Becoming a Blurbarian
I’ve signed up with Blurb.com and started creating books. Blurb is a web site that has software to let you lay out a book and upload it to their server, and then you can order copies from them. Their niche is “coffee table books” — big colorful books printed on thick paper, in hardback or perfect-bound paperback formats. (Like Robin tried to convince me to do a couple years ago — great idea!)
There’s a limited set of sizes and page layouts available, but for living within this standardization you get something pretty cool: you can order books in quantities as low as 1, for prices that aren’t too atrocious (starting around $20).
I put together a simple 40-page book of travel photos just to test the concept, and it worked great. I uploaded my book late Sunday evening, and Friday morning I had a hardcover and paperback copy in hand. The printing and binding are even nicer than I expected, and the only surprise was that they seem to saturate the colors a bit, so my already saturated shots (I usually shoot in Nikon’s “vivid” mode) are really colorful. No problem, I’ve never been big on subtlety anyway.
I’ve made this first book available to anyone who wants to order a copy, just to see how that works. I selected “no profit” on the pricing, but you can also specify a profit on each book if you want. And I decided this first time around to keep it non-personal, so the only shots of anyone we know are Guillermo on page 32 and Megan’s hand squeezing a lemon wedge on page 25.
I’m planning several more books soon, although the work schedule may not let me get to them for a while. And I’d like to expand this one from 40 to 80 pages, and then add a few dollars profit to each copy. Hey, it takes time to do this stuff! But seriously, I don’t expect to sell many of them, this is mostly for my own use. These books will make nice Christmas presents, or promotional items for various purposes, personal and professional. Let your imagination run wild as they say, ha ha ha.
Meanwhile, here’s a link to my first book: “Doug’s World: Miscellaneous Photos.” They have a preview that Blurb can provide for you, but it only shows the first 15 pages, so here’s a preview of all 40 pages.
The previews are much lower resolution than the real book. For this one I picked mostly high-quality shots: close to full frame, well exposed, and sharp focus. Well, mostly — I included a few shots I like in spite of their technical imperfections, too. That’s what’s nice about a hobby, as opposed to work: you can do whatever you damn well please.
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 12:25 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on November 11, 2007 at 9:20 am Tom wrote:
Looks great! I’d love to pick your brain about this a bit when we see you next week — we’ve been trying to figure out how to do what we do, charge what we charge, and still manage to compete with these kinds of companies.
I assume you still hold the copyright (it’s your IP, after all), but can you also buy an ISBN and an LC number and truly publish through Blurb? I guess I could go read their site … okay, I’m back, and it’s a little lean on that kind of information. Do you get anything from them about that stuff once you’ve signed up?
on November 11, 2007 at 1:45 pm Doug wrote:
Yes, it’s still my copyright — there’s no contract you sign, and nothing involved that has anything to do with transferring rights or anything like that. the only detail that may not be obvious at first is they need to send you a 1099 at the end of the year if your books are priced for a profit and they’ve sent you any money (presumably to document why they’re not counting that money as profit on their own tax returns). So you have to provide a tax ID for that.
As for putting an ISBN or anything like that on them, I’m not sure how that might work. Their formats are very rigid, with no such provisions built in, but you could just put an ISBN on the back cover and title page if you wanted. But … the ISBN is assigned per publisher, and in this case I think they’re the “publisher” although I don’t know if there’s any room for interpretation of that.
The thing Blurb offers, which I’m not sure you’d ever really want to compete with, is low barrier to entry. I’ve spent a grand total of $60 including shipping and everything, and I have a couple of nice books in my possession. That pricing is possible because it’s a 100% automated process, and they’ve provide no creative services at all.
on November 11, 2007 at 2:13 pm Tom wrote:
Yeah, I see no need to try to compete with that. Really, we do very different things than Blurb does, but the hard part is helping our clients understand the difference. Cost is (of course) a very important factor for a lot of our clients, and the subtleties of what we do vs. what Blurb does are hard to define in the face of the price difference sometimes. Which is not to say I’m getting whiny about them — fact is, they’re doing a pretty cool thing very efficiently for a good price. They worry me, but I can’t argue with the value of their product.
And yes, I think they may legally be the publisher, at least if you start applying concepts like ISBNs and so forth. Without that, they’re probably purely a manufacturer — it’s probably legally no different than having a picture silkscreened on a coffee mug or t-shirt or something.
Out of curiosity, does their name appear on your book anywhere?
on November 11, 2007 at 2:26 pm Doug wrote:
Yeah, their name and logo appears on the first and last pages (but nowhere else), and it says “published by Blurb.” You can get rid of the first mention it seems (I’ve seen other publicly available books on the site that have done so), but not the one at the back of the book.
I think the silkscreened t-shirt is the right analogy. They’re just a different way of getting prints made, essentially, and the batch of prints happens to arrive bound in a book.
on November 11, 2007 at 7:11 pm Tom wrote:
Cool — got it. We worry about these companies, honestly, but really, Blurb meets a different need than we do. Kind of hard to make that distinction with authors sometimes, but Blurb really efficiently meets a segment of the market in which we don’t want to compete.
I’m looking forward to buying a copy of Doug’s World. I’ve seen most (if not all) of those pics at screen resolution over the years and can’t wait to put a Doug’s World book on our coffee table (since we have one again now)! We’ll have to break out some wine and brie and have a release party when you’re here!
on November 11, 2007 at 10:16 pm Doug wrote:
Hey, don’t order a copy yet. I’m doing a massive update to that one shortly … decided to double the page count, since that doesn’t add much to the cost.
on November 12, 2007 at 10:58 am Tom wrote:
Fret not — thanks to the downside of owning two older cars, we’re broke until the fifteenth anyway. Just let us all know when the new and expanded version is out there and I’ll go order then!