Ask Brooks

Selling PDFs of our photographs

I'm a subscriber to your magazine and to your podcast, and I recently purchased (and am thoroughly enjoying) your PDF Publishing visual workshop. Someplace within all of the "Brooks-talk" that I am ingesting, I heard you say that you had some particular perspectives on pricing PDF folios for the market. Is there a blog post or podcast episode where you are sharing this particular perspective?

— David

Thanks for asking and for enduring all that "Brooks-talk"! Actually, there is a section in the new workshop, Finding an Audience for Your Work, that includes this information.

The short version is this:

• I don't believe people are willing to pay for entertainment-type content delivered via the web. At least I haven't seen any examples that leap to mind as rousing successes — the single exception being music via iTunes or Amazon.com. Newspapers have tried it and failed. Magazines have tried it and failed. There is simply too much precedence of web-delivered content being free — think YouTube, Hulu, the various news websites, somewhere in the range of 4.8 trillion blogs, etc.
• I'm not aware of many photographers offering PDFs for sale over the Internet. William Neill comes to mind, but I don't know whether or not his offerings have really sold. (There is, of course, a difference between offering and selling.)
• Basically, my observation is that people are only willing to pay for something if it involves the shipping of molecules. (We'll pay to have a newspaper shipped to us, but not for access on the web.) So, if you have a PDF you want to sell, better to ship it on a CD or DVD than to try to charge for it via web delivery.
• But this implies a very telling thing about photographic PDFs: they can be pretty reasonable file sizes in and of themselves, so why not distribute them over the web? If the only reason for putting them on a physical device like a CD or a DVD is to sell them, it seems a bit snake-oilish to me.
• There must be a solid and convincing reason a product like a PDF must be on a disc. For example, LensWork Extended (which are molecules in the form of a DVD, shipped to subscribers) typically have 2-4 gigabytes of data per issue. This is far too much to transmit via the Internet, particularly when you consider the total bandwidth we'd need for all our subscribers. Disc shipment is the only alternative.
• This implies that as photographers, we had better be willing to produce something of substance — of meaningful substance — that requires this much volume or there is simply no reason to put it on a disc and ship it. In the case of LXT, that substance is in the form of the number of media monographs as well as the audio and video components we include with each issue.
• If the small PDF doesn't require a disc, my advice is to either send it into the world for free (like I do on my website) or build enough content that it actually makes sense from the consumer's point of view to pay for it and have it shipped to them. Notice on my website page for the Uchiwa-e project, the free, downloadable PDF does not have the audio or video components, but the disc version does.
• For photographers, what about a print + disc offer? Or a folio + disc offer? This is where we need to get creative about what we offer. Make it make sense to ship something.
• In short, offer consumers something they think is worth it and they will pay for it. It's called the free market — where exchange of cash for product is a win for both parties. Try to offer for sale something that people don't value and they simply won't buy it. The [new, digital] world is no different than it's ever been — we have to earn whatever income we make by providing something of value in exchange for it. And in my observation, there is just too little of value in a simple PDF of images for folks to want to cough up the cash. So, we have to get creative as to what we offer to be sure our audience agrees with us that what we are selling is something they are willing to pay for. At least, that's my take on it.

A friend of mine recently sent me this quote, with which I wholeheartedly agree:

"Businesses planned for service are apt to succeed. Businesses planned for profit are apt to fail."
Nicholas Murray Butler (President of Columbia University)

As photographers and artists, we need to spend more time thinking about how our products offer service and value to those we hope will purchase them.

500 Books

Do you know of any book printing houses up in Canada that have reasonable prices on runs of around 500? I'm working on a coffee table book, and found a company in Hong Kong that is affordable (around $10 a book) and the quality is good... but it's a long way to travel, and I'd like to proof it in person.

— Joel

This is the proverbial "no man's land" of publishing — and exactly the spot so many photographers would like to be, if they could.

• Printing 1 or a few is easy: just do it by hand.
• Printing 2000+ is easy: offset commercial printing is made for this.
• Printing 500 is too many to do by hand and not enough for a fully amortized press run.

It's all a matter of marketing. Selling a few handmade art books is easy. Selling 2,000 books is really hard. So, the natural compromise is to print 500 books or so and push yourself to market them aggressively. The problem is finding a way to print them affordably.

It all boils down to a cost-per-book analysis. In the world of offset commercial printing, the magic in reducing the cost-per-book is to amortize the fixed costs over a large enough press run. Almost without exception, the fixed costs amortization really kicks in with press runs of 2,000. Once your press run gets to 3,000 books, the fixed costs are nominal and any more than 3,000 don't lower the cost-per-book more than a few pennies.

At 500 books, the cost-per-book share of the fixed costs is very high, which makes marketing a challenge.

So, Joel, to answer your question, I wish I knew a way around this but I don't. The price of $10 per book for 500 books seems very inexpensive — unless your book has very few pages and is very small. The only way to get costs that low with a press run of 500 is to use really bad paper, very cheap binding, sloppy printing, and to print in a very low-wage print shop — all of which leads to a formula that would make me very nervous. Be careful and have a rock solid contract that specifies the quality you expect — and don't write the check until you take delivery of the books and are happy with them!

The Size of Your Audience

Every photographer eventually reaches a point where they start wanting exposure for their work. I'm just back from Houston FotoFest where I reviewed the work of about 60 photographers; only two asked me how I might suggest they improve their photography or their prints. All the others wanted me to offer advice on how to get their work seen, exhibited, published, promoted — in short, to get it "out there" into the world.

The pragmatist in me kicks in sometimes in the strangest places. This is an example.

Curiously, not one of them could define for me what they would consider success in this venture. I asked them a few pragmatic questions: Who do you want to see your work? How large an audience would satisfy you? What measure of audience will you use to know if you've achieved your goals for an audience? Blank faces. Then non-answers like: Everyone! As many people as I can! Huh?

I'm serious about this. How much is enough? There are some 6 billion people on the planet. What percentage of them need to see your work in order for you to feel successful? And will you be satisfied if they just see it, or will it require more for you to feel happy about your work? What is the threshold over which you must cross in order to justify the time, energy, money, and suffering you've incurred to make your artwork? Will the current crop of humans be enough, or will you need future humans to see your work in order to make you happy? If your last project had X viewers, what factor of X will you require on your next project to find joy and contentment? 2X, 4X, ½X?

Be careful. Audience is a drug. It is easy to become addicted to it. And, like all drugs, it takes more and more to satisfy you. A nebulous approach in defining your audience is often an indication that the real issue is validation. And, wishing for validation about artwork from the outside world is almost always a path that leads only to disappointment and discouragement. There is never enough because there are always people yet to offer their validation, always some who never will because they simply cannot agree with what you've produced.

With these cautions in mind, we can also agree that audience is important. It is not very satisfying to work in a vacuum. It's perfectly reasonable to want to show your work. Acknowledging that, it is equally important to think carefully about how you define success. Quantify it. Qualify it. Who are the people you'd like to see your work? Names, titles, positions, locations. How many of these people define success? 1, 10, 100, 1000, 462? Over what period of time? A month's exhibition, a lifetime, somewhere in the future? In which countries or continents? At what income level, gender, race, political persuasion, age, interest, or hair color?

Furthermore, what do you want them to do? Just look? Buy? Respond? Compliment you? Tell their friends? Blog about you? Link to your website? Give you an exhibition? Publish your work? Back up the truck with the piles of cash and dump it on your porch? Have you as a guest on their late-night talk show?

Be specific. "What gets measured gets managed" is a maxim from the business world. It's also true.