the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Fine Art Museums, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Boston, the Norman Rockwell Museum, The Getty Museum, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Smithsonian. Publishers included Random House, Little-Brown and many university presses, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth. They have also printed the works for many photographers, and of course Quiet Light Publishing as this is where my book The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes was printed.

We chose them for several reasons. One they were the best. They had shown us proofs on our paper selection using our images to prove they could deliver – even before we accepted their quote. Once we were there we could see first hand why they were/are the crafts men and women of such high caliber. Every one of them was dedicated to our project, from the front office, to production to the pressroom. And everyone had the right to say, wait, we need to do this before moving on – even as we were on press. Their quality and dedication to my book was never ending. And we quickly became part of the family there in their corner of Northeast Vermont. We dined at some of their homes, went to places around town with them and became friends. And I was only one of many hundreds or thousands of books they have printed over their 50 year run. It saddens me that their dedication to publishing has come to an end and that these folks will now be looking elsewhere for work.

One of the reasons they cited for their closing is the high competition with overseas printers. The cost of printing overseas has made it so many publisher’s choose this route. We considered it. And rejected it for two reasons. On price, when considering the cost of travel overseas for the print run, and the cost of shipping finished product back, they were within nickels on the price per book. And equally important – they were here – in the US. I have always thought we should support US companies such as The Stinehour Press when we can. A company which put quality first and treats their employees and customer’s with respect. Besides, it only seemed reasonable to have a book about America and its history and landscape be printed here.

But in the end, it seems, the cost of printing overseas did overcome them. They mentioned in their press release they could not compete any longer with overseas pricing when they can print books for what their cost for just the paper would be. This can not just be a labor cost problem. I can only imagine what the cost of health insurance for 26 employees and their families must have been. Imagine if that cost was taken out by having universal health care. Maybe then they would be able to stay and continue their craft of making some of the finest books published. And while some may knock me for being nostalgic here, why is it that we always rush for the lowest price on everything? Doesn’t quality stand for something? I realize the digital age has provided a cheaper, faster way to be able to send off PDF’s of a project to printer’s, have them make a few pages of proofs to be ok’d and then print on demand. But do these books give you the same feel in your hands as one which is handcrafted? Maybe the fact that they worked from 6am to 4pm instead of around the clock put them in a different league, personally, one which I admire. (Oh, and yes, if they were in the middle of a run they did finish it – they didn’t just stop the presses until tomorrow). And that meant family was as important in their company philosophy – at least from what we observed in our time in the Northeast Kingdom. And it showed in their product. Our book The Lewis and Clark Trail American Landscapes, has not only won over a dozen awards, I see it in the faces and hear it in the words the first time someone picks up the book for the first time. Right away they are impressed with the quality. There always seem to be sigh’s of wow, or “hey look at this”, as they show it to someone else. Quality does stand out. It should be what we all strive for.

As Warren Bingham, CEO of The Stinehour Press said in their press release, “These are not good times for American manufacturers. I hope we know the full cost of what we’re buying as a society. When lowest cost is always the determining factor, it might be higher than we think.”

Something to think about. After all, if we can help out Wall Street and their CEO’s when they make unwise structures of mortgages and derivatives, or give huge tax breaks to oil companies making 45 billion in profits – more than most countries gross national products, why can’t we invest in companies worthy of our investment? Companies that care about quality and their employees and customers? Those small companies which really are what America is all about – ingenuity and quality. It is something I don’t understand. It is something 26 people and their families in the northeast now probably wonder about as well.

Yes it is a very sad day for publishing, especially of fine art book publisher’s, but it is also a very sad day for America.

Post Script – When we were at the Stinehour Press we did our first “blog” as a series of posts each day on our website. I will reissue this post today so you can see exactly what it was like to be there. You can find it at www.mackphoto.com/Vermont.html

March 20, 2008

Three Years and counting…

March 20, 2008. Some look at it as the day the of the equinox, the day the sun passes over the equator and begins to warm the northern hemisphere. For photographers it marks the beginning of spring and the thought of wildflowers springing up, or light beginning to make its way to the north side of buildings and mountain slopes. For me it is also my 53^rd birthday. But it is also the third anniversary of the release of my inaugural book The Lewis & Clark Trail American Landscapes.

Some reflections of the past three years are what I would like to discuss here today. It has been an interesting ride. From the initial decision to start a project of this magnitude, spending 6 months planning the shoots, 2 years on and off the trail making the images for the project, finding a publisher, and ultimately thinking the best way to go is to become your own publisher (a notion made partly of the romance of being a publisher of fine art photography books and the hard line decision that it was the only way to make it financially rewarding). And once you make the decision to publish your own work, and maybe the works of others eventually (but will discuss that at a later date), then you must begin the process of making the book a reality and not just file cabinets filled with images. Editing the thousands of images, finding the perfect designer (or in my case two of them in Rudi Backart and Rich Nickel!), getting printing quotes from around the world before settling on a fine art printer right here in the United States – the Stinehour Press in Vermont.

