Your Photos in a Coffee Table Book: Here’s How…

As Bloody Mary sang in the musical “South Pacific,” “You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”
OK, whether we want to admit it or not, most of us have dreamed about seeing our name on the cover of a book. Even more exciting is envisioning walking into a local book store and seeing our book perched on a shelf in full view of potential buyers and watching several of them stop long enough to glance through it and smile as they look at our images.
So, how do we go from dreaming of a book to photographing and making money from the images appearing in the book?
You basically have three paths:
1.) Self publishing
2.) Working with a traditional, national publisher
3.) Working with your local chamber of commerce
Of course, before you publish a coffee table book, you’ll first need to have a few images to show!
Certainly you want the signature images from your city, but you also need the “hidden gems” and lots of smiling faces.
Here are some photos that have appeared in my coffee table books:




One of the great bonuses of shooting for books is that you are only selling “single use” rights to your images, which means you can sell them as stock photos before and after publication.
I have gone on to use my images to form mystockphotos.com, a website that allows buyers to view my images and purchase them for publications.
[Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can turn your pictures into cash in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel.  Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Selling Photos for Cash: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.]