HAPTIC PRESS Box Bundle: Street Notes, Film Notes, Photo Journal

A new idea for the MODERN PHOTOGRAPHER: You must become your own publisher, printer, and distributor.

HAPTIC INDUSTRIES: Creative Tools to Empower You >

1. More creative control

Learn From the Masters Book: First Edition

As a modern photographer, your goal isn’t to make a ton of money, gain massive fame and influence, or be written in the history books. Your goal is to express your creative spirit, and have full creative control and autonomy over your pictures, art, and products.

For example, for our Learn From the Masters Book, we had the option of going with a traditional publisher, but we chose to self-publish and self-print it instead.

To be frank, we probably would have made way more money, had far larger distribution, and seen our book on more photo book store shelves, but we decided that we wanted full creative control and autonomy — how we wanted to design our book, but also to keep all the “Learn From the masters of Photography” content available for free, and open.

2. More fun, and playful experimentation

CREATIVE EVERY DAY: Paper Edition by HAPTICPRESS

A fun product we put out is “CREATIVE EVERY DAY”— an experimental book that combines the trifecta of:

Photography
Drawing
Writing

As part of the HAPTICLABS KYOTO OFFICE, Cindy, myself, my sister Annette, and Cindy’s sister Jennifer all rented a tiny Airbnb, and cranked out this book. We designed it all together using Adobe Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop, and got it printed locally in California. We then distribute the book from Cindy’s family home (her mom packages and ships the books), and we also sent CREATIVE EVERY DAY to Amazon for fulfillment.

The fun thing was: CREATIVE EVERY DAY is a labor of our love, and brought us together closer as a family. It gave us all the opportunity to flex and workout our creative muscles with Annette and illustration, Cindy and writing, Jennifer and editing, and me and photography.

The power of publishing your own books, photography, and art is that you can try printing small batches of books (under 100 copies) and to be like a mad scientist — making fun and playful experiments, to try out new ideas, to bring joy into the hands of the viewer.

CREATIVE EVERYDAY is now available on mobile as PDF/Kindle Edition >

3. You can pick yourself

Now with the power of the internet, you can “pick yourself”— you don’t need to wait and be “discovered” by an agent, a publisher, or anyone else.

You can print and publish your own books on blurb.com (to keep costs lower, print it as a magazine), you can sell your books or pictures as a Kindle Edition in the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing platform, or by opening up your own “Woocommerce” shop for WordPress and sell your own products in your own store.

I remember as a kid, sitting on the sidelines, waiting to get picked for baseball. I was often picked in the middle or the last. That was a horrible feeling.

Now, you don’t gotta wait to get picked or “signed.” Even a lot of musicians nowadays no longer opt for big music deals. They rather stay independent, and solo— to regain more creative freedom. This is what the musician Chance the Rapper chose, and makes most of his money selling shirts, products, cds, and shows.