A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
So many people have asked me about the picture book I published for my Grandson’s birthday that I thought I would use this months “free advice” column to tell everyone about it. The idea was easy. I searched through the thousands of pictures I took of his baseball tournament games, put in some commentary, a few baseball quotes and had the idea for a perfect gift. Now all I had to do was get it printed and bound. I wanted something a little classier than a scrapbook.
As with many other items, if you do a Google search for book publishers, you’ll find millions of them. How do you decide which one won’t rip you off? My method was to search various forums and find out what other photographers recommended. Most of the recommendations were for Lulu, Blurb, Viovio, Shutterfly and Snapfish. I decided to give Blurb a try and I wasn’t disappointed.
To start your book, you have to download Blurb’s Booksmart software. You begin by deciding what the physical size of your book will be. There are six different book sizes from the smallest (5×8 inches) to the largest (12×12 inches). After selecting the dimensions of your book its time to add the content. BookSmart provides templates for Title pages, Table of Contents, Introduction, Chapter titles, Index and Content pages. If you don’t like any of them, you can design your own layout.
BookSmart provides an excellent selection of text editing tools. You can control horizontal and vertical justification, fonts, text color, photo borders, and many other text and photo attributes. Photos are added via drag and drop into frames on each page. Text frames are easily added or resized. Editing text and photographs is easy. Photo editing is limited to zooming and cropping, flipping, and adding borders. If you need to edit the way the photo itself appears, you’ll need to use your regular photo editor. Another neat feature is Group Book. You can invite other people to collaborate on your book by uploading pictures and content for you to consider adding to the book.
Blurb has an awesome help system. Help and support, information about pricing and shipping, helpful tips and book ideas and much, much more are located in easy to find locations, with no complicated paths to follow to get there. There are ten FAQ sections which are all searchable by keyword. There are also five forums where customers can share their tips and ask questions. There is also an E-mail support section. Blurb also has several tutorials, videos and demos that will show you how to use the software.
How much will it cost to print your book? It depends on what type of book cover you choose and how big your masterpiece is. The cheapest book you can print is a 5×8 soft cover, 40 page, no color book for $4.95. You could go all out and get a 400 page 12×12 hardcover book for only $186.95. Blurbs prices to seem to be competitive with the other sites I looked at. Shipping is extra.
After you publish your book, Blurb keeps it on their servers as long as people are buying copies of it. There is also a public bookstore where creators can buy and sell their books. You can set your own book price and pass the link on to people that you hope will purchase their own copy. A word of caution. If you decide to publish a book, I recommend you triple check the spelling and each pages layout. Then I would suggest you have one or two other people proof read it for you. Blurb doesn’t check the manuscript. Once you upload the book for printing, you can’t make any changes.
The book quality is excellent. The books are printed on a high gloss paper and the binding is superb. I’ve borrowed the Grandson’s book a lot of times and have shown it to many people. I have yet to receive any negative feedback. I’ve only mentioned some of the main features. There is a lot more you can do. The software is available for both PC and MAC. If you’re planning on publishing a book, I can highly recommend BookSmart available from Blurb.