I had been wanting to create a book of my male-nude photographs for quite a while, but I kept putting it off–
Because I know too well the amount of time and work and money it takes to publish a book. So even though I really wanted to do that new book, I kept not doing it.
Which was too bad. Because I have a lot of male-nude photographs that would work really well in a book format.
But hey, I thought not too long ago, after seeing the five-hundredth article about how digital is redefining the book business–what about an e-book? Never mind that I had never seen an e-book of fine-art photographs. There must be such things!
Well, maybe not.
I started researching the subject online and found a lot of…nothing! There were a very, very few e-books of fine art, and fine-art photography. But none of them looked very exciting or beautiful, or made me want to buy one.
That’s probably because the e-book industry is still defining itself. And until recently, e-readers didn’t do too well with images. But that’s changing, and changing fast, as devices like the iPad and the Nook and all kinds of other e-readers and tablets become available. The more research I did, the more I thought this seemed like the perfect time to make an e-book happen.
I got very excited about the idea of creating a new book without having to go through the tedious (and expensive) six-month process of proofing, printing and shipping huge boxes of books from Asia.
So I dived in.
My first hurdle was deciding on a format for my book. How to create an e-book that would display my photographs the way I wanted to see them–big, beautiful, rich with color and detail?
After a lot of research, I discovered the perfect format for such a book is one that’s been around for a long time: PDF.
Since you’re reading this on a computer, chances are you’re already familiar with Adobe’s Portable Document Format. It’s ideal for an e-book composed mostly of images because it preserves your formatting and does a good job of compressing images. And you can view a PDF on any computer, and on the iPad and many smartphones.
So with the format issue handled, I began the next step: going through tens of thousands of photographs looking for likely candidates for the book. This process turned out to be a several-days-long job. But I loved doing it because I was so excited about the project. And I kept finding buried treasure. I have been doing this a long time and I don’t always remember every segment of every photo shoot. It was exhilarating to discover hidden caches of gorgeous images I hadn’t seen or thought about in years–especially knowing that I now would have an exciting new venue in which to display them.
As I started putting together the images I wanted to feature in my new e-book, I also started thinking about a theme. Well, I say thinking about it, but the truth is, it came to me in a flash after I’d chosen maybe the first 15 images.
TROPICAL.
That’s the title I thought of. And of course Marcus had to be the cover model. I knew exactly what image I wanted, too. There was this photograph of Marcus from our very first photo shoot in Angra dos Reis where he’s holding this huge tropical leaf over his crotch and looking right at the camera–it’s a great image. I opened it up, and pasted the word TROPICAL over it in orange, and it looked amazing. As soon as I did that, the subtitle came to me: Hot Men in Warm Places. Sometimes choosing the right title for a book (or a painting or drawing) is a difficult process. This wasn’t. It came to me in a flash and felt totally right.
I’d been excited about the book before, but having the cover in front of me, and loving it, made a huge difference. Now the book had a real identity and a theme. Choosing the rest of the photographs for it became much easier because the cover set a tone. It was immediately clear to me, as I continued to go through possible photos for the book, which ones fit with the theme and which ones didn’t.
I’d envisioned the book being about 100 pages long, and I ended up with 110 pages. But on those 110 pages there were over 170 photos, since I put multiple images on a single page in some instances.
Once I had all the images in place, I wrote an introduction and an “About the Photographer” blurb, and then used Photoshop to create the PDF file. I did this MANY times before I found the magic balance between file size and image quality. The final PDF file was just over 36MB which is bigger than most e-books by far, but not too big a file for easy downloading. And at that size, the PDF format still allowed me to offer very good detail and color depth on the images. I had an e-book, and one that I was very happy with!
What remained was to work with Mitch, my web guy, to set up a download link so that buyers of the book would be able to download it easily. That was not too difficult to set up, and a few days later I was able to send an e-mail to my mailing list announcing my first e-book. The next few days were an exciting time as I watched the orders flood in. Not only were people buying the book, they were loving it! The feedback was entirely positive, which of course made me feel great.
The best part of all? I created and published a beautiful book in under 1 month!
If you haven’t yet gotten your copy of Tropical, it’s available here. With instant payment and download, you can be enjoying your copy of the book just a few minutes from now.
So what am I up to now? I’m working on my next e-book…
UPDATE FROM THE ARTIST: Since this blog entry was written, back in April 2011, I’ve created a LOT more e-books. In fact, there are now (late 2016) 40 of them! They’re all available for download (or on CD) right now in my E-books Store.