Vladography

Under normal circumstances, I never would have thought of making this book, but I listened to a podcast that convinced me that under some circumstances, vanity publishing is ok.

Now I don’t mean the kind of rip off vanity publishing where you sink thousands of £££ or $$$ and get a pile of shoddy books that moulder under your bed or behind your sofa for the next five years because you were convinced that if only your masterpiece was published, people would flock to buy it. No, I mean the print on demand variety, where, if you go into it with your eyes open and a realistic idea of what you’re going to achieve, then it can make a satisfying conclusion to something like the 52 weeks project.

Yes,  I could have printed off the photos and put them into an album, or made my own hand bound book, but there is something about seeing the project as a whole, printed up into book form.

If you are going to do something similar, it’s not for the faint-hearted. Sure, you could just use some of your flickr photos, but the chances are they won’t fit right, or not all of your photos will be print quality. And let’s not get talk about colour management. It took me hours and hours or rescanning and editing, and a frightening moment when the software I was using crashed and I lost all my work. The staff at Blurb were really helpful and managed to restore my file just in time (I was making my book for a birthday present and the date was fast approaching.)

So I made myself a book. You can check it out on Blurb. I don’t expect people to flock to buy it in their thousands – that’s not why  I did it. But if anyone does I will be absolutely chuffed.