Upload, Print, Sell, & Share Your Book
Lesson 7 from: Create a Trade Book with Blurb BookWrightDan Milnor
Upload, Print, Sell, & Share Your Book
Lesson 7 from: Create a Trade Book with Blurb BookWrightDan Milnor
Lesson Info
7. Upload, Print, Sell, & Share Your Book
Lessons
Lesson Info
Upload, Print, Sell, & Share Your Book
Okay, so we've gone through the majority of buttons and tools here in the book write software. We've got everything pretty much figured out, and we're now with the part where you're done and your finished and you've previewed everything and you're happy and you're ready to upload your printed project so you'll notice Here in the upper right hand corner you're going, there's an upload button. When you click on that upload button, it's gonna ask you to sign into blurb. And this is the same sign on information that you would look used to sign into blurb dot com. Now I'm not going to do this now, because one I'm already signed in until we don't necessarily need to go through the actual upload process. It would just take a little bit more time than we want to spend, so I'm going to cancel out of this. But what happens is when you hit upload and you sign in, depending on the size of your file will determine how long that upload time is. Once that file is finished, uploading it lands on, and ...
I'm gonna move over here to my Internet program. It lands on your author page. So this book that we made earlier this food toe food book, which we made earlier as you will see, is now residing on my author Page and I want to walk you through some of the components of what you're looking at here. The first thing on the right here is it reminds you of basically the ingredients that you had in this book. It's a trade book. It's eight by 10 inches at 72 pages and you created it in book, right? And it tells you the date that the book was created just as sort of a reminder here of what you've got. If you flash to the left hand side, you're going to see a little thumbnail here of the cover itself. And you're gonna notice that there are two different previews. I can preview this book just to see what it looks like for myself. Or I could hit a bookstore preview, which is going to show you what that book looks like to a perspective customer that's coming in to potentially buy your book. Okay, moving into the center, you're going to notice that there you have the ability to share this book. I can share Twitter to Facebook to email, etcetera. And this is for specific people. When this book is first uploaded, it's not automatically made public. You don't have to worry about when you upload a book that suddenly everybody in the world is going to see it. All of that is controlled by you behind the scenes, which I'm going to show you in a second. So just know when it hits first hits the online world. It's not public. Don't worry about it. And when you share it, it's with specific people. Unless you choose to put it on Twitter or Facebook. Now you can also delete the book, and you're probably thinking, Well, why would I do that? I just deleted it. Oddly enough, I've deleted many a book after I've uploaded to go back and make changes and start again. So again, don't worry about it. If you need to delete it, delete it. Now this is the button that we all want everyone to hit, which is the order Mawr button. You want to sell books, etcetera. This is exactly how you would do it. The final book here, the final button here I should say is Sell my book and if I click on this, it's something. There's a lot of steps here that I want to walk you through because this is where it really gets exciting. You'll notice now that instead of looking at all my books on the dashboard, I'm just looking at this particular book and I've got a multitude of tabs here and options that I have. I can again look at a book store preview Aiken, do some editing. Aiken, delete the book. But I'm going to start here on the first tab on the left, and I'm just gonna walk through these like we did before. This is your book detail path tab, and what's interesting is I've looked at a lot of books in the bookstore, and it's sometimes people get a little skimpy on this section, and they don't really fill out all the information that you have here to fill out things like tags, your author website selecting categories of really good book description, etcetera. This can really help you, and it can really make or break whether your book is found and whether your book sells. So take the time and remember We've talked about patients and practice this entire time. Take the time to fill out the information and there's no hurry. There's no rush. Just make sure you provide as much information as you can moving to the next tab. Sell and distribute. This is where you have options, and what we talked about earlier is you have photography books and trade books and magazines. They all have different kinds of selling options. And so this is where you would control all of that global retail network with Ingram blurb Direct Cell, etcetera. We're talking about a trade book in particular, so the trade books you can actually sell through the global retail network and you can sell through blurb directly or you have the option of Don't distribute. I do not want a list This book for sale me. I've got so many different books out there. I've used just about every one of these multiple times, so it just depends on what your goal is with the book. There's no right and wrong here. It depends on what you want to dio. Also, you'll see the base cost of the book, the paper choices that you've made and This is where you can set up your your profit. If you actually want to sell the book for a profit, this is where you can control it. You could say, Look, the book is $15.71. I'm gonna add $2. And now, when it sold its 17 71. So it's This is the place that you control the markup. It's very slick and fun if your goal is to sell books. No, you also have a promotion town, and this is fantastic. There a couple little things in here that I think are really important right now. What it's