Blurb, Inc.

Transcription

Alright today I want to look at a website I have been using now for really quite a long time, this company is called Blurb and what I do is print books, they are one of the company driving technology behind the self publishing revolution that happen in the last 5 and 8 years, as it happens, they found me in2013 so we have a starting more formal relationship, but I have been using this site since I think 2002 something like that, quite a long time and I do all of my paper backs in hard covers 3D system. So what Blurb has done is make the process of making books very simple, let’s start by looking at the sort of books you can make here. Certainly you can make photo books, which is what you can now do in a lot of different places, you can do this through apple, you can this through these loads of companies now who have made the margin in this business vanish, so photo books certainly you can do. But the part I am interested in that is unusual about blurb are the trade books, these are the kinds of books you find in book store, these are pocket size books, trade page backs, hard covers, as well in the world of publishing your own book and this is where in think blurb really come its own. So let say for a seconds I want to create a book, maybe one of my books, I will show you here, this is timlevy.net, you can see I have a number of books, here is one called creativity and innovation for example which is publish via Blurb, and it happen to know, it’s about 120 pages, so if I go back to the Blurb website and I type here to calculate the price, and it tells me that I will get a 100 copies of the trade page back which is the one am interested in of black and white for 599 dollars, since it’s about 6 dollars a pop, hey if we just take it down to one copy of wish the price is going to go up then you are 8 dollars a pop, so I can get myself my own book upload it to this website even a single copy for as little as in this case for 8 dollars. So let’s look at how to do this a little more specifically, but first see how this blurb have come a variety of different ways of doing this, the easiest I think is what I call book smart. So book smart is when you download an app to your computer, and create the computer using the app and then upload it to the blurb system who will then print it out for you and send it to you. The other thing that I use a lot is the indesign plugins, now am not expecting you to know how to use indesign, am expecting you to hire someone who knows how to use indesign, from website like Fiverr and Elance, for example if we go to Elance and there is another video on this if you haven’t seen it, also its covered in another one of my book called The Entrepreneurial Handbook, which shows you how to use Fiverr and Elance, I don’t want to use such of tools to build your global dynamic team. But let’s come back to Elance, if I want to find a designer I just type in designer, time lucky, and Elance will tell me in this case that there are 36000 and a half designers waiting to help me welcome my pool, if I type in indesign I become more specific and now there is 3,362 designers who know indesign, if I for example make it into just united states by changing this criteria down here it comes back with a small number of people, now here we go, you can say 1300 people who know how to use indesign and live within the US, as it happens this one here Mary A is someone I have use many times she is terrifically talented, so that where I will hire somebody to do the indesign work you needed, if you want to have a high quality design than just the basics. But let’s go back to blurb, so let’s say I just want to welcome my own create a paperback, how will that work? Well I can start by downloading book smart, to do that I jump into the book smart page and I click on download now and I believe they will ask you to create a free account first, so they can stay in touch with you which make sense as well because you need an account to upload to, as it happens I already have an account with these guys, so I am going to sign in quickly, am going to prm at the download blog for pc, of course you can have it unmark there are various different options but am just going to go for pc right now, click this, save the file and its going to pop on to my computer, let go to the download directly so we can find that file and run it, here it is book smart, and now it’s going to run this app or install this app onto my computer. Now we have got this app installed, so let’s run it and see what happens, we need the book smart app and its has install the pops up like this, in this case let start a new book from scratch, and I am going to use an old manuscript of mine from a book I have written called The Google Gamble, so I just type in the title in my name, and In this case select a trade paperback which is the standard size you use in book stores, now it ask what kind of layout do I want, do I want something blank, I go for my own or start from scratch, do I want to use one of their portfolios, such as photo book or guestbook, I could even use a blog where I go straight to a blog on the web and will draw the content for me, in this case I have a word document which is how I recommend you begin, so I say I want a word document click on continue, it says which word document, so I click on, because I can have multiple document , so I will click on get word document and I will grab the manuscript from The Google Gamble, when I click on continue, it ask me a couple of options, how do I want my chapter openers, how do I want my pages to look, like in this case I am going to click continue, and now am