![]() the black and white has a slight green/blue hue and the contrast is rather dark. On all the odd number pages of the book, the black and white sections of each image are true greyscale. All of my images are black and white, with aspects of those images highlighted in colour. However, the printing of the actual images is quite poor. The quality of the physical aspects of the books are good, from the paper quality to the finish. But for now, I’ll have to pass.I recently ordered three photobooks through Blurb. I don’t plan on selling anything at all on Blurb after seeing the outrageous prices. The justification errors, the disappearing page numbers and all the editing I’ve done since has fixed it so that I’m not going back.īookwright has promise as a book layout design, and I hope there will be an update fixing some of the above problems so that I can use it for future books. I figured that if the inside was good then maybe I would reuse that gorgeous template for my CreateSpace printing. When I first opened the cover, I really wanted to like it. I knew it would have problems I just didn’t know the extent. But without a table of contents, the lack of page numbers makes it as good as unsellable. Except for the annoying justification problems, it looked about as good as the cover looked bad. The intricacies of the template design really shine, and in a good way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book so shiny, and it doesn’t look good.Īs for the interior, it swept me away at first. ![]() It looked like I had taken the book to a local print shop and ordered the shiniest material available. I’ve had “glossy” covers before, and they’re usually not exciting one way or the other, but I blushed when I first saw this. My cover image didn’t stretch over the whole front page and has ugly white around it, and the spine is completely blank. I don’t know entirely how much of that was my fault as a designer and how much was Blurb/BookWright’s fault for not providing clear enough guidelines. If the author is reluctant to pay, the reader wouldn’t dream of it.įortunately, the shipping time was great–it came about a week and a half earlier than they had said it would, much faster than most printing companies. Even with my discount I cringed with I ordered it. I looked everywhere around the app and online.īlurb books are expensive! On Amazon I can sell my books for $5-$10 apiece, usually, but the minimum price for this small paperback novella was $20, with $5 shipping. And no, there’s no way to work around that. In the end, some paragraphs look more indented than others, making the whole book look amateurish and belittling my hard work. ![]() Not only did my BookWright book have those big gaps between words in places, but it also toyed with my indenting spaces. Traditionally published books are always justified, but also laid out in a way that disallows awkward spacing. Properly justifying your text is a scary thing, and everyone seems to have a different opinion on it. In the end, I needed to add spaces before every paragraph to make them look more natural, but that only led to my next problem: justification. You can always simply hit tab, but there’s no way to control how far the tab goes–and it goes at least twice as deeply as it should for a printed book. There’s no good way to indent your paragraphs. The trouble starts with the paragraph formatting. That takes time, but it’s not too inconvenient when you think of what you’re getting in return. Instead of merely copying and pasting your chapters onto the blank pages, you will need to link the block of text from page to page individually, editing text from a separate window than the layout itself. If you have experience with digital layout programs like InDesign, you should be able to adapt fairly easily to BookWright’s layout. Getting the words in there is a different matter. There are templates for all kinds of genres, adding a nice and professional touch that makes your book feel unique and special as soon as you open the pages. ![]() BookWright is designed to work hand in hand with InDesign and other layout softwares, so there’s a strong visual focus when designing your book. The BookWright template experience was very different that CreateSpace‘s and LuLu‘s. They provide their free writing and formatting software, BookWright, on their site and have many templates to help people get started. Blurb, though usually known for their excellent photo album printing service, has recently started to reach out to self-publishing writers and now prints traditional paperbacks as well. A few days ago, I received my discounted copy of my latest book from Blurb. ![]()
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