Anyway, getting back to the post I'd intended to write, for a while I've been intending to do a book of my English Civil War pictures and thought it would be interesting to blog about the project. I actually mentioned it 18 months ago when the idea was to go through Lulu, but I soon found myself short of time and all that energy went into learning InDesign. In any case, Lulu seems much more suitable to another project, and I saw Blurb's stand at Focus on Imaging and think it looks the better option for a coffee table book. It's now time to get started.

Very typically for me, I already feel more concerned about the details of the workflow. There is a “marketing strategy” and I'll blog later about a way I'm hoping to use on-demand printing as part of it. There's a book plan too - mainly pictures but also text pages to explain the themes, and perhaps satisfy a long-overdue ambition to write a history book by the age of 30….

But you very quickly get into the nuts and bolts. How much of the work can I do in Lightroom, how much in InDesign, how much in Blurb's BookSmart - and how flexible can I keep the whole chain? A good example is that each picture will have a brief caption, probably an abrupt what / where / when - so this picture from Sunday would be “Pikeman, Cheriton, 2009”. I'm really - really - not into unnecessary retyping and want to add these captions automatically, but unfortunately using Lightroom's title field would produce many inconsistencies - some might be “Pikeman”, “Cheriton”, “Pikeman looking worried”, “Rob or Joe”. You can fix these upstream in Lightroom or downstream in InDesign or BookSmart, but then you're into cascading the changes downwards or finding efficient ways to control the process. So right now I'm trying out a few ideas (Blurb's forum) and I'll go over a few options in my next post on the project.

So any experience of producing books with Blurb?