Wanted: Your Feedback on Invite Contributors - Community Book
Hello Fellow Blurbarians –
As some of you may know BookSmart 1.9.2 has a set of features we refer to collectively as Community Book. This is most visible in the "Invite Contributors" button on the main toolbar in BookSmart. This lets you invite people to contribute photos to your book. Your contributors can simply upload photos to Blurb’s Web site (via a personal email invitation that we help you send). Then you can access the photos directly in BookSmart.
Anyone interested in "kicking the tires" a bit and providing your comments here in the forums? Even if you don’t have a book in mind, please just invite a few friends to submit photos, download them to BookSmart and let me know what you think of the experience.
Specifically, we’d like to hear:
1. What works well?
2. What is confusing or could be improved?
3. What kind of books might you be inspired to make using this component?
4. Other suggestions for taking Community Book to the next level?
If you’d like a bit more detail or have questions as to how it works please check out the Community Book FAQ’s or watch a brief video screencast of how it works.
In order to keep the thread on-topic please only post comments on Community Book such as Setting up a project, Inviting Contributors, and Accessing the photos in BookSmart.
Thanks for your help!
- Chad, VP of Design
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I am responding to #4 above about taking it to the next level. Initially, when I first read about Community Books I thought it would suit my needs. I was consolidating three cookbooks that my mother had given three of us sisters. I was soliciting comments and recipes from them in order to make the book complete. I would have loved to be able to share the book with them before printing so they could review it. I know I’ve seen other requests to have a full pdf preview. If and when that happens I’d love for it to be viewable for those that you have invited to a community book.
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I just finished a book where I used contributed photos and stories. I think Blurbs idea for a community book is ok for a casual friends book but not for a professional book that you want to sell. First I searched other books on a simialar subject , rescued and abandon pets or animal photos. I found a couple breed books but nothing that addressed my subject directly. I took some ideas for layout and subject. I also read a few dog stories writen by top authors to get a feel for the story telling. I then proposed the idea to local agencies and got some promotional support from the local radio and newpapers to announce it on completion. I recruited a couple of dog training facilities to hold an open house to get some photos, contacted friends and my local chamber. Be prepared for at least 50% of the respondents to not follow through. I had a few photos submitted and one person actually sent me a cd for copy. I had everyone sign an agreement giving me complete control of the photos and copy.This is important to your sanity. The two friends(?) I did not have sign the agreement were the most trouble. Make it clear who’s book it is, anyway. I took the submitted photos and stories and edited both. I took photos with my own camera for most of the pictures. Dogs are great if they are running around and take a lot of photos to choose from. Color adjust slighly desaturated and slighly lighter. Blured and desaturete the backgrounds to make the subject pop. Raise the highlights on the subjects face and eyes slightly. Get rid of eye glass flare. You can’t do this if you upload the original photos to Blurb. I edited all the copy in Word. The copy flow is difficult to change in the blurb template. For those that cannot or will not write I created a questionair and really pressed on some questions. To flesh out why someone did something or how they felt took the same question worded a couple different ways to peal back some real meaning. I also used artistic license with some stories if the dogs owner where I knew the dog and the owner did not see the same qualities I did. When all was done I annouced it via my Chamber, newpapers, and radio came on board after the newpaper articles. Dont forget your libraries if your book is suitable for public reading and make sure a label is on the inside telling people where to get more. In two weeks we sold over 25 books at $39 and $29 with half the profit going to our dog rescue orgs. (I didnt spell check this , sorry) 
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I used the Community for the first time and completed a book as a Xmas present for grandparents. This feature allowed 2 families to jointly put together a book showing off the kids although we live in different places. It was easy to use, sent announcement to recipient, alerted me that I had pictures when they were uploaded and established a separate folder/tab for them. Would suggest you expand the capacity though, 30 pictures is not enough. We had to upload them, then had other person delete the 30 and add new ones for me to get additional pictures. Also, the announcement to add pictures gives a deadline which I could set, but I didn’t notice what time it stated during that day as a cut off. It closed out early in the morning, think you need to let it run throw the entire day til 11:59pm. I had to figure out how to re-open the link so recipient could add pictures. This type of feature is perfect for families to share photos for family reunions, major anniversaries & life events. Great for groups who travel together and take pictures to share photos and create a combined album. School trips/sports (Little League/soccer/any high school team sport) any event where various people take pictures of same event. Also perfect for cookbook with various contributors such as when churches do their cookbooks or within a family. Expanded capacity would be my main suggestion. Is there a way for all contributors to access the book and edit it? Didn’t play with it enough this year to know if each member could change the personalization vs having to re-do the book to make minor changes depending on the purpose or recipient. The ability for all to preview before printing would be great as well. Planning to start my "family" books in January and invite contributors monthly to add their family pictures, will be a lot easier to do project this way vs scrambling at yr end for a years worth of pictures. Obsolutely great gifts for parents/grandparents that you can never buy things for, just priceless.
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Wow! Thanks for such detailed and helpful feedback mforbes, Linda, and babsinaz. Hopefully we can get a few more posts then I will follow-up with some additional questions and comments.
Cheers – Chad
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The ‘Invite Contributors’ is very nicely implemently within the Blurb dashboard and I’m sure that a lot of time and thought went into designing it. I have to agree with Linda and mforbes321 though that the contributors inability to see the work inprogress will drastically reduce the value of the feature. While I can understand Blurb’s reluctance to make a full resolution PDF available, seeing the book in preview mode would allow contributors to get a better feeling for what they were contributing to. I am getting contributions from others right now but just via e-mail. This accomplishes most of what this new feature would accomplish.
