Okay, the book has undergone some changes since my first concept. The publisher did an amazing job of laying the book out. The first change that was presented to me was the cover. Although the changes were minor, they looked great. So, here it is – you decide:

I love the way that they designed this. I like the inset photo of Gerry Niel of Mint Hill, North Carolina shooting a photograph on the shipwreck, Lana Carol – a scallop boat that sank in a Thanksgiving storm and the purple jellyfish on the spine.

Before I go further, I should explain that the book is going to be hard cover, 11” x 8 1/2”, with 166 pages and 235 color photographs. Schiffer Publishing has been a joy to work with. Everyone there has been incredible.

Some of you may have looked at my original design and a lot of you voted for the front cover. The main image used was chosen from your votes. I had pictured a North American lobster for the back cover but the Schiffer designers had another idea and I liked it better than mine. The lobster image is the last image on the inside of the book. The new back cover is:

The image of the lined anemones and blue mussels is pretty cool and it enhances the “Garden State” theme. Now, you can buy the book anywhere but if you want a signed copy, you will have to attend a book signing (none are planned yet but there will be) or purchase the book from my site when it is available. If you would like to be notified when the book is available, please fill out the contact info form below. This information will only be used to notify you of book availability and nothing else.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

This is the photo of the bell of a lion’s mane jellyfish. There are two hitchhikers aboard the jellyfish. There is a Chaetognatha (below), Spadella cephaloptera, which is also known as an arrow worm. Arrow worms are transparent or translucent dart-shaped animals covered by a cuticle. They are predatory marine worms that are a major component of plankton worldwide.

The chaetognatha was cool but it wasn’t what I was excited about. In the upper left hand corner is a tiny, baby long-finned squid, Loligo pealei.

I have never seen a squid in New Jersey. I have seen their eggs but that is it. I am estimating that the squid was 1/4” to 1/2” long. I have a few other shots of the same jellyfish but from different angles. It is more difficult to see that it is a squid in the other photos but since they were taken one-after-the-other of the same jellyfish, I assumed that what I have is a view of the squid with its tentacles tucked underneath its body.

Now that I know what a baby squid looks like, I have found it on another photo. I missed it on the first scan because of the way that the scanner exposed the image. It blew out all the white areas. I rescanned using manual settings (this will be the subject of an upcoming blog) and lo and behold-there was another juvenile squid.

This is an eight-ribbed hydromedusa. It is the only photo that I have of one and our little hitchhiker is aboard.

So this was just one of the exciting things that I am experiencing as I continue on my quest. I will be bringing more to this site as I find them.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

On the plus side is seeing images that I made twenty years ago. I always thought that I could remember every image that I have taken but was I wrong! I look at some of these images and go “Wow, did I really take that picture?”

Before I started this project, I used to scan one slide at a time. That led me to only scan enough slides for each subcategory to fill one page in my web site photo gallery. That was a maximum of twenty images. The rest resided in albums. When I originally scanned the slides, I wasn’t aware about the importance of IPTC information embedded in digital files. I burned all the scanned slides as TIFF files onto CD’s and did not keep a copy on my PC. Every time I needed one of the digital files, I copied it off the CD to my hard drive and used it. That meant that I would need to add all the caption and image information to the file before sending it out. It took what should have been a five-minute project and made it a 30-minute task. Earlier this year, I decided to move all the images from the CD’s to my computer and get everything captioned and labeled. I am glad that I did it as I had a few CD’s that I could not read anymore which meant rescanning the original slides.

