Weirdly, the journey to birth my new photo book has taken nine months.
There have been so many steps. Each one was taken with someone else at my side, be it the filmmaker, my Kickstarter supporters, the book designer, people who helped me with editing and sequencing, the poet, the essay writers, the copy editor, the book printer, the broadside printer, or the friends who let me lean on them when I felt done-in. Making this book has been exhilarating, frustrating, painful, messy, and full of joy.
I’m so close now I can taste it.
This week I received the F&Gs from the printer. When they first told me about the “effing G” I knew right then and there I’d pushed too hard, demanded too much, been an absolutely obnoxious perfectionist. Yes, there’s a bit of a language barrier, since the printers are Italian, but “effing G” sounded pretty universal to me. They’d had it with me, and they’d come up with a not-so-subtle code word to refer to the client who’d driven them crazy!
After a quick Google search, I learned it’s actually a printer’s term, and it stands for “folded and gathered.” What I received in the mail on Tuesday was a set of all six printed signatures of the book. This included the printed cover that was wrapped around the signatures. All 96 pages neatly divided into six beautiful portions. What a lovely sight to see! All I needed to do was look everything over and then give my approval for moving forward.
So now we’re on to one of the very last steps: the binding of the book. At long last the hardbound book will finally take shape and become the object my collaborators and I have been working toward all these months. Then the books – all 500 of them – will be shipped to me in Portland, piled into a storage unit, and then one by one, I’ll package and mail them to the people who have pre-ordered them or backed my crowd-funding campaign. Two book signings will follow (one in Portland and one in Kansas City) and then the task of promoting and selling the remaining copies begins.
It’s a labor of love, to be sure.
So, after nine months, “I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For” will be born. I couldn’t be more excited to push it on out into the world!
