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About the Book

4 years in the making, this was a leap of faith

Texas As I See It is the brainchild of Warren Paul Harris of Dallas, Texas. Every bit of this book from photography to layout to cover design and writing is entirely due to the hard work and imagination of Warren Paul Harris.

It seems so simple when you start considering publishing a book. This is just a matter of getting everything together, laying it out, printing it and then the world will beat a path to your door to buy it.

Well... Maybe if you're Stephen King or John Grisham or any other major author.

But for the rest of us mere mortals, it is not only a big project, but there is a LOT to learn. It is EXPENSIVE. There are lots of decisions to make. And in the case of a fine art coffee table book there are a lot of factors you probably never thought of. Like you're not going to print and bind it in this country. Seriously.

First of all thery are BIG. And HEAVY. And you are going to have to store them somewhere. And shipping is expsnsive. And you have to be v ery careful how you package and ship them if you want them to arrive in one piece.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This book was 4 years in the making.

We have been traveling the back roads of Texas for over 2 decades now. In the process I have always been looking for those oddities and unique finds. Things you KNOW you will never find again if you don't stop RIGHT NOW and go photograph them. I know this because early on, I made the mistake (more than once) of assuming I could go back and capture something unique when I had more time. Only to find the thing I loved was gone. So here's a piece of advice. When you see something really amazing and you want a picture of it... DO IT NOW. It may be gone tomorrow.

So anyway. It was not uncommon to be ripping down some back road (and we have 75 MPH 2 lane highways in Texas), spot something remarkable and slam on the brakes, sliding off the road in a cloud of dust and flying gravel. Then hot-foot it back to that ideal vantage point we just passed and get the photo. Every time I woudl do this, my eternally patient (well mostly) bride would say "What are you taking that picture for?" And I woudl say "For the book." And she would say "What book?" And I would say "The coffee table book I've been working on."

And off we would continue down the road, the plan for a book clear in my mind and not remotely plausible to my wife. I started by prototyping volume 1 in Blurb. If you're not familiar, it's a pretty good way to make a single book. It won't look as good as something done on an offset press, but you can actually do small runs of books that don't cost a fortune. You cannot feasibly print and sell books this way as you're spending well over $100 to produce one copy of a book like this. And then you would have to mark to way up to sell it. And then your mom is the only person who will buy one.

 

Seriously.

 

The only one.

So... Once we had the prototype we took it with us to art shows where we were exhibitiing and showed it to friends and family and gernerally received very favorable responses. Everybody loved it. I get the same responses to my large scale photography at art shows. If half of those people actually bought something I'd be quite wealthy by now. So you have to take all this praise with a grtain of salt.

After having the prototype around for awhile I decided to take the plunge and print 1,000 copies. But by the time it came to write the big check and start the process we already had 250 books presold. So at the very last minute I upped the order to 3,000 books.

 

That's a REAL leap of faith.

My wife was not so sure that was a great idea, but backed me nevertheless.

We continued to take preorders and when books arrived on November 11, 2011 it was really exciting. My publisher, Brown Books in Dallas was warehousing all the books and that was great, as we didn't have room for 10,000 lbs of books. They were marketing to the big book stores and Amazon and I was getting a little money coming in from this. We were doing a fair number of art shows and selling books via our website too, whicht was a lot more lucrative. So when I got a bill the 3rd quarter for $700 from my publisher (instead of a check) I said "WTF" or something to that effect. Well it seems that the large distributors buy cases of books, then just ship them back for credit after 90 days if they haven't sold. And that's what happened. They also repack the books in a pretty pathetic manner, resulting in damage to the books. So I was losing inventory to damage - AND paying for it.

 

Nope.

 

Just Nope.

So we got a climate controlled storage unit and hired movers to haul all the books up to it.

Over the span of 3-1/2 years we sold the entire first printing of books. 3,000 books. And something I found out AFTER I ordered all these books is that the vast majority of people who undertake to produce one of these fine art books sells about 10 copies. And these go to their mother - and other family members for the most part. So we were (and are) very gratified this book has done so well.

We originally had almost 50 resellers across the state, but with the 2nd printing we have scaled down to around 20 or so.

We are always on the lookout for a great home decor type retailer that will do as well as one of our original vendors (now under new ownership) that sold 329 books all by themselves over 3 years. So fi you know of anyone, we would like to hear about them.

We took delivery of another 3,000 books in March of 2018, so we have lots of books again.

Texas As I See It makes a GREAT gift. Signed by the author and personalized by you, the person you give it to will quite literally never forget you.

 

Immortailty for under fifty bucks!

That's a heck of a deal, don't you think?

Check out the endorsements and testimonials to see what other people are saying.