the most incredible place of all.

So I have 'published' my first book (titled This Is The Most Incredible Place Of All). Weird. I'm not sure if it's really considered publishing. It's mostly a Christmas gift for family (sorry to spoil the surprise for any fam that reads this). Maybe I should say I have 'printed' my first book.

Anyways–it will be available in an 8x10 landscape softcover as well as a larger 11x13 landscape hardcover with dust jacket. The two versions will be exactly identical in content, but the larger format allows for both–well–larger photographs as well as more white space so everything does not seem so crammed on each spread. I'm making the larger one for myself really, but I wanted to have the smaller, more affordable softcover option for anyone who actually wants to order the book (the hardcover version will also be available in a week or so once I finish reformatting the design).

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So this evening I picked up the first two that I had ordered (as a test) off the porch (and I bought two at a time cos I had purchased a pretty awesome Blurb Groupon - $20 for $60 worth of books - and it doesn't matter which city's Groupon site you use since it's an online deal - I bought mine from Colorado Springs or something). Opened the package and took a look–and despite being hard to impress on just about everything ... I was impressed. As in really impressed. The image quality was absolutely stellar. And the colour was dead-on to how I had meticulously retouched it. It took some basic color management (for those that don't understand color management, Blurb does a really good job of explaining it and how to set it up on their site) and I had to call them out on a flaw in their workflow (which involved neglecting a conversion to their printers' profile when making the PDF file from InDesign because without that conversion and thus no images tagged with profiles the spread previews looked really horrible online)–but once I ironed all that out I uploaded a final PDF and waited to see how a book would turn out.

Like I said–I am really impressed. I'd like to fix the spine of the softcover, but Blurb doesn't give as good of specs for the softcover variable width spine as it does for the fixed hardcover spine (they do provide a calculator but the safety margin on either side of the spine in my book's case was equal to the spine itself so they're clearly giving themselves some room to not be exact getting the spine copy lined up on the, well, spine) and the two books are assembled with the title on the spine aligning differently on each copy. Also, my only other nitpick is one of the two books was scored (this is a good thing) on the cover near the spine to make it easier to open. Not sure why the other one was not.

But overall I am blown away at the quality. And for a preview of the book, Blurb allows anyone to scroll through select spreads (of my choosing - didn't want to give it all away) with a little Flash player (and from there you can view fullscreen, see the book info and even order a copy if you're interested) -

This Is The Most Incredible Place Of All by Thom Schroeder | Make Your Own Book

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80 glossy pages
13 tri-tone black and white photographs
22 colour photographs
12 essays
Selected quotes

Available in 8x10" landscape heavyweight glossy softcover ($39.95) and 11x13" landscape hardcover with glossy dust jacket ($89.95)