That Ain't Workin' - My New Book

[Pottel]

His profit could even be higher this way with many more copies sold and surely many more fans satisfied.

I didn't realise that Donald Trump was a member of AMIT, thank you for the business lesson oh great one.

the art of the deal is my bible

[Pottel]

Isn't the cost of producing it just about £5-8 ? I think you should have kept the profit margin much much lower

Gotta love a forum!!!

Apart from the fact I spent many spare minutes taking the photos on the tour, instead of sitting in the dressing room sipping a beer. The fact it's taken me two years of work to make the book, which was mostly hours and hours of painstaking work cleaning hundreds of dust spots and scratches one by one on at least 100 images, using software like Capture One and Photoshop. The fact I paid for those software programme's monthly subscriptions for two years while I worked on the book.
The fact is took me four months of work to actually build the book in Adobe's InDesign, which I had no idea how to use in the beginning and spent hours watching Youtube tutorials and made many mistakers along the way..
And even THEN, the book does NOT cost £5-£8 to actually print.
I'm usually eating some of the postage, the shipping boxes cost £92 for the first 150 books. It took me all morning today to sign, pack, drive to the post office and half an hour in the post office filling in custom forms and going through the different nations the books would be going to with the man behind the counter. PayPal is deducting a £3 - £4 fee from most sales too (not all).
In the end, if you have a 106 page book with 80+ never seen before behind the scenes images of a beloved tour that took place 35 years ago, please make your OWN book and sell it for £10. Please do it - LOL

it is amazing how one tends to not notice all the praise one gets and gets stuck on trolls trying to annoy the hell out of you. (just noticing, not blaming) do not get all worked up about such moaning know-it-alls Chris.
he is NOT forced to buy your book, just like he is no way entitled to know the cost of your book. ignore is the message here

hey how come many people are not tolerant here ?

once again, the right price for any product is the key to sell more and profit more,
I was trying to help Chris and also please more fans, that's all,
what's the problem ?

what intolerance?

[Pottel]

I shared the info on web, FB, Insta, X, and even LinkedIn

I hope it will give you more orders

Thank you so much.

Hi Chris,

Knew about it thanks to JF post on both his blog and LinkedIn.
I ordered it today and I'm looking forward to receive it.
It's me who asked you to send it to a UK adress as my best friend is currently there.
Will save me the 10£ postage 

Greetings from Belgium

once a dutchy always a dutchy huh old friend....hiding in Belgium :-)
x

Dutch and Belgians are not the same.
Need to learn your geography, mate.

Anyway, why should I pay for postage if I can avoid ?
It's not like I'm robbing Chris of anything.
If I was "dutchy" I would not buy a 55£ book.

Also, why do you think I'm "hiding" in Belgium ?
It's my country.
Furthermore I'm from the

waldo, just pulling a leg...

[Pottel]

Anyway, why should I pay for postage if I can avoid ?
It's not like I'm robbing Chris of anything.

It's so much easier to post to the UK.
Yesterday I spent a long time kneeling on the floor of a convenience store filling out ten customs forms before posting to Europe.

well we know who is to thank for that bureuacratic nightmare

[Pottel]

I shared the info on web, FB, Insta, X, and even LinkedIn

I hope it will give you more orders

Thank you so much.

Hi Chris,

Knew about it thanks to JF post on both his blog and LinkedIn.
I ordered it today and I'm looking forward to receive it.
It's me who asked you to send it to a UK adress as my best friend is currently there.
Will save me the 10£ postage 

Greetings from Belgium

once a dutchy always a dutchy huh old friend....hiding in Belgium :-)
x

Dutch and Belgians are not the same.
Need to learn your geography, mate.

Anyway, why should I pay for postage if I can avoid ?
It's not like I'm robbing Chris of anything.
If I was "dutchy" I would not buy a 55£ book.

Also, why do you think I'm "hiding" in Belgium ?
It's my country.
Furthermore I'm from the

waldo, just pulling a leg...

i now realise you are not the Waldo i know, that is actually dutch, lives in belgium and has a great sense of humor. so forget my comments. obviously you are someone totally different, new here. or to say it differently, je suis desolée little frenchie

[ds1984]

Anyway, why should I pay for postage if I can avoid ?
It's not like I'm robbing Chris of anything.

It's so much easier to post to the UK.
Yesterday I spent a long time kneeling on the floor of a convenience store filling out ten customs forms before posting to Europe.

Are you talking about CN22 ?
I though  you can do it online now and print it at home.

[Waldo]

I shared the info on web, FB, Insta, X, and even LinkedIn

I hope it will give you more orders

Thank you so much.

Hi Chris,

Knew about it thanks to JF post on both his blog and LinkedIn.
I ordered it today and I'm looking forward to receive it.
It's me who asked you to send it to a UK adress as my best friend is currently there.
Will save me the 10£ postage 

Greetings from Belgium

once a dutchy always a dutchy huh old friend....hiding in Belgium :-)
x

Dutch and Belgians are not the same.
Need to learn your geography, mate.

