When was the last time you picked up a book or magazine and asked yourself “How was that made?” The chances are you are more interested in the content than the form. My first book was published in 1996 in collaboration with Sammer Gallery and, on reflection, I had very little to do with it. I sent the photographs to my brother Mike who spent hours and hours doing all the technical stuff required. Sam laid the book out saying “Put some text here. Find a poetic quote to put there”. The whole lot was sent off to a printer and then hey presto three weeks later there was a book.
I’ve now just published a second book but this time on my own; known in the trade as Vanity Publishing. The book trade seems to be a very closed environment and not easy to get into. The big publishing houses have a lot of influence and can guarantee to have whatever they publish on the shelves, and they only publish what sells - and what sells is what is on the shelves. Understandably each publisher specialises and the more specialised they are the smaller they will be which means they have to use a distributor whose job it is to visit all the buyers, from chain stores to individual book shops, encouraging them to reorder and carry new publications, everything is on deposit and the standard commission a shops takes is 30%
So if you want to make a book then you should approach the appropriate publisher and present them with your material for assessment. The first question they’ll ask themselves is: “Is there a market for this?” To find that out they will simply look at what the bookshops are selling. It’s a Catch 22 situation. What sells is what is on the shelves and it sells because we, the public, walk in and buy a book about what we know. “Salman Rushdie has just written another book which got rave reviews in The Times. That’s a good enough recommendation. I know about Salman Rushdie so I’ll buy it”. Our choice is based on what information we already have, that’s what publicity is all about.
When Sammer published my first book he had an outlet for it via VIPS chain store who bought 500, a good start, but then the buyer retired and his replacement decided that VIPS were only going to stock art books by famous artists: Monet, Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Miro etc. So Sam is stuck with a stack of books, and so are we. When we moved to Barcelona we gave the book to a distributor here who specialises in distributing art and design / architecture / interior decoration. He tried his best to get the book into the shops, especially into museum/art gallery bookshops but unfortunately they too only want to stock the big names; Monet, Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Miro etc,. and, of course in Barcelona, Gaudi. This is due to two factors: Shelf space and what the public want to buy, and what do they buy? What’s on the shelf and what they know. Next time you hear someone say “I know what I like”, just translate that into “I like what I know”.
So the answer to the marketing department’s question, “Is there a market for this?” is “No. Never heard of him nor has anyone else so nobody will buy it”. This dog-chasing-its-tail circle isn’t just confined to the book world, it’s all over the place and if we want to ‘get anywhere in life’ it helps to be in the circle rather than out of it. I’m perfectly happy sitting in my little ivory tower painting away but to eat and pay the rent means I have to promote my paintings which I’m doing by exhibiting. The books are part of the promotion, they’re to inform a wider audience with the intention of promoting a sale so that I can continue in my ivory tower. That’s the theory.
In the music industry when a band can’t get a record company to make a CD many of them will make their own recording and launch it as an Independent Label. Music produced by Independent Labels has quite a following and is respected as a legitimate way an unknown group can promote itself. In the book world an Independent Label would be called Vanity Publishing and looked down upon. So, bearing all the hassle in mind, is it worth making a book? The simple answer is yes, especially when you pick it up. A painting is a bit like a paragraph because it tells you something, but it’s just one painting, one paragraph. Whereas a book gives an overall view and all those paintings, all those paragraphs add up to tell the complete story. Obviously it would be better to have all the paintings together in one exhibition but that’s just impractical. So we had to make a book.