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Cost of shipping
Ordering and Shipping
“So if theyre all employees of the same company, order them all at once and the cost to have them all shipped is only $8.59. Next day air on the whole 25 is only $46, less than $2 a book.”
Yes, my client considered doing that, but then the 25 books would have had to be individually repacked, addressed and mailed. That’s a minimum of an hour’s labor ($25-$40, depending on which of his employees did the job), plus the cost of padded boxes or envelopes (about $15-$20), and of course postage (about $50).
The total cost would have been somewhere between $90 and $150, or $4-$6 a copy—a slight saving over UPS shipping from Blurb, but not nearly as much as you’d think, and not enough to convince my client to go ahead. But if Blurb were able to offer Media Mail shipping, the cost per copy would drop below $2. That’s a big difference!
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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Cost of shipping
Ordering and Shipping
Well, now the topic has even more personal impact for me: I just lost a 25-book order because of ridiculously high UPS shipping costs. A client was planning to buy a copy of “Quiet Waters” for each employee of his company as a holiday gift. But when he realized that the per-copy shipping cost for my little 40-page, $15.95 book was in the neighborhood of $7-$9, that killed the deal.
Blurb folks, I’ll say it again: you’ve GOT to offer less expensive shipping options, and USPS Media Mail is the prime contender. With shipping as costly as it is now, there’s not much point in my doing any more Blurb books, because nobody will buy them. Yes, I know you’re working on this…well, please work harder! :-)
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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Can't get rid of page header
Tips and Tricks
“Are you using the ‘Apply to All Pages’ in the drop-down box?”
Yes, but at least in the Mac OS X version (1.9.1.20466-blurb), it doesn’t work consistently, especially with respect to font/size/style.
There’s a fair number of bugs in this Mac version, ranging from un-Mac-like menus to occasional crashes. (To give Blurb’s software developers credit, though, I’ve never lost data in a crash.)
I recently spent a couple of days laying out a book in the BookSmart software before deciding it was more trouble than it was worth. While it’s adequate for small photo books, BookSmart is just too limited in its control over typography and layout for me to want to do anything more ambitious than a small photo book. If Blurb accepted PDFs generated by InDesign, I could tackle projects that aren’t worth struggling with in BookSmart.
And if Blurb offered USPS Media Mail as a shipping option, I might be able to actually sell more than a couple of copies. Matter of fact, I just lost a 25-copy sale because the $8-plus UPS shipping cost for each copy of my $15.95 book “Quiet Waters” simply made it uneconomical for the customer, who wanted to buy copies for all of his company’s employees as holiday gifts.
Until more reasonably priced shipping is at least an option, it’s hard for me to imagine doing any more Blurb books, sad to say.
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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resizing text boxes?
Tips and Tricks
Just a note of caution: while this procedure gives you complete control (and you can do the same thing with Illustrator or InDesign, exporting full-page JPEGs to BookSmart), it means that all your text will be converted to process-color halftones.
For large type such as titles, that’s not likely to be a problem. But with 9- or 10-point body text, it will result in noticeable unsharpness of the characters, as reported by other Blurb users who’ve gone this route.
In short, it’s a good technique for a photo book, but may not be so desirable if there’s a significant amount of small text.
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Problems may be user error
Tips and Tricks
“Photoshop is an easy way to increase your photos to 300 pixels… If you are uploading a picture from your camera phone at 2 or 3 MGP your photo may have errors because the quality is not what is required for the print quality of Blurb.”
Just to clarify, if you start with a 2-megapixel photo and increase its resolution by resampling in Photoshop, you’ll simply end up with a blurry high-resolution photo. BookSmart will no longer complain about it, but the printed image’s quality will be poor nonetheless.
There’s no magic way to create more detail in an image that didn’t have enough detail in the first place. If your images are only 2-3 megapixels, you have a choice of using them at small sizes so that they’ll print sharply… or using them at large sizes and accepting substandard quality.
