2020. First confinement. I have time and I am working on two books in parallel, each representing several years of upstream work. At the end of confinement, they are ready and I consider them to be my best. I have already published five books with four different publishers. As everything has always gone well, I show them in priority. In vain. I prospect more widely. No answers, or else they are negative.
One of these books is Naturalia II, with a beautiful preface by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The first volume was released in March 2018, and I had planned to release the second volume three years later, in March 2021. Summer 2020 is coming to an end, and if I want to make this happen, I have to rush things a bit. Convinced of the quality of this book, I decide to self-publish it.
Thinking about it, I realize that the second book might just be the most interesting of all. Combining photography and fiction, it is based on around fifty pages of text and some of my photos of abandoned places, with a particularity. I do not voluntarily reveal too much for the moment… I asked a friend with literary skills to be my pen to develop a scenario that I had imagined a few years ago, then I presented this book to about thirty publishing houses by adapting my presentation to the criteria of each: text only, text and some photos, summary, etc. Despite this tedious work, the negative responses followed one another: fiction publishers do not make images, image publishers do not make fiction, and a world crisis having passed by there, none was inclined to launch a UFO.
Having many other projects, I come to an obvious conclusion: I can’t spend so much time prospecting. As the French adage says, “you are never better served than by yourself”: I will therefore also self-publish this second project. And why stop there? I might as well publish all my next books and give a beautiful framework to this new adventure!
Tadaaaam: Jonk Editions was born!
So I created my publishing house to publish my own projects. Once the machine started, I thought it was a shame not to also publish artists whose work I like. What happens next, we will imagine it together!