I was talking to my son, Tom, the other day about my project. He is recovering from a traumatic brain injury and I am constantly amazed with his progress. I asked if he knew why I was going to scan all my slides. My answer to him would have been that they are not doing me any good in albums on a shelf in my office. I need to get them on the web so that they can be seen. His answer to me about my reasoning was “for ease of access to the images.” I started to correct him but when I thought about what he said, I realized that this was the most important reason. Yesterday, his assessment was tested. I needed to upload 25 high resolution files to a Dropbox account. Some of them would have been on CD’s and it would have been a lot of work to get them in the condition required for delivery. Instead, I opened up my Dropbox folder and dragged and dropped images into it. I was done with my upload in less than 30 minutes. How great is that. Before I move on, if you have not heard about Dropbox, it a site where you can get 2 GB of storage space on the cloud. All you need is a gmail account. You can use this space to back up your computer files or to share photos or files with friends. I have been using it as a backup destination for my phone data and also for sharing with friends.

Once I realized how many slides I had to scan, I sat down and developed a work flow to make things easier. Here’s how it goes. I use Vuescan to batch scan slides with a Nikon 5000ED scanner with a Nikon SF-210 slide feeder. I can scan fifty slides at a time. Since all my slides are divided into categories like Fish, Invertebrates, Rays, Turtles, Marine Mammals, etc., I do each category and subcategory separately. Subcategories of fish would be Band Sea Bass, Black Sea Bass, etc. I could scan much faster if I just put fifty slides in at a time and scanned them all into a generic folder and then separated them afterwards. I hadn’t thought of doing that until just now and I may change my workflow in that direction. One of the hassles of doing things the way that I am now is that when I have subcategories with only a few slides, it is tedious to make a new folder, scan three slides, process those three and then move on.

Okay, I batch scan all the slides in a subcategory. Each slide is scanned at 4000 dpi and at 16 bits. The scanned image file is approximate 130 mb in size and are 1.3” x 0.9” at 4000 dpi. After scanning, I rename each slide to accommodate my current labeling system, add descriptions, keywords, copyright information, etc. For this I use IMatch. I have been using this program for a long time and it is extremely flexible and powerful.

As an example shown above, I can take all my images in a subcategory and assign them to categories. I the case above, the great barracuda images in this category are assigned to “Animals” “Fishes” “Marine” Barracuda (Sphyraenidae)” “Great Barracuda” and “Sphyraena barracuda.” I also assign other categories to the images such as “Location” “Oceans” “Atlantic” “South Carolina” etc. Once I have checked off the categories that I want for the images, I run a script called “Copy IMatch categories to IPTC keywords.”

All the categories that I assigned are now keywords in each image. If all the images were taken of the same subject and the image caption is the same for all, I would open the IMatch IPTC editor and add the remainder of the information that I want:

I entered the caption information and all the other criteria (except the object name which is the image number) and press the “Close” button and IMatch adds the information to the IPTC section of each image.

Now that I have completed my labeling work, I now have to process the images. When I was scanning one image at a time, I would open each individually in Photoshop and make all my adjustments. If I did this with the approximately 25,000 slides that I have, I would be at this forever. So I came up with another plan of action. I use a filter in Photoshop named “Perfectly Clear.” I have been very pleased with the way it processes and image. I run a batch program from Adobe Bridge to process each image in a folder using the Perfectly Clear filter.

Just a heads up, since my scanning process will go on for quite awhile, I am going to be adding some of the scanned photos to my blog posts and will probably be doing posts about the images themselves.

After the images are process with the filter, I open each one individually and crop each image to 8” x 12” at 300 dpi, and do all my usual Photoshop operations like spot removal, backscatter removal, etc.

I have an incredible sequence of a monkfish eating a black sea bass. What I forgot was that there were images in that sequence that I never scanned. This is one of them. The sea bass is in the monkfish’s throat and he is swallowing it. I scanned the image before this one and the image after but not this one. It was one of my “Wow” finds.

My wife, Veronica, and I would stop at the “2M” buoy about a mile outside of Manasquan Inlet. We usually stopped on an incoming tide which was when the water was the clearest around the buoy.

Other boaters would stop and ask if we were in trouble or did the person in the water need rescuing. Veronica and I would just laugh because they never realized what we could see beneath the surface.

