It’s the end of a busy couple of weeks where I have been focused on a lot of things–training and financials and marketing–everything except what I love the most: making books from photos and memories. I came across this fabulous project in my Facebook stream late last night and just had to share it with [...]
Can people trust your pricing?
July 13, 2010 – 4:20 pm
Let’s suppose you were a builder and a potential client says, I’d like you to build me a structure out of this particular material that’s this size with this kind of a roof, one door, and four windows. How much would that cost?
You go back to the office, look up prices for materials, figure out [...]
thinking about [profitable] book design & production
July 9, 2010 – 8:58 am
It’s been almost a year since I introduced this blog with my first post What is Book Thinking to orient readers to this site. Here’s what I wrote:
… I plan to share what I have learned about how to think about a book project, organize its content [particularly images], design and produce it—and make a [...]
speaking of e-books
June 8, 2010 – 2:39 pm
With the recent release of the iPad and the latest iPhone, there’s been a lot of buzz lately about e-books. Here I offer up some thoughts on the subject.
You do realize, don’t you, that the “book” part of “e-book” is a metaphor? It’s used to describe a way of presenting text through electronic devices. I [...]
a brief history of book printing and binding
May 3, 2010 – 9:07 am
The other night in my Print Production Workflow teleclass, some questions came up about terminology and how, exactly, the physical book got put together.
Youtube is an invaluable source to help us visualize a process. Here is a curated overview of book printing, from letterpress, the same process that produced the Gutenberg Bible, to the Expresso [...]
scanning tips
April 13, 2010 – 8:11 pm
With good quality scanners available for a few hundred dollars and services advertising pennies per scan, it seems like this is a commodity service. But to get from a faded photograph to a handsome photo printed in a book involves both aesthetic judgment and technical expertise. Here are some tips for making your scanning process [...]
time tracking: what are the numbers telling you
April 6, 2010 – 10:33 am
Last week I wrote about the importance of keeping track of all the time you spend on a project: billable and not billable, productive and spinning-your-wheels, brilliantly executed and fatally flawed. This week I want to show you the next step in my process: categorizing and analyzing the time.
I used to have much finer divisions [...]
time tracking: are you doin’ it?
March 31, 2010 – 11:06 am
I just spent most of a gorgeous Sunday afternoon figuring out how much time a project actually took compared to the proposal estimate. That part was easy: twice as long. Gulp!
Now the more difficult question: how much of this was “beyond scope” and can be billed, how much was attributable to poor estimating on my [...]
five workflow stumbling blocks that can trip you up
March 25, 2010 – 7:33 am
Book design and production is a complicated process with a lot of “moving parts” in terms of text and graphics, multiple people involved, and a fair share of gremlins hiding in the technology, waiting to trip you up when it hurts the most. Some glitches are bound to arise, but some trouble spots are fairly [...]
working with a designer-part two
November 17, 2009 – 10:58 am
In working with a designer-part one I offered some suggestions on how to begin to select a book designer. That post ended with arranging a time to talk to them on the phone to find out more. So what is it you want to find out? [No, actually, “What will it cost me to do [...]
