I have had a number of questions from forum members about the two photo books I have published, so I thought I’d go ahead and do a write up about it. It’s probably way more than most of you want to know, but it’s a long journey and lot of work to put a book together, far more than I would have imagined.
You might want to take a look at my books - both are free to view online or download as PDFs to give some context to this long post:
http://www.magcloud.com/browse/magazine/526793
After picking an idea, one of the hardest parts is selecting the photos. You want to showcase your work, but you also need to fulfill the narrative of the book, which means that you’ll likely have to take more photos or dig through your old photos. In my case, both books were about nature areas that I frequent, so I had many thousands of photos and hundreds of keepers. I started out by narrowing down the keepers to about 300 photos. From there, I further narrowed them down to about 150, mostly by cutting out duplicate photos, picking the best of the two, three, or more shots of the same subject, but also by cutting the work that I didn’t feel was as strong. I kept the discarded photos in another folder. That is important to do as you’ll need to fill in the gaps.
The next, and most difficult part was how I would organize the book. You need some chapters to group the photos and provide some cohesion. That sounds easy, but looking through your photos, it’s not as easy as it sounds. What do they have in common? Color? Shape? Type? Behavior? That’s up to you. I grouped my first book by wildlife and landscapes and then broke up each one. The garden book is broken up by the number of flowers in the photos and the landscapes of the area.
After that, you need to start putting the photos into those chapters. I created folders for each one and soon discovered an imbalance. Some folders had dozens of photos, others had two or three shots. I decided to go back through my discarded photos and was able to find some photos that could be added to some of the smaller chapters, but I still had gaps. I then went back and dug into my archives and found some photos that didn’t seem great at the time, but were a great fit. I knew with a bit of polish (post-processing) theses shots would work well.
I still had some gaps, however, and that was the fun part. I knew I needed photos of certain subjects, so now I returned to these areas on a mission. I wanted very specific shots to complete the story I was trying to tell, so while challenging, I planned and obtained the photos. Well most of them, I still haven’t been able to capture a good photo of Florida’s elusive black bears, but I digress…
Now, I finally had all of the photos and had them organized the way I wanted them, but oops, they were all JPEGs. Now I needed to go through multiple hard drives and folders to get the RAW files & TIFFs, but once I had those, I was ready for the next step – re-processing. Many of the photos were fine, but some of the older shots needed to be re-processed as the advances in my skills and RAW converters made it worthwhile. I ended up with a group of folders containing the CR2 and TIFF files. Now I needed to convert them all to 300dpi as that is what’s required for desktop publishing (VERY IMPORTANT STEP). I ran batch processing on the TIFFs and soon enough, that was done. If you don’t do this, the photos will be displayed too big or too small in the publishing software. Also, make sure they are all same the color space (Adobe RGB is the most practical).
Now I hit the next big challenge – layout. First, you have to pick the book size. I choose 8.25”x10.5” as it’s a good compromise in terms of size & price, but that’s a personal choice. Keep in mind that few sizes will like up well with the 3:2 sensor size. This is also the time to choose a publisher. At the time, MagCloud was the best I found because they offered print-on-demand, had good templates, full color management, and offered printed books and digital files. They only downside was that they didn’t offer hardcover books, so both of my books are printed in softcover. The paper is heavy and very high quality, at least. They use HP Indigo presses and having used these when I was a graphic designer, I knew the color would be great. This is also a good time to point out that you MUST have a calibrated monitor. If you don’t use a hardware calibration tool, your color won’t be right, guaranteed. MagCloud is now owned by Blurb, so that would be my recommendation, particularly because they have a partnership with Amazon to sell your books, and they still use these great printing presses.
Next, the software. Your choices are MS Publisher (not recommended), QuarkXPress, or Adobe PhotoShop or Illustrator (not good for multi-page layouts as you have to do them one spread at a time) or InDesign (best tool). If you can use InDesign, I highly recommend it.
With the photos themselves, you can do one photo per page or portrait (orientation) shots on each page and landscape shots as double-page spreads, but that’s boring and doesn’t always work. It’s better to have some variety and it makes the book look a lot more professional. The gutter (center of the two pages) is a killer and you have to make sure you don’t put anything important in that area. Also, if you want a full bleed (ink all the way to the edge of the page), you’ll have to crop. The bad news is when you crop, you’ll need to do it in PhotoShop (or whatever you use), otherwise you’ll screw up the DPI and such. That means you have to crop it to the correct size and then put it (back) into the layout. With InDesign, you can use the Adobe “round-trip” feature to go back & forth, which makes it a lot easier.