On this day, we were blessed with the presence of an ocean sunfish (Mola mola). They are gentle giants that reach a height of ten feet from top fin tip  to bottom fin tip and a weight of 2000 pounds. They feed on jellyfish so they are no threat to humans.

While I was snorkeling, Veronica had a real treat. She saw the ocean sunfish breach out of the water. I have never seen that behavior and I am really glad that she got to see it. Like many animal encounters, you just have to be in the right place at the right time. I did not realize until I started scanning how many images that I have of ocean sunfish. The crazy thing is that I have seen one in a few years. It’s not because they are not there but because I am not in the right place at the right time.

Sea Ravens are members of the scorpionfish family. They come in four colors: brown, tan, yellow and red. The brown and tan are the most common. They yellow would be the next most common and the least common is the red variety.

Underwater, colors are lost as you go deeper in the water column. One of the first colors lost is red. It is lost at a depth of about ten feet. This red sea raven looks very dark colored. You can see the red color by shining a light on the fish. Photographers have to use a flash to get the red color in the photograph.

Now that I have gone off on a tangent, I am going to return to my slide scanning stories. First, if you have as many slides as I do to scan, you really need to either send them out and pay to have them done or purchase a quality scanner like the Nikon 5000ED and a slide feeder like the Nikon SF210. I don’t think that I would have undertaken this task with those two pieces of equipment. The bad part to purchasing the scanner and feeder is that they are not made anymore and you have to search places like EBay to find them. Additionally, they cost more now used than they did new. My two units together with shipping cost $2800.00. New, they were just shy of $1700.00. The plus side is that when your scanning project is done, you can sell them on EBay and retrieve a good part of your purchase price back. The other two things that I am finding invaluable in this project is the Vuescan scanning software and the IMatch image database program.

That’s all for today.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Towards the end of the week, we all went with Tom to Special Strides Therapeutic Riding Center for his Thursday night horseback riding session. Ken, Paulette and Susan had never seen Tom horseback riding so it was a real treat for them.

Tom was going to ride a new horse today. The horse is named “Snowy.” We would find out later that Snowy is a special horse. After grooming, Tom boarded Snowy and went for a ride on a trail through the woods. It was a beautiful evening with low humidity and comfortable temperatures.

You can see a mask over Snowy’s face. It is made of mesh and Snowy can see through it. I believe that it is there to keep the flies off of the horse. Whatever the reason, it didn’t seem to bother Snowy one way or the other.

Okay, so I told you that there was something special about Snowy. Here it is. Snowy was previously owned by Bruce Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa. I am not positive about the particulars of how Snowy got to Special Strides but I believe that Patti Scialfa donated the horse. Personally, I am grateful to anyone that donates to Special Strides Therapeutic Riding Center as they are an incredibly wonderful organization. You only have to see the smiles on the faces of their clients to know how much horseback riding means to them. Our family is blessed to watch Tom as he continues on his journey to recovery. It is extremely slow but as long as he continues to move forward, we are grateful.

Have a great week, everyone!!!!

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Tom entered five photographs. I loved them all. Tom’s favorite is this  one. This is Duke, a hound dog owned by one of the employees at the Brick Reservoir, Ryan Pharo.

This one was a favorite of some of the visitors and Expo participants, It was taken at Deep Cut Gardens in Monmouth County, New Jersey:

I loved the composition in this photo:

This was another favorite also taken at Deep Cut Gardens:

Deep Cut Gardens is located at 152 Red Hill Road, Middletown, NJ 07748. It is part of the Monmouth County Park System. Tom found some beautiful flowers in a field and made this image:

Tom has always had an interest in photography and one of my favorite shots of his is of a red-tailed hawk that he took at Spring Meadow Golf Course in Farmingdale, New Jersey. Tom was playing golf and saw two red-tail hawks land on the golf course. He rode his golf cart back to his car and got his camera. He got as close to the hawks as possible and then crawled on his belly until he was close enough to get the shot. One of the hawks moved out of the picture but he did get two great shots. Here are those two shots:

I really love these two shots and considering that they were taken with a point-and-shoot camera impresses me even more. The Creativity Expo 2011 is a wonderful happening for all of the people that participated. It is hard enough to recover from a brain injury so any avenue that they can find to express themselves is great.

