I just received my book, “Ocean Adventures,” from MyPublisher. The book started life as a portfolio of my underwater images. When they offered a 70% discount on their deluxe hard cover book with unlimited pages, I decided this was the time to max out the pages in my portfolio book and change the title to make it into (what I hoped) would be an impressive coffee table book.
This gave me an opportunity to try some neat things in the book like taking an image and spanning two pages with it. These kind of images are really impressive.
I finished the book and uploaded it to the MyPublisher site. The process works extremely well. Their software will check your book and point out mistakes that should be corrected before you upload. I completed the process by placing my order for the book. The normal price would have been $227.00 plus sales tax and shipping. With their promotion, I paid $70.00 plus sales tax and shipping. The final price was around $84.00. I have used MyPublisher before and I was really pleased with the final product. This time, I offered the book to anyone that wanted to order. I have not done that before and I found things that surprised me.
First, if you are going to have others buy your book and you want to make any money on it, forget it. There isn’t any way for you to set a price for your book. You can get $20.00 off coupons when people buy your book. To do this, you have to sign up for the service and send out emails through this service. If people use the link they receive in the email to order, you will get the coupon. I tried to sign up for the service and after inputting email addresses, I received a system error each time. I tried this a number of times with the same result each time. In frustration, I emailed MyPublisher to ask if there was a way to track who purchased my book. Their reply was “no.” I could sign up for the coupon offer but other than that, they couldn’t tell me how many books were purchased. I told them that I tried to sign up for the coupon service but kept getting a system error. They suggested that I input fewer email addresses and try again. I was amazed and disappointed by their answers. Then I thought about the coupon offer. I realized that I purchase books from them when they are having a two-for-one, 50% or 70% off offer. You can’t combine the coupon with any of those offers so it was unlikely that I would be using the coupons. I did find out that everyone that ordered a book received a discount offer with the book. It will prompt some people to use MyPublisher which is good for their business.
Okay, so with that out of the way, I waited for my book to arrive. What amazed me was that my wife’s brother received his book on the same day that I did and they ordered a day after me. I can’t really complain as the book arrived about five days after ordering. I have to say that the book met all my expectations. The printing was as good as I have seen and the image wrap cover was spot on. I don’t think that there is anything that they could have done to make the book better. That sentiment was echoed by the other people that bought the book (at least the one’s that emailed me to tell me that they purchased it). By the way, I just received another offer from MyPublisher that is only good for three days. I could reorder my “Ocean Adventures” book for $60.00. I don’t understand how they can offer books at these prices but I like it.
I also had a book printed at Blurb. I am working on a book about underwater New Jersey. Many of you voted for the cover photo of the book and I thank you all for that.
The editing of the book is finished and I am looking for a publisher. I explored a lot of options. I have contacted publishers to see if I could find one that would publish it. I looked at print-on-demand (POD) like Blurb, CreateSpace, Lightning Source and Lulu. I also looked into self-publishing the book and requested quotes from printers. My first concern was the final quality of the book. I designed the book in Adobe InDesign CS5, exported it to a PDF file as per Blurb’s specifications and did the same for the front and back cover’s and spine. I uploaded everything to the Blurb web site and placed my order. I used a small landscape size (10” wide x 8” long) with an image wrap hard cover. The book is 160 pages long so using MyPublisher was out of the question. Their maximum page quantity is 100 pages (actually 50 pages printed on both sides).
When you upload your PDF file to Blurb, they check it for errors. I didn’t have any so the process went smoothly. The file was quite large and took some time to upload. I paid for my book using a discount coupon and patiently (?????) waited for my book to arrive. I choose the least expensive shipping mode and found out later that it was not possible to track the book after it shipped. In any case, about two weeks later, I received my book. I have read a lot of comments about the quality of Blurb printing. The comments seem to be all over the place. Some thought that it was great and others thought it was bad. Overall, I felt that my book was okay. It wasn’t as good as MyPublisher but it I felt that most people would be happy with the results. The front and back cover images don’t have black blacks but the inside images were much better. I also read about complaints of the paper not feeling thick enough. I used their premium paper and I felt that it was very good.
This photo is fairly representative of how the cover looks. If you compare it to the cover image above this one, you will see the difference in the blacks. I took this image of the book cover with my wife’s Nikon Coolpix S600 camera.
This is a flatbed scan of one of the pages from the Blurb book. You can see the blacks look black and are not as washed out as those on the cover.
My initial impression was that I might be able to sell my book through Blurb but then I considered the selling price. In 10” x 8” soft cover format, the book was about $46.00 (my cost). As a small 10” x 8” hard cover book, it came in a little over $61 and as a large hard cover book (13” wide x 11” high), the price was around $111.00. I didn’t believe that I could sell the book with a small markup and make anything. I don’t believe that I would have sold many even if I didn’t mark up the price at all.
That’s when I started looking for other publishing options. I quickly found out my 10” x 8” book size was not an industry standard and in order to use CreateSpace, Lightning Source or Lulu, I would have to change the book size as most of their layout sizes are portrait and not landscape. I tried laying it out as an 8-1/2” wide x 11” high and as an 8.5” x 8.5” book and neither worked very well. I found the same problems when I started looking at self-publishing the book. One printer that I spoke to said the only way I could do this at a reasonable price was to use a spiral binding. I wasn’t against this but I now would have to order 100 books at a time to keep the price reasonable.
My saga continues but here is the bottom line for me so far. If I was going to do a book for myself and some friends and the page count was going to be less than 100, MyPublisher would be my option of choice without hesitation. If I was doing a book that fit the format for one of the POD publishers and I wanted to make a profit on it, I would look at them. I have read a lot about CreateSpace, Lightning Source and Lulu and have seen good and bad comments about all of them although I have seen less about Lightning Source than the other two. The problem with Lightning Source as I understand is that they don’t work with individuals but with companies. You can get around this by making your own publishing company, getting as ISBN number for your book and signing on to Lightning Source. I have also read that they are the toughest when approving the layout of your book. Many people have recommended using Lulu to layout the book and get it approved and then taking the finished PDF file to Lightning Source. The difference between the three seems to be distribution and royalties. If one of these interests you, Google them and you will find more information that you ever wanted. Since I don’t have a book format that fits theirs, I have not pursued this any further.
If you plan on doing a book, look into sizes first to make sure that what you choose has a marketable format. If your book has the potential of being a great selling book, your options using a traditional publisher (not self-publishing) will be greater. One of the publishers who is actually considering my book has landscape options that will fit right in with the size that I envision. The saga continues. Until next time.
© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.
