Poster-Books

I've written about the sticky, solvent-scented joys of model-building before (e.g. see the post Regifted). Like many of us who enjoyed making models when we were kids and who may well have rediscovered that pleasure with our own children, I'm sure, I often found that contemplating a kit in its pristine, unmade state was in many ways the peak experience, a useful early lesson in the way that so many of life's keenest pleasures are as much about anticipation as fulfilment.

As a visually-oriented person, I always responded with a special interest to the ancillary design aspects of a model: the box art, the instructions with their "exploded" views, the sheet of transfers ("decals"), and so on. This was particularly the case with the sort of paper-engineering model where you have to cut out and assemble the constituent pieces, all printed on a single sheet of card alongside the instructions and other descriptive matter. It was always with a certain reluctance that I finally took up the scissors. There were cottages, castles, and theatres with a cast of cut-out characters, but the best were the life-sized versions of birds in flight made by BirdMobile which, cut out and assembled with appropriate care, were uncannily convincing, and also provided a useful early opportunity to instruct children in the safe use of sharp knives, scissors, glue, and so on.

So a few years ago, I amused myself by designing some little concertina-style booklets that imitated the look of paper engineering and could, in theory, be cut out and assembled, but were really intended as 2D wall-pieces, a sort of book in the form of a poster. Then, having admired variations on the palm-leaf book at an exhibition on Buddhism at the British Library, I started making my own "bar" books that then evolved into a style in its own right. No-one else seemed terribly turned on by these efforts, however, and that burst of cut 'n' paste creativity lapsed.

Summer grasses: /  Traces of dreams / Of ancient warriors

(Matsuo Basho)

Recently, however, Blurb have been bombarding me with special offers – never a good sign of company health, IMHO – culminating in a two-day-only "50% off + free postage" offer, which seemed too good to pass up. I had been thinking it was about time I put a new book together, so – although there are several other, but more time-consuming alternative projects waiting to be made into a book – I settled on simply putting a selection of Bars & Poster-Books into a large (30cm) square book. You can see a preview of it here in my Blurb bookstore:

Or, as usual, in the form of a much higher-quality PDF flip-book at Issuu:

It will be a great shame if the business model of Blurb is no longer working out. Each time I launch a new Blurb book into the world, it strikes me that most people – even the genial and well-informed folk who are the readers of this blog – do not understand what makes an on-demand self-publishing service different from other publishing services, and why it is such a brilliant idea. So I thought now might be a good time to repeat a few words from a previous post:

The basic Blurb model is this:

• You sign up for an account. This costs nothing. You get a personal "bookstore" where your publicly-available books will be displayed for sale, plus various administrative tools.
• You download some free book-making software onto your computer, BookWright, which is regularly updated. There is also an online book-creation tool for really simple stuff, or at the other extreme you can design your own complete PDF file in something like Adobe InDesign and upload it.
• You choose a size and binding style for your book, and either use a ready-made "look", or assemble your own from page-templates which enable you to choose combinations and placement of text and image, plus essential features like page numbering.
• You insert your text and images. Images need to be 300 dpi JPEGs or PNGs. Text can be typed in directly, cut and pasted, or uploaded from a text file. The book will sit on your own computer to be tinkered with for as long as you like.
• When it's complete and free of errors (and you need to be very sure about that) you upload the book to Blurb.
• To keep it there, you have to buy one copy, at basic production cost. Now, this is the point at which most people who have never tried self-publication before balk. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty pounds? Plus postage? For one copy?? But that is not a rip-off, that is a bargain. Why?
• Here's the thing: you yourself need never buy another copy. Repeat: you need never buy another copy.

Once it's uploaded you can invite people to buy it, privately, or open it for sale as an item listed in your personal bookstore, available in whatever formats you choose, and at the prices you decide. There are also various free tailored publicity tools available for insertion into social media, your blog or webpage, wherever. But here's the really important thing: you hold no inventory at all, and every copy that a customer buys is made on demand by Blurb, who handle the whole transaction, from payment to delivery. Any profit you have added onto the basic production cost will be passed on to you by Blurb, provided it exceeds a certain accumulated monthly total, currently £12.50. If it doesn't, it's rolled over into the next month. [1]

So your book is out there and easily available – you can even sell it on Amazon, something I have never tried – and you will not have paid a ton of money up front to a printer for a quantity of books you will never be able to distribute or sell, and which will sit unsold in boxes under your bed and in your closet, your loft, and probably also your garage forever like a bad dream. Have you ever seen a "small" run of 500 copies of a hardback book? I have (thankfully not one of mine), and you should be very afraid. Worse, if you intend to go down the classic self-publication route more than once, the only certainty is that you're going to need a bigger house. Plus a willingness to write off many thousands of pounds, all for the sake of a vanity project. [2]

The really big plus of on-demand publishers like Blurb, I think, is that the relatively low cost of entry (and the zero cost of failing to sell any copies) means that producing new books regularly is not just feasible, it is addictive. And, if you're serious about your writing, or your photography, or your recipes, or whatever it is you do, there is no better creative discipline than imagining, editing, and sequencing a book. Plus you will have a permanent, compact, and convenient record of your work, which is far more likely to survive the coming decades than boxes of prints or ephemeral image files. Best of all, it's the sort of fun, self-motivating challenge that can shift your work into a higher gear.

But you should never imagine that you might sell more than, say, 10 copies. Dream on! Also, although their stats will tell you how many copies of your books have been sold in the last 45 days (none at all, usually), Blurb will not disclose the name, email, or location of anyone who does buy a copy, so gratitude from you, the author, to your tiny group of fans has to be taken for granted. But then, Lee Child doesn't send a thank-you note to everyone who buys his books, so why should you?

So who is this "Mike Chisholm", anyway?

1. I suspect that a significant flaw in the Blurb model, from a profitability p-o-v, is that (a) few people who make Blurb books are interested in buying the books of other Blurb users, and (b) habitual book buyers are unlikely to be looking at Blurb as a primary source. I'm pretty generous in my own book-buying, but have only ever bought four Blurb books other than my own.

2. The dirty secret of "real" photo-book publishing is that you will be expected by the publisher to cover anything between 50% and 100% of the cost of publication. Sure, your book will get a certain amount of publicity and distribution, but sales and profits will still be low. It's really just a way of taking vanity to the next level.