One of the things that Tom and his Community Skills therapist, Nina, realized after a few photographic excursions to parks was that “ACCESSIBILITY” does not mean full accessibility everywhere. I talked with Tom and Nina and we talked about how great it would be for physically challenged individuals to share their experiences about accessibility in the places that they visit. It would help them decided if an “accessible” venue is correct for their situation. This could be an excellent idea for an accessibility blog. It is something that an organization like the Brain Injury Association of New Jersey might be interested in. If you have any thoughts on this, please post them here or post a link to the article on web sites that might undertake such a blog or build an accessibility database.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Okay, so I have time on my hands. What did I do with it? I created a new screensaver. It is titled “Mid-Atlantic Marine Fish.” I took about fifty photos and made them into a Windows screensaver. Here is the title screen that I use.

A number of the images in this collage are in the screensaver. I would appreciate any feedback from those of you who download this screensaver. I believe that I will be doing a few more including New Jersey Artificial Reefs 2, Mid-Atlantic Invertebrates, and a few others that are in the planning stage. The screensaver has settings that can be changed such as including different transitions and changing how long each image is on the screen. I hope that you like it.

To install, download the exe file here. Save it to your hard drive and double-click it to run and follow the prompts. After it is installed, you will have a number of options.

Click on the “Settings” button and you will see:

Under the “General” tab, you can change how long each image is on the screen and whether they should be shown sequentially, randomly or whether the images should be shuffled (different order on each pass). Click the “Position” tab and you will see:

You will have the option to change the size of the image. Each selection is self-explanatory. Click on the “Effects”  tab:

The “Effects” tab allows you to change and/or set the transitions between images. The default setting is “Crossfade” only.

The default setting for the screensaver is “No Sound” but you can add your own music to the screensaver and have choices for repeating, shuffling or playing one random playlist item.

The “Behavior” tab changes how the screensaver reacts to the mouse, keyboard and the escape key. Clicking the “About” button brings up the following which is self-explanatory.

Finally, clicking the “Website” button takes you to my home page on my website.

Please let me know what you think of the screensaver. By the way, the screensaver is only for the PC, it does not work on the MAC. Sorry!

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

This was one of the photos that I am not especially happy with but it is the one time that I dove and photographed subway cars sunk off New Jersey as artificial reefs and I wanted to make the photo look better. I thought that I would give Nik HDR Efex Pro a try and see what I could do. The plugin opens under the “File” “Automate” “Merge to HDR Efex Pro” menu in Photoshop CS5.

The plugin starts and presents a menu to choose the photos to merge into an HDR image.

Click on the “Select” button and choose your images:

I chose the three images that are shown above. Click “OK” and the process starts. If the program cannot determine the correct exposure differences, it will present the following screen. It could not tell the difference in exposure in this case because I took the initial exposure and manually corrected for +1 and –1 exposures and saved the over and underexposed images as separate files. If I actually took these three photos at different exposure settings, the program would be able to get the information from the photo’s metadata:

I manually keyed in the correct changes in exposure and then clicked the “OK” button. HDR Efex Pro has 33 presets that you can choose from. I will show the results of a few that I thought were interesting:

The photo above is the default effect created by blending the three images together. It looks much better than the original photo. The photo below is called “Night on Earth” effect. I liked this one a lot because it darkened the areas of the photo were backscatter is prominent:

I also liked the “End of the Road” effect. It is similar to “Night on Earth” but it adds some warmth to the photo:

You do not need three different images to accomplish the same results. You can choose one image at normal exposure and run the HDR Efex Pro plugin and end up with similar results. I ran the single image and found that I liked the results better using the three different exposures. For example, here is the “End of the Road” effect using a single image. Compare it to the one above using three separate exposures:

There is clearly a difference but I don’t think that the difference is huge. I wanted to see how this would work on an image taken in clear water so I chose a photo that I took of the shipwreck of the Oro Verde in Grand Cayman. I created one photo with a +1 f-stop exposure and a second of a –1 f-stop exposure and brought those along with the original image into HDR Efex Pro.

