Self-publishing with Blurb

Today I published a children’s' book for a friend of mine. She wrote and illustrated The Fart Book some thirty years ago and was passing the original artwork and handwritten text to her kids and their kids. She was telling my daughter a story the other day about a boy with magical farting powers that enabled him to fly when I immediately took interest (*smiles).

Look story short - I scanned the originals into my printer, transferred them to my PC, downloaded Blurb's Booksmart, and published the 50 page book this morning. Ok, not cheap it cost about 40$ to get a 10x8in hardcover book with dust-jacket BUT it looks great in the preview and draft copy I printed at home. I a week I'll post again after receiving the actual book.

The process was quite simple and really pretty error free. I am not certain why Blurb is still in Beta as this is a solid piece of software. While I wish it had some 'apply to all pages' features what is there is sound. After adding the scanned images to a Blurb template, adjusting the background color, and entering the title, about the author, dedication page etc, I had a book ready for printing. A few clicks later the book was uploaded to their site and sent off to production and should ship to my home in a week.  Very pleasant experience.

Now for what didn't work. The success with the first book leads me to create another one. I wanted to take some text I had written for an unpublished book about SAP and self-publish it. Having negotiated royalty contracts with my publisher in the past I know first hand how little authors receive in terms of payment when compared to the time invested in writing. So back to Blurb. I went to paste about 50 pages of pure text into a Blurb template only to find my laptop frozen. I rebooted and tried 15 pages. Same issue. Rebooted. After getting about 5 pages pasted the formatting was inconsistent across the pages and there was no way to alter all the pages at once. This became too tedious and I abandon that project.

Net Net- Blurb is really cool and I highly recommend it for content that is more pictures than words where high-end professional looking book is the end goal.

Now I'll find out how to get an ISBN for The Fart Book.