At this point, you will have a lot of work to put photos together on facing pages or in groups, or in sequence of pages to tell the story and create your chapters. This isn’t easy, and you may find that photos don’t work. Like me, you might even need to go out and take more photos…
Once you have the photos together, you need to decide if you want to caption them. For my first book, this was pretty easy, but for my garden book, it was a long, long journey. I didn’t realize how hard it was to identify flowers and how many of them are hybrids or interbred. I spent weeks trying to find the flowers, mostly using Google Images with the drag & drop feature. This was futile at best. I ended up asking the park rangers for assistance, which they graciously provided, but even then there were still about 20 they weren’t sure about. I turned to some Internet forums and got some great help. This was a 6-month process!
Now you need to design the covers and pick a title. I checked Amazon to make sure I picked a unique title and then found an appropriate photo for the cover that highlighted the book but had room for the words. For one book the front & back cover are one continuous photo, and for the other, it’s two different photos, but more on that in a moment.
For the back cover, you need to write a blurb about yourself, which is one of my least favorite things… And a brief intro to the book. Now, you need to add the title pages, copyright notices, and if you’re ambitious, ISBN number. Getting an ISBN number is expensive unless you’re publishing a lot of books or have a publisher. Blurb may provide these, but I’m not sure. You will also need to design the book spine, which (once uploaded) will be sized precisely in x by y pixels. This is really tedious if you’re trying to match a photo on the front and back, but can be done.
Now the book is done, but it still needs to be proofed. Save a low-res PDF and send it to friends and family. Make sure it’s as perfect as possible.
The final layout step is to prepare the PDF for publication. This involves downloading the publishers PDF export settings, and tweaking them. With MagCloud, they were using too much compression, and it crushed my blacks and caused banding. I tweaked them extensively, frequently going over their 300MB (I think) file size limit. I finally got it right and uploaded it.
Now for the surprise. The book is going to be quite expensive and unless you want to charge a high price, your profit is going to be quite low. For my books, I have the profit (which you set) at around $1. I could charge more, but the book was really for me and my friends and family, not to make money. Unfortunately, it means that books you buy for yourself are rather expensive. This is the biggest downside of self-publishing. They give you a break on volume purchases 25% of 20+, but that can be a lot to pay upfront. I also decided to give away the digital copy for free, but this is the place to make money if you want as the margins are much higher.
When it’s all said and done, holding your own book in your hands is a thrill and worth the hard work!
Now you need to promote the book, but that's a subject for another post. You might want to create a gallery of the (uncropped) photos from your book as well on your website so you can sell prints as well. That's what I did:
http://www.ianandersonphotography.com/Books-1
If anyone has questions, let me know.
You might want to take a look at my books - both are free to view online or download as PDFs to give some context to this long post:
http://www.magcloud.com/browse/magazine/526793
After picking an idea, one of the hardest parts is selecting the photos. You want to showcase your work, but you also need to fulfill the narrative of the book, which means that you’ll likely have to take more photos or dig through your old photos. In my case, both books were about nature areas that I frequent, so I had many thousands of photos and hundreds of keepers. I started out by narrowing down the keepers to about 300 photos. From there, I further narrowed them down to about 150, mostly by cutting out duplicate photos, picking the best of the two, three, or more shots of the same subject, but also by cutting the work that I didn’t feel was as strong. I kept the discarded photos in another folder. That is important to do as you’ll need to fill in the gaps.
The next, and most difficult part was how I would organize the book. You need some chapters to group the photos and provide some cohesion. That sounds easy, but looking through your photos, it’s not as easy as it sounds. What do they have in common? Color? Shape? Type? Behavior? That’s up to you. I grouped my first book by wildlife and landscapes and then broke up each one. The garden book is broken up by the number of flowers in the photos and the landscapes of the area.
After that, you need to start putting the photos into those chapters. I created folders for each one and soon discovered an imbalance. Some folders had dozens of photos, others had two or three shots. I decided to go back through my discarded photos and was able to find some photos that could be added to some of the smaller chapters, but I still had gaps. I then went back and dug into my archives and found some photos that didn’t seem great at the time, but were a great fit. I knew with a bit of polish (post-processing) theses shots would work well.
I still had some gaps, however, and that was the fun part. I knew I needed photos of certain subjects, so now I returned to these areas on a mission. I wanted very specific shots to complete the story I was trying to tell, so while challenging, I planned and obtained the photos. Well most of them, I still haven’t been able to capture a good photo of Florida’s elusive black bears, but I digress…
Now, I finally had all of the photos and had them organized the way I wanted them, but oops, they were all JPEGs. Now I needed to go through multiple hard drives and folders to get the RAW files & TIFFs, but once I had those, I was ready for the next step – re-processing. Many of the photos were fine, but some of the older shots needed to be re-processed as the advances in my skills and RAW converters made it worthwhile. I ended up with a group of folders containing the CR2 and TIFF files. Now I needed to convert them all to 300dpi as that is what’s required for desktop publishing (VERY IMPORTANT STEP). I ran batch processing on the TIFFs and soon enough, that was done. If you don’t do this, the photos will be displayed too big or too small in the publishing software. Also, make sure they are all same the color space (Adobe RGB is the most practical).