Here are a few of the results that I liked:

Notice the detail in the front of the wreck where there were heavier shadows before.

I like this better than the default image. It is a little darker and the water is a more vibrant blue. For a crazier look, check out “Night on Earth” effect on this photo:

The “Night on Earth” effect causes vignetting (dark areas) in the corners. The next effect is very similar without the vignetting.

The “End of the Road” effect puts this wreck into perspective. It really was the end of the road for the Oro Verde although it can be argued that since it now is a haven for marine life, perhaps it’s just a fork in the road.

I was going to end this here but I thought that it would be interesting to try this on something different. I have a photo of a southern stingray on the bottom in Grand Cayman with the live aboard dive boat, Cayman Aggressor IV in the background. Let’s see what HDR Efex Pro can do with that. First, I created one stop under and one stop overexposure images:

I loaded the images into the plugin and here are a few of the results:

I found that there were some very interesting prospects among the 33 presets. I am going to be spending more time with this plugin.

Will HDR Efex Pro make all of your photos better? No, but it can really make them look different and in this day and age, different is okay. Until next time, have fun shooting and being creative.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

I have a lot of work ahead of me in the coming months. I have a preview of the book that you can see here. This is the way that I perceive the book but I am not sure that it will end up like this. Schiffer Publishing Ltd. editor’s will do the layout.

This book has been the culmination of forty years of scuba diving and photographing in the Atlantic waters off my home state of New Jersey. I have seen and photographed some amazing things. One of the areas that I love the most is the surface and mid-water. This is where I find my favorite subjects – jellyfish and plankton. I have spent entire dives hanging on the anchor line at fifteen or twenty feet and loving every second of it. When I was shooting film and using a Nikonos camera, it was easier to capture some of the really small things like the one-half-inch long naked sea butterfly since the Nikonos camera had macro capability with a wired framer. I just had to get the subject between the uprights of the framer and take the photo. Although this is much more difficult with a housed digital SLR, I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

The book is full of some of my crazy dive stories like when my wife, Veronica and I were snorkeling around the 2M buoy off Manasquan Inlet. We observed numerous fish and an ocean sunfish circling the buoy. Other boaters stopped to ask if we were in trouble. None had thought that the view below the surface was so wonderful. On another occasion, I was swimming over the deck of the USS Algol more than eighteen miles off shore. The deck was covered with baby scallops and I moved over them, many clasped their shells together and squirted up into the water column.

I have a great photograph of two baby Forbes’ sea stars in a mussel shell with two arms of a much larger Forbes’ sea star above them. I like to think that the large sea star is the mother telling it’s two babies that they can’t go out and play until they finish their meal and clean up the shell that they are in.

One of my favorite dives was on the two locomotives off Long Branch, New Jersey. On a few occasions during my diving career, I have been completed speechless when viewing something that takes my breath away. The locomotives did this for me. They sat upright on the bottom about fifteen feet apart and were covered with sea anemones. The sight was one of unbelievable beauty. Schools of black sea bass swam around and under the locomotives. I stood looking at them for nearly ten minutes before I started to photograph.

This is a one-of-a-kind book. Very few people have spent as much time as I have photographing the New Jersey marine community. You will see fish, invertebrates, mollusks, crustaceans, sharks, turtles, seahorses, artificial reefs and shipwrecks. I hope that many of you will enjoy having the book as I enjoyed creating it.

