My book, Computational Photography, is now on sale for $49.95—normally $75.95—including Media Mail shipping! If you prefer you can download the high-resolution PDF for six dollars off, only $8.95!
I have a book and it’s Black Friday. It took me until yesterday for it to occur to me that maybe I should mention my book on Black Friday, indeed, mention it at all on this blog.
You see, I have a gift for marketing.
Here’s another example of my extraordinary marketing prowess.
When we were late in the design stage of the book, after months of work, just a few days from sending it to the printer, at the point where we were going over the design and the text making tiny corrections and adjustments, nudging every last detail into place, it suddenly occurred to me that I had forgotten to put my name on the book. My name was on the dust cover (on the back, not the front) and on the spine of the dust cover (all one long word joined with the title) and I knew it was on the copyright page way in back–but was it on the actual book itself?
I woke up one night at three in the morning and this fact suddenly occurred to me. I had to get up to check.
This is not as impossible as it might sound. The book design process started off in a linear fashion—I gave my designer photos, he put together a layout. Simple. Normal. Only we started having these things called ideas and, despite all advice to the contrary, we started making changes and then more changes as even better ideas popped up. Chaos isn’t quite the right word, because things weren’t falling apart, things were getter better and better. The book became less a task you handed over to someone else than a project not too dissimilar from my photo projects, that is to say, a work in and of itself. But it was the kind of rapidly changing, quickly moving process where maybe I really could miss the fact that my name wasn’t on the book.
But it was there, there was a title page. And that was it, my name in the book only once.
My marketing genius—it can only be called that—also led me to *not* include an essay at the front by some noted scholar, *de rigor* in art books, enlightening the reader and associating my work with the big name. There *are* essays, lots of them, but at first read they might not seem to have anything whatsoever to do with the photographs or even with each other (but they do).
I made it hard for the reader, I know, even titling it *Computational Photography* despite it not being about computational photography. (The title refers to my method of producing imagery, not to what the iPhone does).
I made it hard for the reader, I know. I didn’t even number the pages or provide any sort of technical information on the photos (though I do, on some of them, in the accompanying essays, although some of that text actually talks about computational methods, which I know is contrary to what I just wrote).
I made it hard for the reader in that I hid things all over the book, Easter eggs of sorts. Even the varnish on the pages, innocuous in most books, contains imagery and connections to other parts of the book. I don’t think that has ever been done before, using the varnish as content.
So, along with my designer, I created a book and it arrived in January and I thought maybe I should mention it today, maybe even write about the book over the next few weeks or months, highlighting some of the interesting aspects of the project.
Yet here again my gift for marketing is showing. I’m just over five hundred words into this post and I have forgotten to tell you the price or provide a link. What I’m going to do is this: I’m going to put the following text at the very top of my words here, to demonstrate again my impressive marketing abilities.
My book, Computational Photography, is now on sale for $49.95—normally $75.95—including Media Mail shipping! If you prefer you can download the high-resolution PDF for six dollars off, only $8.95!
I’ll put it in italics, that will be nice, with links, and did you notice the exclamation points? That’s my trick for conveying my infectious excitement! I’m just that good.
So, yes, buy my book. It’s Black Friday, it’s Christmas, and we’re all stuck at home. Give the book away as gifts and buy one for yourself. It will give you something to do.
