Curated China : Guizhou (my first China book - of 16 planned over the next 2 years)
I'll start off stating this is NOT an ad. ! I just thought some people may find this of interest or even inspiration to do something similar.
I've been seriously busy of late, not much time for forums and the like. I made a second trip to Guizhou province since I loved it so much the first time around (3 weeks) and this time went for 4 weeks. The near 8 weeks encompassed mostly ethnic minority villages and events but also some epic landscape scenery.
The 156 pp book is out in lay-flat hardback in China (I bought a few copies to the UK to sell), it's been uploaded to Bookvault (so they will distribute to Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble etc.) and I'm working on finalising the upload for Kindle etc. I just received my Bookvault Test copy today (looks good) !
Everything was shot on either an OM-3, OM-1i (mostly 20/1.4 + 45/1.2 + 75/1.8) or Sony A7r5 (16-35/4 PZ + Tamron 70-180/2.8 + Samyang 24 and 45)
I shot, designed, edited and produced the book myself (AI was so helpful with ideas, layout suggestions and instructions for implementing those into Affinity Publisher 2 - not the castrated Canva version)! It's on sale in the Artscape gallery in Shanghai. Happily my investment has already been recouped from pre-sales in China, so my wife is happy and it gives me the green light to continue!
The biggest issue / obstacle so far is the format. It's an A4 landscape format book, which many aggregators / printers can't handle. I may make small adjustments (smaller, even vertical) to future books because of this.
Anyway you can see a 2 chapter sample in the Flipbook below (I send the full book out as a Flipbook and in 2 PDF formats to PDF buyers).
My intent is to have 16-18 books, in the 'Curated China' (copyright applied) series, out in the next 2 years (I've already shot many of them already, I just haven't put the images into books yet). And then have residual income over the rest of my life, whatever few years are left. But also have some memories for my family of my footprints on this earth.
My second book (same length, many others will be shorter, around 100pp, on specific topics/subjects), '25 Jiangnan Watertowns' (located between Shanghai and Suzhou), these are the ancient villages set on canals, up to 2,000 years old, will be out in September/October.
Note the flipbook sample below is best viewed on a computer monitor or Pad. It's too small for a phone IMHO.
P.S. there are a couple of images repeated in this sample flipbook - they are not repeated in the actual physical book or full flipbook. Click the loudspeaker icon to switch off the music.
Aug 11, 2026 at 10:20 AM
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