As many of you will know I have been planning to produce a book about a project that I have been working on for a number of years called ‘Coast People’. Initially things with the publishers were going well and the layouts and text were all sorted and it was starting to take shape. However when I saw the print quality of the book and saw how the pictures had been reproduced I had some issues with the overall quality and so I pushed back the release date to give me a chance to rectify things because the last thing I or any other photographer would want to do would be to release a book with badly printed photographs in it!
After several weeks of trying to resolve things it has unfortunately reached the stage where it was obvious things weren’t going to be as I wanted them as far as print quality was concerned. As a result I have now decided to go completely through the self-publishing process via the on-line book publishers, ‘Blurb’.
This is a company I have used before on several occasions for ‘one-off’ books that I wanted to get printed myself and I know that their printing, bindings and paper quality is amazing so I have opted to go down this route.
Because of the nature of book publishing in general it potentially works out cheaper for me to buy a hundred copies in the first instance which in turn reduces the price per copy of each copy of the book and then sell them myself to give the buyer a better deal. But to do this I would have to pay out a few thousand for those 100 copies in the first instance which is something that I’m just not in the position to do right now.
So what I’m doing, at least for now, is to design, create and make available a book that I have designed from scratch and which I will make available to buy via Blurb.
I have slightly reduced the number of images from the initial book design in order to reduce the overall production costs and I have totally changed the layout. The book is now designed in a square format, sized at 18cm x 18cm and with 140 pages and the image quality is now far, far better and is more fitting to a book of photography. The price per copy of the book now is the minimum I can achieve for the size, number of pages and the design and I have only added £0.01 (1 pence) to the overall price of the book, which is the minimum that can be done when you sell a book on Blurb so that they cover their printing costs. Again to try and keep that price down as low as I can.
I’m also not making the book available on Amazon as there was a £5.99 surcharge to do that which I didn’t want on top of the price. So Coast People will be available through Blurb only. A preview of the book can be seen on the main page and the price per copy of the book is £23.40.
Postage costs are set by Blurb and are £6.99. So the total price would be – £30.39
So to date this has been a frustrating journey to get this far and I’m disappointed that I won’t be taking delivery of a few boxes full of my first published book but this at least is a compromise that I have reached that is achievable at the minute and whilst I won’t gain financially with this book it has been an interesting process to go through and one that will help when I publish, ‘Country People – cornerstone‘, which is my next book-publishing endeavour. More on that coming soon, so as they say, ‘watch this space’…
So to see a preview of Coast People, to read about the book or to purchase a copy please follow the link below….
COAST PEOPLE – Life on the north east coast
See more of my work on my website and blogs… HERE
Images copyright Ian Forsyth 2015 /
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No usage without arrangement.
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