There is an almost universal agreement that personal financial resources are being severely tested. Faced with seemingly ever-increasing cover prices of books, with £40/50 being the norm - many of you who posted have either stopped or restricted purchases. From a publishing perspective, this raises a dilemma: if you reduce print runs, the unit cost rises and margins are reduced but if you lower the cover price you have the same result. In short, you are in a hole - time to stop digging.
But - perhaps price is just a deflection from the concern many have expressed.There has been a flood of photobooks (from publishing houses and self-publishers) and new books no longer generate the interest they once did. Design, content and poor quality have been raised as issues. Added to this is the lack of visibility of new titles in bookshops/retail spaces and on the internet. Combined with high cover prices this is a perfect storm.
So where do we go from here? Image&Reality has temporarily paused its publishing programme to give us space to think out our next move. We have already capped our cover prices at £30 for hardbacks and £25 for softcovers but the discussion is about much more than price - it is about a more radical approach to publishing documentary photography.
There is a surfeit of zines out there and it is not a route we are following. Hardbacks are the norm today but it wasn’t so twenty years ago - so is it time to switch back to softcover? When we published David Hoffman’s Protest last year, we printed it in both formats and the feedback we received suggested that the softcover was more tactile and user-friendly. The print cost reality is that switching from hardback only saves about £2/3 a copy (based on a 500 run) but it is both a saving and a shift in direction. What do you think?
Should we publish smaller, more handleable books. When Allen Lane started Penguin Books in 1935, he revolutionised publishing, selling high quality paperbacks that sold in Woolworths, WH Smiths and elsewhere for sixpence. Clearly that isn’t sustainable now but have we become too precious about photobooks and their presentation? What about a range of books the size of most contemporary fiction work (B format - 198mm x 129mm or maybe slightly larger)? Would Waterstones, for example, give tabletop space to them like they do with paperback fiction and nonfiction?
And, of course, what about the content and layout? Do we need to get away from the formulaic blank or minimal text left hand page facing a photograph? Isn’t it time that text takes far greater prominence in creating a meaningful narrative. As Roy Stryker, the man behind the Farm Security Administration photography project, stated, ‘... don’t expect a picture to tell the whole story. There’s only one picture in a hundred thousand that can stand alone as a piece of communication.’
I am just getting warmed up! What do you think? How do you see the photobook of the future?