I am collecting names, email addresses and/or mailing addresses for anyone that might have an interest in purchasing the book. There is no obligation to buy. It is only to notify you when the book is available. The contact information will go no farther than from me to the publisher and will not be used for any other reason. You can sign up at the contact form here.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Paul and Ruth Hepler run the charter scuba diving, fishing and commercial boat, Venture III, out of the Belmar Marine Basin on the Shark River in Belmar, New Jersey. Veronica, Tom and I have known Paul and Ruth for over thirty years and they are two of our favorite people. There is no one that we can think of that deserves the award more than them. I remember bringing my young son, Tom, aboard the Venture II, a sturdy wooden boat that chugged along at a steady six knots or so. Tom made his first scuba dive without me as his buddy aboard the Venture II. He partnered up with one of our great friends, who has since passed, Dan Kirby. Paul is a quiet-gentle person and Ruth is a bundle of energy. I remember being on the boat and watched Ruth go into the water after all the divers had returned to the boat. She boarded the boat with a bag full of lobster to the amazement of the divers who came up empty handed.

I started looking through some old slides to see what I could find of Paul and Ruth and came up with some oldie but goodies. All are circa 1968 or so.

These were taken aboard the Venture II. I had been diving about six years. Paul and Ruth are incredible divers and equally incredible boat captains. I’ve watch Ruth pull an anchor and I don’t too many people, man or woman, who could keep up with her.

There wasn’t much in the Beneath the Sea program so I wanted everyone to know about this prestigious award. I hope that all of you will join me in congratulating Paul and Ruth Hepler on their award. They are two of the best people that I have ever met and I value their friendship greatly. Please post any thoughts that you have about them here. They are truly the Northeast Diver Pioneer Award winners in anybody’s book.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

This gave me an opportunity to try some neat things in the book like taking an image and spanning two pages with it. These kind of images are really impressive.

I finished the book and uploaded it to the MyPublisher site. The process works extremely well. Their software will check your book and point out mistakes that should be corrected before you upload. I completed the process by placing my order for the book. The normal price would have been $227.00 plus sales tax and shipping. With their promotion, I paid $70.00 plus sales tax and shipping. The final price was around $84.00. I have used MyPublisher before and I was really pleased with the final product. This time, I offered the book to anyone that wanted to order. I have not done that before and I found things that surprised me.

First, if you are going to have others buy your book and you want to make any money on it, forget it. There isn’t any way for you to set a price for your book. You can get $20.00 off coupons when people buy your book. To do this, you have to sign up for the service and send out emails through this service. If people use the link they receive in the email to order, you will get the coupon. I tried to sign up for the service and after inputting email addresses, I received a system error each time. I tried this a number of times with the same result each time. In frustration, I emailed MyPublisher to ask if there was a way to track who purchased my book. Their reply was “no.” I could sign up for the coupon offer but other than that, they couldn’t tell me how many books were purchased. I told them that I tried to sign up for the coupon service but kept getting a system error. They suggested that I input fewer email addresses and try again. I was amazed and disappointed by their answers. Then I thought about the coupon offer. I realized that I purchase books from them when they are having a two-for-one, 50% or 70% off offer. You can’t combine the coupon with any of those offers so it was unlikely that I would be using the coupons. I did find out that everyone that ordered a book received a discount offer with the book. It will prompt some people to use MyPublisher which is good for their business.

Okay, so with that out of the way, I waited for my book to arrive. What amazed me was that my wife’s brother received his book on the same day that I did and they ordered a day after me. I can’t really complain as the book arrived about five days after ordering. I have to say that the book met all my expectations. The printing was as good as I have seen and the image wrap cover was spot on. I don’t think that there is anything that they could have done to make the book better. That sentiment was echoed by the other people that bought the book (at least the one’s that emailed me to tell me that they purchased it). By the way, I just received another offer from MyPublisher that is only good for three days. I could reorder my “Ocean Adventures” book for $60.00.  I don’t understand how they can offer books at these prices but I like it.

I also had a book printed at Blurb. I am working on a book about underwater New Jersey. Many of you voted for the cover photo of the book and I thank you all for that.

