Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

It’s been an exhausting week working on this Print on Demand book. Since I last spoke with you, I’ve downloaded software from Digi-labs.com (the same program that Pikto uses) but decided not to use it. (Their “My Photo Books” software is very easy to use, but it really wanted to resize my images, slightly but enough to annoy me).

I can’t even remember half of what I did as far as technical stuff goes. At some point, I wound up at SharedInk.com

As I went along, I realized that so much work was going into this project that I just wanted the book to be as good as I could get it with POD technology, regardless of price. So the last two days I’ve been working on redoing the book for SharedInk.

I haven’t gotten to the point of doing proofs yet. You use a simple PS template, which basically just gives you printable area; do your thing in your native colorspace (RGB for me); and eventually zip the file using a page number file name and do the first PDF proof.

They will also print SINGLE pages ($6 for the first one and $1 ea. additional) so you can tweak your color management / sharpening etc. before doing the whole book.

The book if I continue through with this - which I think I will - is 8 x 8 inches, hardcover (a bunch of choices for materials); and at this point 4-color. The owner also mentioned a neutral gray curve they can use, but we’ll see if this is needed or not.

As usual, if the first book works out, I’ll probably do a larger one. Cost for the 8 x 8 inch book is about $45 for the first 20 pages, and then $1.00 for each additional page (I think that’s what it is).

There’s also a signup fee - but again - given the amount of time and energy that goes into these things - that’s the cheapest part (and it’s waived for the first 45 days to give you a chance to do your first book).

Last night, as I fell asleep, I was trying to remember all the POD companies I had tested or partly evaluated and I couldn’t even list them all. I was thinking that my first book shouldn’t be of photographs at all - but just about this process of producing a book. The other phrase that struck me (duh) was - you get what ya pay for.

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Another day with SharedInk.com - I like their online interface. I think I’m getting a good idea of what this thing will look like when printed. At this point, I’m looking at about 80 pages, hardcover, 8 x 8. My costs will be around $120 ea. It’s still called Morning, Noon & Night. Images from New York. I suppose another two weeks of this. I want to have it available for the holidays. The only issue that I see so far isn’t exactly technical - I know that everyone is going to ask for a signed copy. This means shipping it to myself and re-shipping it, as opposed to drop-shipping a copy from SharedInk. This is true with all online services. There’s no way around that and it will increase costs. Of course, I can buy ten at a time and hope they sell.