
The film lab scanned those photos at about 1500×1000 pixels, and I’ve successfully printed 8x10s from such scans before. I had to rescan several photos because BookWright warned me they were too small for successful printing. Blurb allows upload of PDF from other layout platforms and I may try that next time. Primarily, BookWright’s page templates didn’t function as I expected and offered no good way to apply a template change across the book. As I’m still on the tool’s learning curve, I may yet find features I wished I knew about while laying out this book. It works, but it lacks much of the power I hoped I might get based on my past career experience in publishing and technical writing.

Laying out the book was the least rewarding part of the project. I used Blurb’s BookWright software, which is a lightweight page-layout tool. I’ve been investigating CreateSpace, for example, for a text-intensive book I have in mind. I think there are better choices for text-intensive books. And from his experience I knew that the process for making and selling the book would be reasonable.īlurb is a decent choice for an image-intensive book. My copies of his books are of acceptable quality for the cost. That advice was invaluable.Ĭhoosing Blurb as my publisher was easy. I chose Blurb largely because Mike Connealy has published two books that way (go buy them they’re lovely).

What if this photo, which I love, isn’t actually all that good? Am I leaving out a photo that is truly good? Fortunately, a reader (who probably wishes to remain anonymous in this forum) offered to edit out the photos that shouldn’t make the cut. All of my insecurities as a photographer came out. It was surprisingly challenging and time-consuming to pick through all the photos I shot with my Pentax ME.

Choosing the photographs was the hardest part of the project. Because this project was about experiencing the bookmaking (and selling) process, I chose to use photos I already made.
