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The Design of a Photography Book
The Design of a Photography Book
Using a print on demand service (POD) like Lulu means more work but if you were thinking of paying a regular printer, you could use some of the money, you save on the printing costs, to hire a book designer. Or save even more by designing it yourself. Lulu gives you several options. You could design in Word, Publisher, InDesign etc. and then save and upload as a PDF file.
The PDF file is extremely important! The correct color reproduction of your book is dependent on your PDF. If you use Lulu or any other POD service make sure that you send them files that will be compatible with their printers. I spent a lot of time on their support forums reading their customer comments trying to figure out what problems I could possibly run into and if there were solutions to them.
The three programs that I seriously considered were Microsoft Publisher, Quark and Adobe InDesign. Publisher was quickly ruled out. I gave up on Quark because it didn't seem easy to learn quickly. I had a deadline to turn in a rough draft of the book (I was perpetually behind schedule; everything took more time than I thought it would.) and I only had a few weeks to turn it in.
I read a lot of reviews online and looked at tutorials online. There seemed to be a consensus that InDesign would be easy to learn quicklyI got a access to a copy of InDesign and borrowed a few very heavy and thick books from my school library on InDesign. Fortunately for me, it was not difficult. I basically only learned what I needed to learn to design my book i.e. creating master pages, a toc and an index. Another selling point for InDesign was the option to output to PDF.
Using a print on demand service (POD) like Lulu means more work but if you were thinking of paying a regular printer, you could use some of the money, you save on the printing costs, to hire a book designer. Or save even more by designing it yourself. Lulu gives you several options. You could design in Word, Publisher, InDesign etc. and then save and upload as a PDF file.
The PDF file is extremely important! The correct color reproduction of your book is dependent on your PDF. If you use Lulu or any other POD service make sure that you send them files that will be compatible with their printers. I spent a lot of time on their support forums reading their customer comments trying to figure out what problems I could possibly run into and if there were solutions to them.
The three programs that I seriously considered were Microsoft Publisher, Quark and Adobe InDesign. Publisher was quickly ruled out. I gave up on Quark because it didn't seem easy to learn quickly. I had a deadline to turn in a rough draft of the book (I was perpetually behind schedule; everything took more time than I thought it would.) and I only had a few weeks to turn it in.
I read a lot of reviews online and looked at tutorials online. There seemed to be a consensus that InDesign would be easy to learn quicklyI got a access to a copy of InDesign and borrowed a few very heavy and thick books from my school library on InDesign. Fortunately for me, it was not difficult. I basically only learned what I needed to learn to design my book i.e. creating master pages, a toc and an index. Another selling point for InDesign was the option to output to PDF.