"People like an underdog," says Bruno Ceschel, the founder of Self Publish, Be Happy. "We like it when something seems to come from nowhere." And that's where The Afronauts came from, but the book has been a runaway hit since Cristina De Middel published it in May, with photography enthusiasts as well as collectors buying up the modest 1000 copies produced.

The story of Edward Makuka's failed Zambian space programme, which aimed to put the first African man on the moon in the 1960s, provided the idea for The Afronauts, which came to De Middel when she was researching ideas that border fact and fiction. "I was looking for weird things that happen around the world, and made a list of the 10 strangest experiments humans have done," says De Middel. "At the top of this list was the Zambian space programme. I had found a video on YouTube and that's when I knew this was going to be my next project."

De Middel envisioned The Afronauts as a carefully constructed story that would only make sense as a book, rather than a mere collection of images. "I wanted to play with the audience - whether they believe in the story or not," she explains. "And you can't do that with just a series of photographs in a magazine. I needed to add other documents - letters, maps and collages."

Image © Cristina De Middel.

De Middel collaborated with Ramon Pezzarini, a designer who has worked with Colors magazine, and Laia Abril, another Spanish photographer, who proved to be a ruthless editor. "She knew exactly which images needed to be taken out to tell a good story, even if they were my favourites," says De Middel. 

The Afronauts is not a conventional book, and De Middel says working out how to publish it was one of the best things about the experience of making it. "I have never tried to publish a book with a traditional book publisher," she says. "Instead, it was just a case of having the money to do it and finding friends who could help. The fact that I didn't know what boundaries existed in the photobook industry helped me break them. I didn't think about creating a proper photography book; instead, I just wanted to tell the story in the best way possible. I wanted people to experience the same emotions I felt when I was shooting the images."

As a result, she didn't pay much attention to details such as the quality of the print, or whether the book was going to be big or small. "I wanted it to look like a notebook. I wanted it to look raw," she says. "And I wanted people to understand the story when they looked at the pages and the images. That was the only thing I asked the designer when we started working on it."

This determination may go some way towards explaining why the book became such a hit - De Middel says she didn't have a specific marketing strategy when she published it, yet just days after she arrived at the Rencontres d'Arles festival in early July, it had sold out, with hundreds of photographers and photobook collectors still looking for a copy.

Image © Cristina De Middel.

"Before printing the books, I had already started to crowd-fund the production," she explains. "I didn't use any crowd-funding platform - I just have a big network on Facebook, and told my friends I was going to publish the book. That helped spread the message. But after that, I'm not sure. I went to Santa Fe and showed it to people who I think were really helpful in promoting the book - people like Denise Wolff, an editor at Aperture. It was also published on Raw File at Wired.com, and it went viral. If you type The Afronauts into Google, you will find hundreds of blog posts about the project."

She also decided to say yes to every single request she received, whether they were able to pay for the privilege or not. "Any blog that asked for the images, my answer was, ‘Yes,'" she says. "Any magazine - ‘Yes' - even if that meant not earning any money. I was more interested in promoting the book. It was really hard for me at first because I'm a photojournalist; I believe that if you [want to] publish something, you should have to pay for it. Now the magazines that are contacting me are ready to pay."

De Middel also received sound advice from another Spanish photographer, Ricardo Cases, whose book Paloma al Aire was a similar hit last year. "He sent me a list of 10 or 15 people to whom I should send a copy of the book - important reviewers and photobook experts. I sent it to Alec Soth, for example," says De Middel. 

Martin Parr also gave her "very sound advice" on how to manage people's expectations, and advised her to keep some copies for herself. Soth, meanwhile, told De Middel not to reprint it - something that has proven difficult to resist. "I'm receiving a lot of offers from traditional book printers," says De Middel. "They are very tempting offers, but I prefer to spend my energy on other things. I've spent two years with The Afronauts - I love the story, but it's been too long."

Image © Cristina De Middel.

In fact, the success of the book has meant that De Middel is now able to focus on what truly interests her. "This book has changed my career, mainly because I've gained a lot of confidence in myself," she says. "Before I made it, I was always worried about doing things that would sell and be understood by everyone. I had a lot of crazy ideas, but I would keep them to myself because I thought I had to focus on the stories that would make me earn a living as a photojournalist."

She had good reason to be hesitant, too - when she started work on The Afronauts, for example, her then gallery in Spain told her not to continue with it. "When I had shot around 75 percent of the images, I sent them to the gallery and was told I had to stop this project because they felt it was a step back in my career and had no place in the market," says De Middel. "They didn't want to exhibit this work. For me, it was clear this was a great story. And with this story, I realised I could do whatever I want."

She is now working on four new projects, some of which relate to the list of 10 human experiments she drew up two years ago. "I don't want to focus that much on freaky things, but all of these projects will be books," she says. "And each book will respond to its project. What I can say is that they will be different from The Afronauts."

"I know she's working on another project that sounds amazing," says Ceschel. "She is a very interesting artist, with a quirky and ironic take on documentary photography. I have a feeling she's going to deliver. Good on her. A lot of people don't succeed, so it's nice when someone does."

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