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Can't get rid of page header
Tips and Tricks
Speaking of headers and footers, I found to my annoyance that it was impossible to globally change their typeface and size from the default Georgia… it must be done on a page by page basis, which is tedious and error-prone.
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Font usage
Tips and Tricks
“We are working to improve how OpenType and PostScript fonts print, and don’t recommend using these fonts for the time being.”
Since the difference between these various types isn’t obvious when laying out a book in BookMaker, it would be extremely helpful if BookMaker checked for non-TT fonts and flagged them before submitting the book to Blurb for printing.
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Just Received My Book: Some Thoughts
Book Printing
“looking at them afterwards they show no artifacts, so the fuzzies aren’t jpeg artifacts”
I didn’t say they were; I said the problem most likely was halftoning. You’re looking at millions of colors on your monitor, but Blurb is printing with just four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. To get from millions to four, they use halftone screens—four of them, at carefully calculated angles relative to each other.
Given this process, minute jaggies in text are almost inevitable, even with fine screens. (Anybody know how many LPI they’re using?) But as I understand it, text created directly in BookSmart is rendered from vector fonts directly to the printer, so no halftoning occurs. The result should be cleaner looking text.
I say “should be” because I have yet to receive my first Blurb book. :-) But this is all pretty standard stuff in the printing industry, and I do have experience with that… so I doubt I’m far off in saying that the reason your text is fuzzy is most likely that it’s being printed as four-color halftones rather than as RIP’d vector characters. Try creating text in BookSmart next time and see what it looks like.
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic; in fact, I’d much rather be using InDesign myself, and I’ve been tempted to employ the same JPEG-export workaround that you did to get past some of BookSmart’s limitations. But I’m realistic about the price I’ll pay if I choose to put all my text in bitmap form and get it halftoned; that’s just the way process printing works.
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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Cost of shipping
Ordering and Shipping
I don’t know about overseas shipping, but Blurb’s shipping rates in the US are very high. I just received this email from a friend who ordered my first book. She’s an independent mail-order bookseller, so she’s very familiar with what it costs to ship a book. She says,
“I ordered—but I will not order again from them. I do know shipping costs, and they are so far overpriced had it been anyone but you, I would have cancelled. I feel HAD by those people.”
I have to agree: $7.84 to ship a 40-page paperback via UPS Ground is really excessive, and if my friend is any indication, it’s a major turnoff to customers. I urge Blurb to reconsider their shipping rates, and to offer USPS Media Mail shipping as a low-cost option.
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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Blurb now requires your customers to register an account before they can...
Web Features
The difference between giving info to place an order and giving into to create an account may be mostly a psychological issue, but it’s a real one in consumers’ minds, including mine—I don’t like being asked to create an account just to make a purchase. It feels as if I’m being coerced into a relationship I don’t want or need. You can call that irrational, but it definitely creates buyer resistance.
I urge everyone to read the GrokDotCom article that Michal cited. For one thing, it states that about half of online retailers DON’T require the creation of an account before making a purchase, which contradicts what a few folks have said here about this being a universal practice. It isn’t.
And more important, it offers a simple solution:
“Get the cash first, then… offer the option to create an account AFTER the order is complete.” (emphasis mine)
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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Just Received My Book: Some Thoughts
Book Printing
“I did all my book design in InDesign and then went through the laborious task of generating jpegs and putting them in BookSmart… the black text was not as crisp as in Lulu’s books – lots of fuzzies around the edges of the letters.”
I suspect there’s a connection between these two statements. Normal text is rendered from vector fonts; yours was halftoned from a bitmap. It’s not surprising to see some fuzziness undr those circumstances.
I understand why you did what you did (InDesign to JPEG to BookSmart), and in fact I also used a full-page JPEG with text for the cover page of in my first book (in press)... but in my case the text was only a few words in large type, so I don’t anticipate problems.
Putting body text into JPEG format, however, is obviously not something one would prefer to do if there were any alternative. Let’s hope Blurb starts accepting PDFs soon!
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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