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In order to use this feature, it is imperative that the author be able to download the original JPG files for resizing, color correction and cropping. It would also be very helpful to have a generic web link for people to use for uploading. I want to sponsor a photography contest and have people upload their images directly to blurb and attach their email address as the unique id. Then I can make a book from the winning entries. The description area also needs to link into booksmart so I could pull down a description with credits automatically attached to the photo.
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To take this to the next level I think that when contributors are needed give an option if we want it public ( for ever member to help with) or if we want to choose who gets to help.
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I just finished a poetry book for my Mom for Christmas and put it together so quickly and easily. It was beautiful! I’m attempting now to put together a yearbook for my graduating nursing class and would like to use the contributor feature, however, when I click "Invite Contributors" and then "New Contributor Project", absolutely nothing happens. I’ve been collecting photos and bios via email thus far, but would like to know how I can get this feature to function properly. I do have BookSmart 9.1. Also, my yearbook isn’t going to be the traditional layout of multiple student photos on a page. Was planning on dedicating two pages to each student where the first page has a bio and a before/after nursing school photo and the second page more of a personal collection of their own. I’m very frustrated with not being able to make my own templates for designing these pages. I have Photoshop, but am just a novice. How can I build these pages the way I want, will you be adding more design templates, or allowing more flexibility?
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Hi, It is my Dad’s 60th birthday in February and a number of the family members have been allocated sections of the book to complete. i initially thought that the "invite contributors" would allow more than one person to work on a single book by contributing and adding their pages with photo’s, text etc. i understand that their should be different levels of contribution and feel that the contribution of a limited amount of photo’s by a certain deadline is a required feature when you don’t want people to directly influence your book but how does more than one author contribute to a single book? maybe I have missed a feature? please let me know if I have. kind regards, Alex South africa
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Hi Alex –
Currently Invite Contributors is focussed on collecting photos from multiple people to use in your book. I think what you are looking for is more so a shared version of the actual book so different people can design different parts of the book? Is that correct?
BookSmart doesn’t have the real-time collaboration you are describing. One of the challenges is that the book files tend to become quite large very quickly once you start adding high quality photographs. This blog post describes a few ways you could collaborate or share a book file: http://blurberatiblog.com/index.php/2007/05/17/how-to-archive-share-or-transfer-your-book-files/
Cheers – Chad
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A very good idea!
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I have experienced the pleasure of writers and editors using my photographs for covers and inside art for their own projects. My many years as a professional have taught me how to "marry" images to a theme, and as such, I offer freelance photography to provide explicit , new images to fit your needs, or can license images frrom my existing archive iof images.
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I am starting a book for a friend’s 5th birthday, and as you can imagine I need to get photos from lots of people. So Contributors feature seems like a no-brainer to use hey? Well… it’s a good idea, but will need lots more thought before it is useful. Here’s why: 1. I need to edit (color correct, etc) photos that people have sent, but once sucked into the book I cannot get them out again. This is a HUGE oversight. 2. Every photo tells a story, right? Well in truth I need people to send in the story behind the photo. Ther eis no way using Contributors to do this. 3. I need to communicate back and forth between the people who are adding photos. No way to do this either. I’m sure there is more, but at this point I abandonded the feature, and now am using good old email and a Google Groups forum to accomplish the photo gathering. Blurb, you really need to think the workflow through, and then actually try it out for your self. Try inviting non-computer savvy people to be contributors so see how it works for them. I know BookSmart is still version 1, but I would prefer that you enhance the basics of the software (like styles, custom templates, etc) before you add the bells and whistles like Contributors. Glen
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...and that last post should read "50th" birthday, not "5th"!
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I just finished my community book project and it went fairly well. The feature has significant drawbacks (listed above) which makes it less than fully adequate for future projects as it now stands. In addition to downloading the cont4ributor’s images and attaching text to the submission, there needs to be a way to communicate back to individual contributors and announce the completion of the book to all contributors (perhaps with several custom messages over time). I did experience some strange bugs in the project. Some people were unable to upolad files. The upload dialog started and ended without doing the upload. I also had some problems uploading images myself. Something caused booksmart to crash after an upload as soon as the dialog box was closed. The only work around was to manually save the project after an upload then close the dialog box , let BS crash then start it again. This was very cumbersome. I like the concept of a community book however, this product needs a lot more work before it is ready for primetime. I would most likely use Flickr for photo collection on the next project and manuall import into booksmart after I had resized and color corrected the images. Most people do not understand color management and they invariably submit images that will not print nicely without color correction – that is the biggest flaw in the program.
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I am a "newbie" with Blurb. I just finished my first cookbook and I’m waiting for delivery. As I was putting the cookbook together, I kept wishing that I had personal photos of different types of food to add to the book, especially in the different sections. I saw the "Invite Contributors" and I thought I could make a request that would be sent to a registry within Blurb of photographers looking to place their work in books. (I realize that many folks don’t want to post an advertisement, but are willing to work with others on a case-by-case basis). Unfortunately,this was not the case. Instead, I opted to use other photos that I had in my personal collection – most of them are not food, but of friends, family or nature that I’ve taken over the years. I was disappointed that I couldn’t contact folks who might be looking to collaborate on a book. I find that many of my ideas need assistance (photos, illustrations, etc.) - so being able to collaborate with someone (not necessarily a personal friend, but someone with a similar vision) may be very helpful – especially as I continue to learn and improve on my skills. I found that since I didn’t have "food related" photos, I used more text (not necessarily my original intent). I’m not disappointed with my choices, but I do believe there may have been more "value added" and a better "return on investment" if I had actual food-related photos incorporated into the book. I can share more when I receive the hard copy, but for a "first run" this was my experience with the tool. – Pam
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