ckitze's Posts

Hi Kathy,

I’m a fine art photographer. Your service is very good and I’ve used it for prototyping a variety of books and organizing my work—I’m a happy camper, in fact I just posted another book and put in another order. Everyone loves to get a book I’ve printed on Blurb! Kudos to every one on your team!

I’m going to give you some advice that should help your user community and help you sell more books at the same time, so please take this the right way—I really do love you guys.

I have to disagree with you on the way your company handles the preview. I understand you are probably trying to “protect your software investment” and make it hard for a competitor to use it. Please hear me out…

First, I need to quickly see a high quality proof on my printer <del>- it would be ideal to print it here because I could check things on the spot before I upload to Blurb. Yes, I could show a client a low rez version of the book, but that gives them a very bad impression of Blurb and makes me look lame. Even when you tell them the quality is better, they can’t see how good it will be with their own eyes. Yes, I understand this kind of output is slow, but an hour of computer time, plus another hour of printing is acceptable, especially compared to the five days it takes to print and ship back a copy from Blurb. Many of us have high quality printers -</del> but don’t worry, Blurb is a bargain compared to the cost of ink jet paper and ink – you’d have to be crazy to try to print anything but a proof yourself! And when you go through a couple of revisions, Blurb just isn’t going to work for that because we don’t want to wait for three weeks of back and forth to get it right.

Second, I need a good preview .pdf I can post on my web site (and on Blurb, too) that shows ALL the pages, 15 pages is a joke (sorry)—you get the cover, the title page, the copyright page, a couple of “bumper” pages and about two pictures. Lower rez is OK (just lower the jpeg quality and make the book a bit smaller) for this, because I don’t want the download to be more than a couple of MB. I’d like to show people the whole book and invite them to get a Blurb paper copy.

So here’s my suggestion; let the user decide the resolution to output the document and the number of pages and let them generate this on their local computer so I they can post this to a web site, make quick proofs and get an order into Blurb. Put your ads in the front and back, with a link to the sales page on Blurb for the book <del>- that protects your software from a competitor. In fact, put a small blurb logo on the bottom right of every page with a link as well. I WANT this link, as long as it’s not obtrusive -</del> it will help get my book out there and sell more copies.

One other quick suggestion… Please make a longer description field available for each book (a Blurb on our book) and make it searchable on your site AND GOOGLE. You’ll drive a ton of traffic to your users books (and sell more books because people can find them).

Hope this helps, CK