Best Practices for Selling Your Own Photo Book

Making a living off of your creativity, talents, or even hobbies is so much more doable now than it was a few years back. You no longer need to hit an artist’s version of the jackpot by being in the improbable right place at the right time to catch your big break – you can make it happen yourself. Today we’re talking about photographers who have a great opportunity to further distribute and earn money from their product. With the right strategy in mind as well as the help of some tools that are at our disposition, creating and selling your own photo book can be easy and well worth your time.

Once your photo book has been perfected, it’s time to start figuring out the business side of things so you can get rewarded for your hard work. Of course, it’s always an option to take the traditional route of going through a publishing company that would take care of all of this for you, but that almost always implies taking a huge cut on what you could be earning, as well as giving them the rights to your work. For this reason, self-publishing solutions are becoming increasingly popular. Some of these platforms, like Amazon, mainly serve as an already well-established space where your book can easily be found and purchased by the right audience, getting you paid. Others, like Blurb, cover a fuller range of aspects involved, from the actual production of your book, to distribution, to keeping financial matters in order.

Gaining traction for a book is not much different from any new product or business. A good marketing strategy revolving around impactful online presence is required to create a buzz, meaning social media activity, press coverage, quality email marketing with regular newsletters, and some investing in advertising if the funds are available.

Another very important factor worth spending time and money on is SEO. The wording you choose to include in your listing title and description have a huge impact on the search algorithm and can make the difference between a product that appears when your potential audience is looking for it and one that doesn’t. Don’t hesitate to do your research on best SEO practices or even enlist the help of a professional.

Selling photo books is a great way to turn a passion into a profitable product, and it is quite low-risk compared to many other business endeavors. Solutions like Amazon and Blurb give you total control over your product, unlike when going through traditional publishing companies. This means you’ll never be tied down to unfair ownership agreements, and you can bid farewell to the obligation to sacrifice hefty portions of your potential earnings and other general constraints. Considering how simple it is if you decide to use a self-publishing platform, there is not much to lose here, so why not give it a go?