It was worth the wait!

Panorama of North House of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico

When you embark on an art or photographic retrospective monograph, or any memoir for that matter, I discovered the project seems to take on a life of its own, with all kinds of additions, acquaintances, sidebars, excursions off topic, enhancements of images, second thoughts, more additions. For me there have been a ridiculous number of edits—now some 50 in all. In November 2017 I really though I was close to complete. Wrong answer!

Backing up the timeline: after an exhaustive search for a traditional or university publisher, or even an agent, I realized that independent publishing was the most valuable (though challenging) route. Art books, especially my hybrid image and text manuscript, is a niche where only the author knows how to design it, edit it, and offer it to the public in the right places. That was almost ten years ago. I joined the Colorado Independent Publishers Association.

Then it was November 2019—time flies with project creep. That’s when a whole new set of challenges arose in the process of converting completed files to the color space and language of my chosen printer. Even in Covid spring 2020 new alterations had to be solved by experiment to achieve the continuity of color and sharpness I demanded.

Read on for the 10-year plus evolution to come to print.

Front covers of case bound and soft bound versions of Fragments of Spirit