Now I hit the next big challenge – layout. First, you have to pick the book size. I choose 8.25”x10.5” as it’s a good compromise in terms of size & price, but that’s a personal choice. Keep in mind that few sizes will like up well with the 3:2 sensor size. This is also the time to choose a publisher. At the time, MagCloud was the best I found because they offered print-on-demand, had good templates, full color management, and offered printed books and digital files. They only downside was that they didn’t offer hardcover books, so both of my books are printed in softcover. The paper is heavy and very high quality, at least. They use HP Indigo presses and having used these when I was a graphic designer, I knew the color would be great. This is also a good time to point out that you MUST have a calibrated monitor. If you don’t use a hardware calibration tool, your color won’t be right, guaranteed. MagCloud is now owned by Blurb, so that would be my recommendation, particularly because they have a partnership with Amazon to sell your books, and they still use these great printing presses.
Next, the software. Your choices are MS Publisher (not recommended), QuarkXPress, or Adobe PhotoShop or Illustrator (not good for multi-page layouts as you have to do them one spread at a time) or InDesign (best tool). If you can use InDesign, I highly recommend it.
With the photos themselves, you can do one photo per page or portrait (orientation) shots on each page and landscape shots as double-page spreads, but that’s boring and doesn’t always work. It’s better to have some variety and it makes the book look a lot more professional. The gutter (center of the two pages) is a killer and you have to make sure you don’t put anything important in that area. Also, if you want a full bleed (ink all the way to the edge of the page), you’ll have to crop. The bad news is when you crop, you’ll need to do it in PhotoShop (or whatever you use), otherwise you’ll screw up the DPI and such. That means you have to crop it to the correct size and then put it (back) into the layout. With InDesign, you can use the Adobe “round-trip” feature to go back & forth, which makes it a lot easier.
At this point, you will have a lot of work to put photos together on facing pages or in groups, or in sequence of pages to tell the story and create your chapters. This isn’t easy, and you may find that photos don’t work. Like me, you might even need to go out and take more photos…
Once you have the photos together, you need to decide if you want to caption them. For my first book, this was pretty easy, but for my garden book, it was a long, long journey. I didn’t realize how hard it was to identify flowers and how many of them are hybrids or interbred. I spent weeks trying to find the flowers, mostly using Google Images with the drag & drop feature. This was futile at best. I ended up asking the park rangers for assistance, which they graciously provided, but even then there were still about 20 they weren’t sure about. I turned to some Internet forums and got some great help. This was a 6-month process!
Now you need to design the covers and pick a title. I checked Amazon to make sure I picked a unique title and then found an appropriate photo for the cover that highlighted the book but had room for the words. For one book the front & back cover are one continuous photo, and for the other, it’s two different photos, but more on that in a moment.
For the back cover, you need to write a blurb about yourself, which is one of my least favorite things… And a brief intro to the book. Now, you need to add the title pages, copyright notices, and if you’re ambitious, ISBN number. Getting an ISBN number is expensive unless you’re publishing a lot of books or have a publisher. Blurb may provide these, but I’m not sure. You will also need to design the book spine, which (once uploaded) will be sized precisely in x by y pixels. This is really tedious if you’re trying to match a photo on the front and back, but can be done.
Now the book is done, but it still needs to be proofed. Save a low-res PDF and send it to friends and family. Make sure it’s as perfect as possible.
The final layout step is to prepare the PDF for publication. This involves downloading the publishers PDF export settings, and tweaking them. With MagCloud, they were using too much compression, and it crushed my blacks and caused banding. I tweaked them extensively, frequently going over their 300MB (I think) file size limit. I finally got it right and uploaded it.
Now for the surprise. The book is going to be quite expensive and unless you want to charge a high price, your profit is going to be quite low. For my books, I have the profit (which you set) at around $1. I could charge more, but the book was really for me and my friends and family, not to make money. Unfortunately, it means that books you buy for yourself are rather expensive. This is the biggest downside of self-publishing. They give you a break on volume purchases 25% of 20+, but that can be a lot to pay upfront. I also decided to give away the digital copy for free, but this is the place to make money if you want as the margins are much higher.
When it’s all said and done, holding your own book in your hands is a thrill and worth the hard work!
Now you need to promote the book, but that's a subject for another post. You might want to create a gallery of the (uncropped) photos from your book as well on your website so you can sell prints as well. That's what I did:
http://www.ianandersonphotography.com/Books-1
If anyone has questions, let me know.