JackLyon's Posts

Sorry to hear about your troubles with UPS. Since we ship internationally, Blurb has a fairly complex shipping system that uses several different delivery systems across the world. We’re constantly fine tuning, monitoring shipping rates, and adding new shipping centers.

That said, we’re hoping to provide some new shipping options a little later this year. Stay tuned.

Hi dasantillo

We’re looking into that error message issue and hope to have that resolved by next week. However, we don’t "officially" support the Opera browser, which you can learn more about here:
http://tinyurl.com/blurb-browsers

I like Opera as well, but as only a very tiny handful of our members use Opera (well less than 1%), we simply don’t have the bandwidth to officially support it. As a vast majority use IE7, Firefox 2/3 and Safari on Mac, those are the browsers we have to focus on the most.  

Thanks,
Jack

Oh, one other thing. As you’ve probably already noticed —  if you’re copying and pasting formatted text from another program (like Microsoft Word), a lot of "invisible" HTML code can end up being pasted in as well. Though the code sometimes displays incorrectly as text (and sometimes doesn’t), but it all goes towards the overall character count. Not to mention the fact that you can end up with some very weird formatting in your post.

So, if you’re using a different application to compose your post, you may want to first be sure that it’s nothing but plain text you’re copying. One sure fire way to do this is to first save what you’ve written as a plain text file. Then, open that file in a simple tool like NotePad, and finally copy and paste that version of your text into your Forum post.

One thing you could do is export the .book file and send him that (he would have to open it with his own copy of BookSmart).

To do this, just select File—> Backup/Export Book in BookSmart. If the file is really big, you can try emailing it to him through a service like YouSendIt.

I’m interested why the printer couldn’t print the book. Would they not allow a copy of BookSmart to be installed on one of their machines?

Locked up this thread, as it’s getting fairly large and out of date. But I did want to keep the conversation going on Book Preview.

This afternoon, we released an updated version. Most of the changes are under-the-hood kind of things. But there are a few new things you may notice:

1. Each book’s cover now "flips" like a hard cover book.
2. You can now "move around" on a zoomed-in page, so you can get close up views on several areas of a page without needing to repeatedly zoom in and out. 
3. You may notice some slightly faster loading times due to some streamlining we did with various Book Preview components. Though, again, this depends a lot on the contents of each book. And, we will continue to work on faster loading times.  
4. Finally, here’s a neat little trick that we’re not talking about anywhere else just yet—you can now link to a specific "page" within your Book Preview. Like so.To do this with your own book, just copy your Book Preview URL and then add /pages/<number>.
   
   So, for the example above, you’d start by copying the Book Preview URL: ttp://www.blurb.com/books/232763/
   
   Then to point to a specific page, and “pages” and a number between 1 and 22: http://www.blurb.com/books/232763/pages/18
   
   You can even point directly to a book’s back cover.
   
   Note: As page 1 equals the front cover, page 2 the inside flap, etc., the actual page numbers from the book aren’t the same as the numbers in the URL. Each single page is counted, so (for example) the first full 2-page spread of a book (after the disclaimer and title page) will usually be either pages 6&7 or pages 8&9 (if you have a Table of Contents).

Anyway, as always, we’d love to get your feedback on these changes, as well as the Book Preview feature overall.

Thanks,
Jack

Don’t worry — your sales have been tracked. Remember, to see each individual sale of your book (as well as how much profit you’ve earned) you can always go to your Sales page.

We’ll look into why this isn’t showing up in your Metrics page. Sometimes, sales data is slow to show up in that view. 

Jack

No, I meant just quit out of it, and start it up again. But, by all means, Molly is the definitely the expert. Your error message does sound like something else on your machine is blocking the upload, so I would try everything she suggests. 

Hi Rich –

Sorry for the delay – it’s all fixed. Your PBN-entered book now has book preview working. You should be all set.

Thanks,
Jack 

You can change the status of your book from public to private (and back), any time you’d like. Just toggle the Public/Private radio button in the "Privacy Settings" section on your Edit Book Detail page.

Hmm, that is odd. It looks like your book was uploaded successfully. Definitely submit a ticket to Tech Support as Lee mentioned, if you haven’t already. We’ll try to figure out why this is happening.

Hi laaphoto/ahetheringto –

I’ll double check to confirm that you’ve both been correctly entered. Keep in mind, with so many submissions, it may be really hard to find your book in the PBN directory. The order these books appear in is by original publish date (newest to oldest), not the date that you submitted them for the contest. 

But, rest assured, we have an impressive number of jurors. Each and every book that has been entered will get a thorough review.

We wanted to give you an early heads up that the Blurb website will be down for maintenance this Friday (July 18) from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. PDT, and again on Sunday (July 20 from 12 p.m. until 2 p.m. PDT). During this time you will be unable access the site, upload or order books.

In addition, both the Book Preview feature as well as our GroupBook Facebook app will be unavailable from Friday at 11 p.m. through Sunday at 2 p.m. PDT. During this time, anyone that tries to view your book’s preview will see a message explaining our downtime.

We know this isn’t the greatest news, but a little maintenance goes a long way around here. Thanks for your patience.

Jack

We currently don’t support pre-sales of any kind. In the traditional publishing world, book publishers and resellers can offer pre-release sales because they already have the book in hand (and just haven’t publicly released it yet), or the author has some form of contractual obligation to deliver a final manuscript by a certain date.

In the print-on-demand world, this is a lot more complicated, as there’s no way Blurb could guarantee a book purchaser that any particular book would ever be available.

However, some authors have found success in selling their books locally – at independent book stores, gift shops, restaurants and the like. I have heard of a couple that have become successful enough selling locally that they have personally started taking pre-orders themselves for their next book.