Publish Your Digital Art with Blurb
Blurb.com is a publishing and marketing platform on the web that offers a software called Blurb BookSmartR. It's free to download this book layout software which makes it easy to use on and off line. Once you have your book finished, you can order a printed version for your family and friends. But, this is nothing new. There are many sites, such as MyPublisher, that offer this printing and public/private sharing service.
Besides the custom software and many professional templates, what makes Blurb different is the Blurb Bookstore where you can list your book or books for sale to all. This store works somewhat like LuLuR. The markup price that you set for your book determines your profit. Blurb has a base price for their "bookstore-quality" printing process. You have a choice of three cover types and six book sizes. Your choice of cover types are softcover, hardcover with dust jacket and hardcover with ImageWrap (cover image printed on front and back cover with matte finish). Blurb's 4-color printing maintains the CMYK color space, thus avoiding the need for conversion to sRGB and discrepancies in color from screen to print.
You get an Author profile page on the bookstore site and link to your very own Blurb Bookstore page where all of your books are listed. You have control of the SEO Title, Category and Description tags for each book listing. In the store's Flash-based full-screen viewer, similar to Amazon's book preview feature, the first fifteen pages of your book can be previewed.
Blurb has a few options for marketing your book in their bookstore including their Blurb Badge which is a simple link to your Blurb Bookstore page and their BookShow widget that can be posted on Facebook, your website and blog. This widget is more than a fancy link to your book in the bookstore. It's a Flash-based widget with a page flip feature for previewing your book. Blurb also has an Announce feature and address book for sending email invitations about your newest book.
Besides the free Blurb BookSmart software, you can create your book using your favorite PDF/X-3 compliant layout program such as AdobeR InDesignR and QuarkXpressR. Blurb has many InDesign templates to get you started. You can also grab your photos from FlickrR, PicasaTM, SmugMug and TypePadR.
What does this have to do with digital art? Perhaps your book has a personal theme such as a collection of your wedding photos. You can list it in the Blurb Bookstore for family and friends to purchase. On the other hand, if you are a professional artist or photographer, you can create a book of your best images and order copies to use as a portfolio or list the book for sale in the Blurb Bookstore.
https://www.blurb.com
Besides the custom software and many professional templates, what makes Blurb different is the Blurb Bookstore where you can list your book or books for sale to all. This store works somewhat like LuLuR. The markup price that you set for your book determines your profit. Blurb has a base price for their "bookstore-quality" printing process. You have a choice of three cover types and six book sizes. Your choice of cover types are softcover, hardcover with dust jacket and hardcover with ImageWrap (cover image printed on front and back cover with matte finish). Blurb's 4-color printing maintains the CMYK color space, thus avoiding the need for conversion to sRGB and discrepancies in color from screen to print.
You get an Author profile page on the bookstore site and link to your very own Blurb Bookstore page where all of your books are listed. You have control of the SEO Title, Category and Description tags for each book listing. In the store's Flash-based full-screen viewer, similar to Amazon's book preview feature, the first fifteen pages of your book can be previewed.
Blurb has a few options for marketing your book in their bookstore including their Blurb Badge which is a simple link to your Blurb Bookstore page and their BookShow widget that can be posted on Facebook, your website and blog. This widget is more than a fancy link to your book in the bookstore. It's a Flash-based widget with a page flip feature for previewing your book. Blurb also has an Announce feature and address book for sending email invitations about your newest book.
Besides the free Blurb BookSmart software, you can create your book using your favorite PDF/X-3 compliant layout program such as AdobeR InDesignR and QuarkXpressR. Blurb has many InDesign templates to get you started. You can also grab your photos from FlickrR, PicasaTM, SmugMug and TypePadR.
What does this have to do with digital art? Perhaps your book has a personal theme such as a collection of your wedding photos. You can list it in the Blurb Bookstore for family and friends to purchase. On the other hand, if you are a professional artist or photographer, you can create a book of your best images and order copies to use as a portfolio or list the book for sale in the Blurb Bookstore.
https://www.blurb.com
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