Publishing worth the time and effort?

Bursting your bubble

Let’s begin with the bad news: your book’s not going to sell. I asked top agents and publishers how many of their artists drove Bentleys. The answer was always exactly the same: they laughed. Heartily.

Essentially, there are too many photobooks and not enough buyers. According to standard economics, market forces should ensure that supply will dip to meet demand when nobody wants a product. But for some reason, with photobooks, we insist on printing the things, regardless of who’ll buy them. So, in effect, the photographer becomes the customer.

“At the moment, there’s way too many photographers out there,” explains Tom Claxton, a photographic agent in New York. His list includes some serious names in photography, such as Mark Steinmetz, Max Pinckers, and Laia Abril, who took out this year’s Aperture Award at Paris Photo.

This glut of photographers – and photography books – is commonly referred to in the industry as “The Bubble.” The most devastating critic of The Bubble is Fotobookfestival’s director, Dieter Neubert. For the past ten years, he’s been running one of the planet’s most popular photography festivals in the handsome German town of Kassel. But he’s seriously concerned about the state of the artform. “It’s hard to find really good books,” he admits sadly. “It’s relatively easy to make a book, so you have too many. But publishers have problems in selling all the books. It’s a strange situation.”

In fact, publishers are having so much trouble selling books that the great majority are actually charging photographers to print their work and slap a price on the cover. “In an ideal situation, you’re going to come out with no costs. The problem is that [with] two-thirds of publishers right now, the photographers are paying the majority of the production costs up-front,” says Claxton. “There are very few, actually,