Comments on: Becoming a Blurbarian

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:58:41 +0000

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!

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 05:16:40 +0000

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.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 02:11:35 +0000

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!

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:26:43 +0000

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.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:13:14 +0000

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?

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:45:38 +0000

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.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:20:46 +0000

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?