The editing of the book is finished and I am looking for a publisher. I explored a lot of options. I have contacted publishers to see if I could find one that would publish it. I looked at print-on-demand (POD) like Blurb, CreateSpace, Lightning Source and Lulu. I also looked into self-publishing the book and requested quotes from printers. My first concern was the final quality of the book. I designed the book in Adobe InDesign CS5, exported it to a PDF file as per Blurb’s specifications and did the same for the front and back cover’s and spine. I uploaded everything to the Blurb web site and placed my order. I used a small landscape size (10” wide x 8” long) with an image wrap hard cover. The book is 160 pages long so using MyPublisher was out of the question. Their maximum page quantity is 100 pages (actually 50 pages printed on both sides).

When you upload your PDF file to Blurb, they check it for errors. I didn’t have any so the process went smoothly. The file was quite large and took some time to upload. I paid for my book using a discount coupon and patiently (?????) waited for my book to arrive. I choose the least expensive shipping mode and found out later that it was not possible to track the book after it shipped. In any case, about two weeks later, I received my book. I have read a lot of comments about the quality of Blurb printing. The comments seem to be all over the place. Some thought that it was great and others thought it was bad. Overall, I felt that my book was okay. It wasn’t as good as MyPublisher but it I felt that most people would be happy with the results. The front and back cover images don’t have black blacks but the inside images were much better. I also read about complaints of the paper not feeling thick enough. I used their premium paper and I felt that it was very good.

This photo is fairly representative of how the cover looks. If you compare it to the cover image above this one, you will see the difference in the blacks. I took this image of the book cover with my wife’s Nikon Coolpix S600 camera.

This is a flatbed scan of one of the pages from the Blurb book. You can see the blacks look black and are not as washed out as those on the cover.

My initial impression was that I might be able to sell my book through Blurb but then I considered the selling price. In 10” x 8” soft cover format, the book was about $46.00 (my cost). As a small 10” x 8”  hard cover book, it came in a little over $61 and as a large hard cover book (13” wide x 11” high), the price was around $111.00. I didn’t believe that I could sell the book with a small markup and make anything. I don’t believe that I would have sold many even if I didn’t mark up the price at all.

That’s when I started looking for other publishing options. I quickly found out my 10” x 8” book size was not an industry standard and in order to use CreateSpace, Lightning Source or Lulu, I would have to change the book size as most of their layout sizes are portrait and not landscape. I tried laying it out as an 8-1/2” wide x 11” high and as an 8.5” x 8.5” book and neither worked very well. I found the same problems when I started looking at self-publishing the book. One printer that I spoke to said the only way I could do this at a reasonable price was to use a spiral binding. I wasn’t against this but I now would have to order 100 books at a time to keep the price reasonable.

My saga continues but here is the bottom line for me so far. If I was going to do a book for myself and some friends and the page count was going to be less than 100, MyPublisher would be my option of choice without hesitation. If I was doing a book that fit the format for one of the POD publishers and I wanted to make a profit on it, I would look at them. I have read a lot about CreateSpace, Lightning Source and Lulu and have seen good and bad comments about all of them although I have seen less about Lightning Source than the other two. The problem with Lightning Source as I understand is that they don’t work with individuals but with companies. You can get around this by making your own publishing company, getting as ISBN number for your book and signing on to Lightning Source. I have also read that they are the toughest when approving the layout of your book. Many people have recommended using Lulu to layout the book and get it approved and then taking the finished PDF file to Lightning Source. The difference between the three seems to be distribution and royalties. If one of these interests you, Google them and you will find more information that you ever wanted. Since I don’t have a book format that fits theirs, I have not pursued this any further.

If you plan on doing a book, look into sizes first to make sure that what you choose has a marketable format. If your book has the potential of being a great selling book, your options using a traditional publisher (not self-publishing) will be greater. One of the publishers who is actually considering my book has landscape options that will fit right in with the size that I envision. The saga continues. Until next time.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.