A Decade-Long Project Becomes a Book
For years, friends and followers begged us to turn this photo series into a book, and we'd always have an answer ready. "We need at least one location on every continent," or "There's this pose we haven't captured yet." And once we finally did that? Well, you guessed it. We found another excuse.
Then along came Andy Katz. He's a photographer friend who's created 14 of his own coffee table books, and he simply refused to let us off the hook. The calls, the texts, the emails: "How's the book coming?" He was relentless in the best possible way, and his encouragement is honestly why you're reading this right now.
So we finally dove in. Ben started by reviewing the entire collection of over 1,000 photos and selected 407 for consideration. Then, Andy helped us whittle those down to 230 of the strongest shots. From there, Karen took the reins, designing and laying out every single page with such care and intention that she ended up featuring 154 images in the final book. Ben then optimized every photo to make sure they'd shine on the printed page, designed the exterior of the book, researched printing companies, and built this website. It's been a massive team effort for the two of us, with Andy offering guidance every step of the way.
This is where we need you. We've been able to fund this project with our own time and money up until now, but we've reached one final hurdle we can't clear on our own: paying to print the book. Here's the challenge. To make printing affordable per book, we need to order at least 1,000 copies upfront, and that bill is simply more than we can manage. So we came up with what we think is a fair solution: we'll accept pre-orders for the book, collect your payment information, but only actually charge your card if we get enough pre-orders to pay for that initial print run. To make sure this doesn't stretch on indefinitely, we set a deadline of February 15th. If we haven't reached our funding goal by then, all pending transactions get cancelled and the book won't be printed.
We wanted to take steps to protect anyone willing to support this project. That's why we decided to partner with Kickstarter, a well-known crowdfunding website that was designed for exactly this kind of situation. By running the campaign through their platform, we never have access to your payment information, and once we launch, we can't modify critical details like the deadline—even if we wanted to. It takes the trust equation out of the picture and puts transparent systems in place instead.
Head over to The World Is My Yoga Mat Kickstarter page where you can pre-order a copy of the book and see how the whole process works. Together we can make this book a reality.
Click the banner above to learn more about the book project and learn how you can reserve a copy of the book.