going to count, 1, 2, 3 and in that real seconds magically blurb actually lays out my book for me, as you can see here in the window I got a design option at the top, have got various format on the left, have got my book itself here in the middle and have got my pages all the way down at the bottom, am going to change from hard cover to soft cover because am going to do a paperback first, am going to go ahead and select the view of my whole cover which I can now see, then you pop it a little bit so I can see the whole cover, as you can see that is a generic cover ready to go from here, we just place the name of the book and by, this case by me, if I pop into somebody’s, in the pages you can see its laid out a text format in the form of a standard format brought in from my own word document, I got lots of options here, for example if I want to change the font on this page I could do select or control, and I could change he font from dialogue which it seems to be to say Georgia which now makes it into a nice serial font like that and I could begin to play with the layout here if I wanted to, you can see there is a title here, it does have a style system, so up here I can select style, heading level 1 and a little pop in heading level 1 and if I select this copy again and I said body copy it will pop it into a body size, looks like I select the wrong thing there but I went back to heading 1. So there are some basic layout tools that you can use to layout your book, as I said this is sort of a basic tool design to give in my opinion to be more of a draft rather than a complete book, for me to do a complete book I will hire someone to do the design using a service like Fiverr or Elance, more likely Elance, you can see it quickly have got a page laid out beautifully ready to go and with a small amount of work till the following pages I can go ahead and change the font change the spacing and get my book to where I wanted it, you can see here right on the bottom, you can see it laid out in this case 67 up to 76 pages, with regards to cover you can say this is sort of blank, what I could do here is go to our website like Fiverr or Elance and get a cover done pop up to get to Fiverr and type in cover design, you can see that there are thousands in this case nearly 20 thousand people who love to do a book cover for you, which you can then pop into your blog manuscript. So once you get a cover that you like and you got some copy that’s like that on the right way you can press preview book to flick through one last time to make sure it’s how you wanted, in this case its obviously pretty rough for this example and you click on here that says order book this is where it’s amazing, but once you have got that done you simply log in to your account on Blurb and you will upload it there for you for free. Let me have a little of some here done before, am going to sign into my account I have got quite a few books here and here you go, here is a couple of them including Creativity and Innovation, so let’s have a look at that book, what’s great is when you upload this particular book it automatically creates a sort of a sales page for you, let us actually going find one for The Google Gamble my project, okay here I am on Blurb and if I scroll down here’s the page for The Google Gamble, now this one I actually did using indesign and the indesign plug-ins, so my Elance designer uploaded this for me but it has the same kind of results, so let’s have a look at the page that Blurb automatically creates for me. If I click on this link here and view this book the way it displayed to other people, I can see that right away, it keeps telling that because I am logged in. You can see firstly it allows me to preview the book, this is very powerful and I can select how many pages are preview able when it goes full screen and you can see this my cover and into the pages and scrolling into the pages of my book so that someone could have a look and make a decision whether they might like to buy that and again you can limit this to the number of pages that you wish, here I am back to the setup page, so in here I can say whether is publicly available or not, in this case it is available to public I could just show the first 15 pages of my book or I could select how many pages I want to show let’s leave it on 15, I could choose the book language, in this case it’s going to be English and see a few things here and had it filled in and I can put some keyword if I want to for example business, seo, strategy, I can choose my own pricing which is what’s so powerful, I simply select my makeup and there is my final price $14.99 and then using this link I could actually pop a promotional little widget into my blog which pressing even onto to Facebook, once I hit save that page is now live and as you can see here back on the page itself and lets go back to the marketing page itself this book is now live and on sale all you do is press add to cart and its free to check it out and the buyer have to say, they will normally have the full price and this is just a price for me because am logged in, so that book is now printed and published and on sale and ready to go and that’s why I find blurb to be such a fantastic and easy to use system and that’s why I love blurb as you can see it’s so easy to get your book publish online and on sale and ready to go in a matter of clicks using a free account and free software to do it by the way was the side benefit, it’s when you sell these books blurb just sent you a check the difference between the cost price and the sale price at the end of every month, not a bad way to get a check at the end of the month.