18th February was quite a grim day. It was the day when it transpired that, after three successful campaigns, the push to make the 2018/2019 Cyclocross album happen was unsuccessful. Experiencing failure is not fun and I still don’t think I know why it didn’t happen this time around. When I looked at what I had been doing during the campaign, which was about 100 people short, it wasn’t different from previous years. Maybe it was because of Brexit. Or people spent all their money on Christmas present. Or I just simply reached the ‘peak cyclephotos’ the year before and somehow people had had enough of my books. Whatever the reason, it didn’t work out.
While the outcome was quite disheartening, I was very keen on making the book happen, as I wanted to commemorate the tenth anniversary of me starting shooting cyclocross. I opened a fresh Excel spreadsheet and started to look at numbers. I went to book shops to look at different book formats. After doing some research, I decided to make a book, but in a different format. I wanted a product with the same form factor, but to keep costs down, it would have to have a soft cover and less pages – 180, to be precise. The other change I made was to focus on the photos this time around and decided to change to structure as well: the photos would be grouped by month and these chapters wouldn’t be accompanied by any text. There was going to be only one feature in it (though that’s a really interesting one) written by a contributor. The rest would be stories from the first ten yours of my career.
The final hurdle was the design itself. For all the previous editions, I worked with various designers and that has been one of the major costs. I wanted to try my hand at it and decided to create the book design and the layouts myself. It took me some time to get hang of the ins and outs of Indesign. But after using the software quite a lot, I became more and more proficient in it and managed to put together something I am (mostly) happy with.
Long story short, there will be a book and it is almost ready. It’s been pushed back a few times, as more riders decided to retire than I had knowledge of at the end of season (looking at you, Jeremy Powers and Nikki Brammeier!), so I had to squeeze in two more chapters. After a lot of toing and froing, I decided to add 12 more pages, so the book ended up being 192 pages. It is almost ready, we’re just going through it again, looking for typos, imaged boxes and other little errors. The files will be sent to the printers next Monday, so you still have a week to pre-order the book. The benefit of that you can still buy similar bundles that I used to have during the Kickstarter campaigns: your name in the book, prints, etc. When you place your order, just check out the roll-down menu, it should have all the different options.
Pre-order the book before this Sunday to be able to get any perks >>>