But those are all of the production decisions which have to be made. There is an equally mind numbing set of decisions which need to be addressed on the marketing side. Now, you would think someone who has spent his career in the advertising industry as a photographer, would know how important it is to have looked at the end part – the selling of the book – before forging ahead on the production side. Nope. I was thinking to laterally. Get it done and they will buy. After all why wouldn’t they – the images are beautiful and the concept never done and there will be 40 million people along the different parts of the trail during the 200^th anniversary years of the expedition. How can it not sell! This was the thinking I had. Fortunately, I had others around me who whacked me upside the head. Bryan Glaza, my first client and now a life long friend, sat down at one of our initial marketing meetings, with Kathy Weber-Mack, Rich Nickel and Kristi Mendez and asked – innocently enough – “What will you do if it doesn’t make it to the shelves of the Barnes & Nobles of this world? Then how will you sell it?” Bang on. And the brick hit me hard! Why would they not carry it? They carry a book about a couch being carried around the world, about stark images of small towns, how could they turn this down? But they initially did. When I actually received a letter saying they’d carry it online but not on the shelves I was stunned. They eventually acquiesced but only slightly it still seems. So Bryan’s original question still remained, “then what”.

Well, we hit the trail again, placing the book in every store and museum along the trail we could. Put out the required press releases, got some press in the papers, then on TV and radio, then more in the papers and then on national TV on NBC News! (And yes you can see them from our website just go to www.quietlightpublishing.com/news.html and follow the links for the various programs and articles). We also were lucky enough to win roughly a dozen book, design and photography awards for this book. So, in the three years since the release of the book, we have sold roughly 5,000 copies. Not bad for a photographic book. But, what I didn’t know was most photographic books have a print run of 1,500-3,000 tops. And that leads me to mention one of the biggest mistakes I made during this whole process. The decision to print 10,000 copies, based solely on the printing costs, and the fact that the more you print the less the per unit cost. I did not think about the fact the reprint costs would make up for an initial higher price per unit. In retrospect I should have printed at most 5,000 copies the first time out, maybe even less. But the book has done exceedingly well, we’ve made money on the project, and it is still selling each and every month.

Of interest to me is the fact that most big book stores thought it would only sell along the trail. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve found, most of our direct sales through our website have been in states away from the trail, the northeast, southeast and southwestern United States buy as many as the Midwest and northwest where the trail winds its way through. Clearly this should be a book featured prominently at holiday time by the big stores nationally don’t you think?

We also released a Limited Edition version, limited to 200 editions in honor of the 200^th anniversary of the expedition. It is presented in a leather slipcase and includes three prints, each representing a year the expedition spent on the trail. Each book and set of prints are signed and numbered accordingly. This edition is available from Amazon or directly on our website at www.quietlightpublishing.com. We also have an extensive collection of fine art prints from the book available online. Images from the book have been in exhibits in several galleries, and were the backdrop for an exhibit by the Newberry Library in Chicago on The Lewis & Clark Exhibition.

On this the third anniversary of the release party (www.quietlightpublishing.com/gal_opening.html) I can say it has been a great ride! I have spoken to many groups about the book, photography and the Lewis & Clark Expedition. It has enabled me to think about other books now in the works, one on Great Smoky Mountains National Park and one on the Great Lakes, as well as some other projects still in the idea stages. We have begun to look at the idea of offering more expeditions for folks to join us on where we’ll talk photography as we explore different national parks and places around the world. Do you have someplace you’d love to go with the expertise of a photographer along with you – let us know!

I want to thank everyone who has enjoyed the book, come out to the lectures, worked behind the scenes to make this possible and in the making of this book. One person can never make a project this size come about alone. It does take a team effort. Without all of you we would not be where we are now. Thanks!

Peace,

Richard Mack

December 18, 2007December 18, 2007

Our New Blog…

Welcome. We have updated the blog on this new site and hope it meets with favorable results and ease of use. As before we’ll be discussing publishing a photographic book, photography, fine art prints, travel – both on the Lewis & Clark trail and in our National Parks and other locations around the world. I hope you like the new look and will find it fun and informative! I look forward to our discussions online. Remember you can link us with a rss feed by using the links at the bottom of the page to be notified when a new post is online! Enjoy!

Happy Holidays,

Richard