I spent all day today working on my book. My Kickstarter Project comes to an end at 7AM Saturday morning Japan time. Today I finalized the details with the shipping company, the printer and my book designer. Today's configuration: Ricoh GR

I love when I see things named like this in Japan. How do they think of these names?

My first stop today was at White Rabbit Japan. I emailed the owner Max to get suggestions on where to buy boxes and packing supplies in bulk. I was initially thinking I might sell 50-100 books so while it might take a few days I can pack, write customs forms, and address labels for that many books. To date I have sold 10 Image Packs, 24 eBooks, 31 Prints and 338 Books. I can easily distribute Image Packs and eBooks to the backers with digital downloads from my shop. I can provide coupons for my portfolio site to allow people to choose and order their prints. I can't image how many weekends packing and shipping 338 books would take me. I am so glad he suggested I outsource the shipping to him.

I have had a lot of people ask me if they can change their pledge. For example, they ordered an eBook but now what a hard cover Book or ordered just a Book but want to add a T-Shirt or Print. It's easy, go to Kickstarter, click “Manage Your Pledge" on my project page and make a new selection.

I ended up talking about business with Max for a while and I might be outsourcing my ShootTokyo T-Shirt shipping to him. Its a ton of work and I am not really set up to do it. Sometimes I get no orders for a few weeks then weeks like last week I got 10.

It is better to let professionals handle it for me...

Max's site is pretty popular for Japanese Learning materials. I have gotten all of mine from them for years. They make a really cool series of Kanji Flashcards.

They also ship all sorts of stuff from Japanese. These candy toys are pretty sweet.

After White Rabbit I headed to Ikebukuro t0 meet up with my Book Designer and Printer...

I love state of art vending machines next to a bank of pay phones...

Apparently there is no sunshine in the East or North. Make sure you go straight...

I had time for a quick lunch so I stopped at a standing soba bar. I love that you can pay for things with your Train Pass. I hate carrying things in my pocket so not having to always be reaching for cash is very handy...

Meet Hajime. He is the designer for my book... He has designed more than 100 books. After a quick chat about design we were off to the printers...

Meet Yamazumi-san. He is the owner and master printer at Inuuinq.

Hajime insisted he is the best photography book printer in Japan. I still asked to see some of his work. He casually reached behind him and grabbed a stack of books that he has created for Japanese photography legand Moriyama Daido. Then proceeded to open a cabinet full of shelves of books from equally impressive photographers. Strange that Dave Powell's book will be sitting on those shelves. Now it will probably be on the bottom shelve way in the back but that's OK with me if I can get Yamazumi-san to make my book.

He asked me what kind of book I wanted and I said 'let's make the most bad ass photography book you have made yet'. I got a bit smile so I think it translated well into Japanese. After every option I choose he kept saying 'takai desu'...expensive!

We spent a lot of time talking through the details such a cover, color, paper thickness, book size, etc.

We settled on a very cool black cover. I'll have a mock up later in the week.

We also decided on a book size. It will be 25.7cm x 28cm or roughly 10 inches by 11 inches. The book is coming in around 140 pages now so it is going to be a nice sized heavy book.

It is going to have big images with very little boarders around them.

We looked at paper, lots and lots of paper... I am going with the best quality paper available.

I think this is my favorite feature: rather than binding the book directly to the spine we are binding it to a heavy cloth that is attached on each side of the spine. This way when you are looking at images in the middle of the book you don't have a big deep valley to the spine but rather the book opens up so you can see the entire image. It is a very cool way to create the book. Nothing is worse than having a nice book and you need to keep cracking the spine of the book so you can see all of the image.

The books are going to come shrink wrapped except for people who request me to sign it or put a message in the book. There will be a survey at the end of the project where you can ask me to do that.

I hope you can see I am sparing no expense to create an awesome photography book. Personally I cannot wait to get my copy. If you haven't backed the project yet please do as this book is going to be awesome.

I'm going to need someone like this to stand around and sell any surplus books I have...

I never due this but I wasn't paying attention and missed my station...

I picked up very cool Beats Studio wireless headphones. They are a great size for drowning out the noise of the city and listening to great music while out and about. I wonder why it took so long to come out with good wireless headphones. I looked at the Bose ones in the US but they had a huge wireless receiver on one ear. It reminded me of an early mobile phone from Motorola.