doing is reminding me that I've got this as an invite. Only I'm not selling this publicly. I don't have it out in space. I have the option of sharing the book via link to all these different social platforms and email. And here's I've also got a link that I can copy and paste this link as well. And then down below. Here you'll see another little of the little thumbnail of the book, and this is your personal storefront, and this is something that's a little embed herbal widget that allows you to create a preview of the book and then embed this on Facebook. I could embed it on my blogger. I can really use it to help promote. And there's something magical about doing an illustrated book and then having a small promotional tool that's also illustrated. It's a big difference than just pasting a link somewhere to have a little visual of that book that people can literally flip through and see a selection of the spreads to get an idea of what the content of that book is. Okay, and the last tab that will come to here is a book metrics tab and this because this book isn't publicly for sale, you're not seeing a lot of information here. But this is where you contract sort of the behind the scenes of the life of that book. How many people have looked at the book? Has it sold etcetera? These are all things that you can track within this final tab. So again, all of the details of this book are controlled by you, the author who created it. Okay, so we've been through the entire process. You've learned about the bookmaking itself. You've learned about uploading and controlling the book behind the scenes. Now you've seen that you can go from a blank piece of software into a beautiful publication like this. Now you have all the tools required for you to make something like this and enter into the book bookmaking world. So enjoy the process. Relax, have fun and good luck with your bookmaking.
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
This course is about how to use Blurb, not about how to make a book. What I mean is, it is helpful for people who have made books and/or photo albums before and want to learn how to use Blurb. It was also helpful to me as someone who has already made a few Blurb books already but wanted to learn to use it better. I definitely learned a couple things, and given that I watched it during a free broadcast, it was totally worth the price of admission (in my case, 60 minutes of my time). In my case, I learned that Blurb has downloadable icc profiles as well as the ability to make low-res proof pdfs. As someone who learned Blurb by downloading the program and clicking away (from time to time searching some online forums) these are extremely useful things I wouldn't have known about any other way. What the course does not do, however, is teach you how to make a book. It names all the steps (color management, edit, sequence ...) and how important they are, but don't expect anything but a shout out to help you remember to do it well. As examples: The section on color management is basically "Remember to calibrate your screen and soft proof using an icc profile." If you don't know what either of those mean, this course won't teach you what it is, much less how to do it. Secondly: he shows you how to add a background color to your pages, but nothing about when to do that, why to do that, and how to do it well. A last example: Daniel's most important advice is to "edit tight" -- SUPER important but for me, really difficult. Unfortunately, Daniel doesn't go into how to go about doing so. He doesn't even give tips about what to think about when culling down your own photos. I'd have paid a lot of money to watch him cull photo's for two or three books, listening to his thought process while he chooses which photos to include and which to cry over and then leave out. To do all these things would have required a day-long course rather than an hour-long course, but for me, that course would have been far more helpful. It probably have been useful for people using other programs and/or vendors as well. What the course does do, of course, is explain the Blurb BookWright software. You COULD teach yourself by pressing buttons and searching on-line forums like I did. Or, you could watch this course, save yourself a lot of time, and get information you didn't even think to ask about. Since the course goes through all the basic buttons, the course could be useful to an absolute beginner photo album maker, which is what Daniel clearly wants to achieve. He spends a lot of time trying to encourage people who have never made a book before. In my opinion, an absolute beginner book / photo album maker could learn a lot more by starting out with a far more "let me do a lot of this for you" type of program. You know the type I mean? The program that comes with (perhaps cheesy) themes, clip-art, frames, etc.? That way, see the possibilities and develop a sense of what you like before you use something like BookWright, where any and all objects that end up on the page have been created and placed by the person making the book. Doing so will give you far more ideas when you start creating entire spreads ex nihilo on your own. Then, if you want to switch to Blurb, you can watch this course (before or after you've made a couple books just using trial and error). That background will increase the chances that (if you're lacking a degree in publishing) you'll be able to piece together what Daniel's talking about when he uses the specific publishing industry vocabulary.
user 89d27e
Thank you. We are just starting to write our own recipe book and this popped up on Creative Live. It was very helpful, thank you for it :)
Lianne Kruger
Dan gave some good information on * how to layout a book * some good helps with the main page of bllurb. * some entering photos on the screen and layout I do not agree that this is a trade book. He did not go through how to add text with a photo. A trade book to me would be instructions along with photos. He did not show how to do that. The course is supposed to be a trade book