Photograph copyright of Douglas Stockdale
I just realized that I have been publishing this for two years as of this month. nice.
Thank you all for your support, feedback and comments, I appreciated it very much.
Best regards, Doug
BTW I forgot to mention that this was my Chinese birthday cake that the hotel in JiaXing had prepared and was waiting for my return from the long day at the factory back in 2007. I was a stranger in a strange land, but this little cake was almost like home, comfort food, it made my day.
I have been thinking more about my intent for Insomnia: Hotel Noir and why I might not be taking some of my own advice, and now what I have done about it.
So first things first. I have been advocating that when working on a project or series that one of the intents is to have publish it in a book, that you should be thinking ahead on how to promote it. Two recent examples come to mind, the static web site that Henry Horestein developed for his Pond Press published book Anamalia, found here. The other was the blog that was developed by Anne Deniau for her Gourcuff Gradenigo published book Nicolas Le Riche, found here. I lean towards a more introactive blog.
What brought back this into focus for me was a reminder from Amanda Keller-Konya about the series of articles published in photo-eye magazine on book publishing, specificlly getting the word out on your book, even in advance of having the book published. And my intent with Insomnia: Hotel Noir is to have it published as a book. So why not get started today in putting together the promotional infrastructure?
So to the second point, I did start a new blog to accumulate all of my past thoughts and development of Insomnia: Hotel Noir and a place to keep track of what is happening with this project, and which is now located here: www.insomniahotelnoir.wordpress.com Now I need to link this up on the side bar of this blog.
So between a Saturday round of golf with my son-in-law (a very belated birthday game) and Easter Sunday with family brunch after church, I started to pull all my Insomnia information together. What I did notice is a very big gap in writing about Insomnia between middle of January 2008 and a renewed interest in finishing the project in January 2009. A period of allowing the project to more fully development while working on other things, as I had hit a creative roadblock with this project.
So now I continue to get this project back on track, and my goal now is to have the book dummy finished by the end of June.
Best regards, Doug
The workshop went really well yesterday at the LBCC PhotoFest09, great participation (like they had a choice with my workshop breakout assignments!) and super enthusiasm. The best part was all the personal feedback on how they were able to betterconceptualize their projects that they had envisioned, but had struggled to get their arms (minds) around. nice.
Jeff Smeding and Ann Mitchell and the PhotoFest09 team were supportive and a pleasure to work with. And we are already talking about my participation for next year. BTW, Ann also publishers her photographs in her daily sketchbook of ideas, Impermanence. A good read.
I also had the opportunity on Friday to audit the Print on Demand Workshopthat was provided by Amanda Keller Konya, who is also an instructor at LLBC as well as Cerritos City College and the Julia Dean Workshops. It was a great presentation and I took away a couple of pages of notes to modify my own POD book workshop. Always interesting when you bring different folks together and what unique insights that they bring to the process, always a learning opportunity. And I found that Amanda is also a friend of Aline Smithson, who writes the wonderful Lenscratch.
And best of all, I am recharged to finish my own project, Insomnia: Hotel Noir. And I decided that a good goal for this project is to complete the Blurb book in time for this years Photo.Book.Now competition, sponsored by Blurb, and principal jurist is Darius Himes of Radius Books.
And regretfully, I did not bring a digital recorder for my presentation, as I was thinking that I had enough things to juggle for this presentation. In retrospect, I am a free roamer during my presentations, I don’t like to be anchored to a podium, so not sure what the quality of the recording would have been like. And it just occurred to me, I did not take an souvenir photographs of the occasion either. Yikes, see I told you I had enough things to juggle;- )
Best regards, Doug
I am very pleased to announce that my hardcover book In Passing will continue to be available at the 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, OR. This is the first gallery bookstore that one of my books is available at. nice.
So now I need to add this information to my web site and figure how to continue to promote the books availability at the 23 Sandy gallery. Yep, this post is the first step, eh?
On a photographic book related note, while preparing for my workshop in Portland, I had stumbled upon a trivia “fact”, that the best price point for a hardcover photographic fine-art book was under $50, especially for the big box bookstores and Amazon.com but I forgot to bookmark that article or print it off. So now I am trying to find that or another “photo book industry” rule of thumb regarding the pricing and buying of hardbound fine-art photograpahic books.
Also seems that for the Photo+Bookexhibition in Portland, the vast majority of the 40+ books that were sold were under that $50 benchmark. hmmmm
So, any help on this one?
Best regards, Doug