Anyway, why should I pay for postage if I can avoid ?
It's not like I'm robbing Chris of

i now realise you are not the Waldo i know, that is actually dutch, lives in belgium and has a great sense of humor. so forget my comments. obviously you are someone totally different, new here. or to say it differently, je suis desolée little frenchie

No worries, I do have a good sense of humor too.

I guess Waldo is often used.
In my case it's short for my last name.

Btw, I'm not frenchie either.
But I reckon my mother tongue is French.

Cheers !

[Chris W]

Are you talking about CN22 ?
I though  you can do it online now and print it at home.

I'll look into it.

[vape68]

Did I ever say that ? No

Well you are, because you are thinking the book cost £5 to £8 to print and then saying I should sell it for £27.50 and make less profit.
So let's be honest here...
You are completely discounting (to £0) the man hours it took to produce, the cost of software, capture One, Photoshop, (In Design £22 a month and this is the only reason I needed it), the film scanning equipment, macro lens, 24mb digital camera.
Even just the exclusive nature of the photographs, never previously published, no other photographers embedded on the tour.
And you went to all the trouble of phoning your local book store?
This isn't a commercially published book. I'm doing it myself, I'm signing every copy, packing it and posting it at various local post offices.

Did I tell you to sell for raw costs ? No.
At £27.5 you would get a 70-80% profit margin which is really very good for any seller or any product,
I also thought the main point was to get your nice photographs to as many fans as possible, so that everybody wins.

Re the bookskop, I obviously asked if I wanted to print my own book 100 pages A4 black and white what's the cost and that was the answer, so same case as yours. I guess you don't want to answer what's your cost and that's fine.

Again it's rude not consider at all Chris many hours of hard work, your way of consider this is like Chris had to do nothing but print and sell. Work has to be valued and has to be paid.

PERIOD.

and who didn't consider that ? surely not me. The first thing that I wrote in this thread is that the book is interesting, I just thought the 4-5 times the printing price was more than enough and already a very high margin, he can sell it at £55 or £100 or even £500 if he prefers, that's his right.

[vape68]

I was trying to help Chris and also please more fans, that's all,
what's the problem ?

This is such absolute nonsense.
You COULD have just suggested a price the book lower and sell to more fans. Instead you made a wild guess as to how much it cost me to make the book (£5-£8), bluntly asked me how much it cost (more than once), disregarding the actual work it took to produce the book before the final print stage.
I'm happy with the price and don't need your uninvited advice. And why would I take advice from someone who places NO value on the actual photography, the two years of cleaning and editing images, and just think that a book costs £5 to print?
It was more than that anyway.

Chris you are quite a funny guy, once again I never wrote that, you like to twist people's words, the first thing I wrote in this thread is that the book is interesting. There's surely a well done work behind it. I just thought the 4-5 times the printing price was more than enough and already a very high margin, you can sell it at £55 or £100 or even £500 if you prefer, that's your right. I hope this discussion is over frankly. Good Luck with the sales.

[Robson]

Yesterday I spent a long time kneeling on the floor of a convenience store filling out ten customs forms before posting to Europe.

Rock and roll man.

You shoulda learned to play the guitar. You shoulda learned to play them drums.

Dusty you won't believe it but I really wanted to write the same thing. 

[dustyvalentino]

Yesterday I spent a long time kneeling on the floor of a convenience store filling out ten customs forms before posting to Europe.

Rock and roll man.

You shoulda learned to play the guitar. You shoulda learned to play them drums.

Dusty you won't believe it but I really wanted to write the same thing. 

Great minds think alike... or fools seldom differ? 

[Robson]

Yesterday I spent a long time kneeling on the floor of a convenience store filling out ten customs forms before posting to Europe.

Rock and roll man.

You shoulda learned to play the guitar. You shoulda learned to play them drums.

Dusty you won't believe it but I really wanted to write the same thing. 

Great minds think alike... or fools seldom differ? 

I am happy to choose the first option 

[Knopflerfan]

Now it's rude to say that a book is expensive?

It's fine to state an opinion that the book is 'too expensive'. It is kind of rude to make a wild guess at the raw cost (£5 - £8) which is already completely wrong, then base your price opinion on that. Which totally discounts my skill as photographer and the many, many hours I spent editing images, discarding images that weren't good enough for the book, restoring the images that were good enough, meetings with the manager of the printer to get the best quality possible etc, etc.
It's just silly to think you can just cheaply scan 80 negatives, dump them into a file and get the cheapest local printer to make it into a book.

Before writing I called a well known and big bookshop in my city and that was the answer of the cost, so it's not a wild guess, let alone rude. You can always tell us your cost, I will believe you.

Really, I can't believe anyone be so rude......A friend of mine published a similar style 'independant' book (amazing photo's) and already his book is much higher in price than when first published. Like Chris has quite rightly said you cannot price the time to compile the book etc
About time the rudeness stopped and be instead be very thankful that Chris has bothered to release his own pictures at all.......

[Chris W]

I just thought the 4-5 times the printing price was more than enough and already a very high margin

You still don't know what the printing price is. And you're still disregarding the costs and work that came before the printing.