Mitch,
To my eye you're overstating the parallels between yours and Daido Moriyama's work.
In any case, what you're about to read will come off in my typical, unintentionally didactic written tone — sorry, I'm actually funny in person — but these are just my initial thoughts, and I reserve the right to reconsider, too. I'm sure many will feel I deserve a PHD in the obvious, but here it is. I'll be rooting for you and eager to see how you proceed whether or not you agree with anything I say.
What you've written is a good start, but it's not going to get you a deal. I'd like to see a proposal that spends less time using words to describe the feelings you intend to evoke in your reader with your photos, as those photos will be a part of any presentation, and will have to stand up on their own. The Conrad quote is nice, but that's it for ... ethereality.
Instead, emphasize the aspect of your description where you allude to a tangible structure, and where you specifically state what those chapters will address and accomplish. Aside from the fact that you waffle about your commitment to your proposed structure, that's the strong part.
I'm not saying you have to stick to the structure described here, I'm just saying that when you break down exactly how you see this book — literally, physically — it makes it way more tangible, more solid, more easy to imagine as an
object, especially for someone who hasn't been walking around with your vision in his head for the past five years. Explaining it won't do. For 99 out of 100 agents or editors, the "object" part is everything. Even if all it ends up being is something for them to demand that you completely change, the process of clarifying your vision is still a crucial way for you to move forward, especially for a book that isn't as simple as a straight-ahead travel or journalistic subject.
Ok, the opening of your description sounds a bit like an imaginary interview with yourself. If the poem cycle metaphor is crucial to this book — and I think it is an interesting viewpoint and approach — you may want to commit to
codifying that metaphor or similarity in some way, maybe even by incorporating it as a subheading — Poem Cycle 1, 2 or some such thing — beneath each chapter title. I'd have to see more of how this concept is implemented to know how I feel about it, but offhand, late at night as I think about it, it seems like a bold move, a little wacky, a little self-aggrandizing, but also pretty cool and romantic, especially in light of the dark perspective. But however you incorporate it, don't tell us this is
like a poem, instruct us, in some physical way, that it
is a poem.
Next, as much as this has to be a physical thing, I don't think your vision is being served by defining a number of images at this stage. I think it may be too early. 170 is a
lot of pictures. As you begin to sharpen your tangible vision for this book, a number of things can happen, but hopefully what will happen is that you'll become way more disciplined in your edit, and remain open to cutting out anything that doesn't truly serve the book, or adding, but truly identifying any deficits in your undertaking that require and inspire going out and shooting more, with new vigor and clarity and
freedom about your goals. If I'm correct, Robert Frank shot 600 rolls to come up with, The Americans, and some consider his success rate for that little book very high.
Ok two final things: I forgot to mention in one of my earlier posts that designers are the other heavy players in the photo book world. There are many established designers who can get a deal done, so approaching one you respect is a great idea. There's a strong argument that you shouldn't waste your time making a book dummy that doesn't do justice to your hopes for its design, and instead prepare a couple of four-inch thick boxes with so many prints in them that the authority of your accomplishment is so palpable as to be indisputable, even if all those pictures won't ever make it in to the book. That's the thing, at a certain point, the images should suggest a book to anyone who goes through them, even if what they envision is a completely different book than the one you intended to make. Who knows, there may be a designer or editor out there who inspires you to trust him enough to hand off the material, and let him go for it — design, sequencing, edit, everything. That's not a bad thing at all, if it's the right person. Many, many fantastic books have been made that way. (I know, it doesn't sound like the best option.)
And the title; if your title is really so strong that you're afraid it will be stolen by someone on the Ricoh user forum, than it's worth SHOUTING that damn title to anyone who will listen. Make it yours, make it synonymous with your work and your name — MITCHELL ALLAND/BLANK BLANK — and make every publisher's ears in Asia ring with it. Anyway, you'll have to tell publishers, and they're the ones most likely to steal it. If it's stolen, it wasn't meant to be. But in my experience, there's always some blurry figure in the shadows edging in on your creative territory — the process of a book making it's way to the light of day is so slowwww — but those paranoid fears don't usually end up amounting to anything.
If you focus on making a book proposal as specific to your vision as possible, and then reapply yourself to making the work live up to that vision, to making the work as strong as possible and then to getting it out there, ultimately nothing anyone else does will dilute the impact of your accomplishment. I can't wait to see it at Dashwood books, here in NYC, so keep going.
http://www.dashwoodbooks.com/
Ok. I'm delirious and should've stopped an hour ago. Keep us posted.
Good luck.