Some insight on self-publishing
Jorg Colberg has posted a lengthy, informative, and updated piece on his experiences using some of the oft-cited self-publishing outfits such as Blurb and MyPublisher. His article is Here.
I’ve used MyPublisher before, when they first got started several years ago, but have not used them since. I’ve seen more recent books created by my friends using MyPublisher within the last year and they looked good, the same or slightly better quality than my first several books. I’ve not used Lulu.com, but did purchase a book from them that was made by alternativephotography.com that had some of my images in it. I was happy with the production value, quality, and image reproduction in the soft cover editions (2) I purchased.
I “joined” AsukaBook early on, but have not created a book with them as yet. I’ve been looking into creating a self-published book (at least one) and had considered creating my own handmade book of Polaroid transfers (good luck with that one). Maybe I’ll still do the handmade book but with self-printed images instead.
Of additional interest are comments and additional information from aphotoeditor.com related to Jorg’s post. In particular, read the comment by The Jackanory (#6) regarding his experience with Blurb.com and Ed Panar (#20) about Lulu.com.
As is being said, not just in these comments, is do your research. Not all self-publishing outfits are for you, not all provide consistent results, some that were good seem not too be as good anymore, and new ones will always be cropping up. The best way to determine quality is to create a book and get it in your hands, although that in itself is not the entire test, as you’ll understand by reading the posts above.
Digital technology is making publishing a book much easier and less expensive than it has been historically, but it’s not a perfect process yet. You still have to stay on top of things, expect lower quality than you would like, and as one commenter put it, remember that your viewer is likely only to have seen the one image in the book for the first time and doesn’t know the color is a little bit off. Perfection can be a curse.