thanks for your post. I was planning to create a photobook, but never sure where to do it. I heard about Blurb, but I did not find a good review so far. thanks for sharing your experience.

congrats with your book and thanks for the tips! I finally upgraded my computer so I also can get started, can't wait, great job for winter

Great post, this is a useful reference for authors and book designers new to the book printing industry!

I find the quality of the photograph is a bit grainy has anyone found this and also it prints darker than on my computer.

Dont forget to checkout the included Blurb plugin in Adobe Lightroom - I havent used it yet but IM intending to do right now !

The reason why it is darker after printing is because colors on paper are subtractive (color is based on light absorbed in the paper/ink). While the monitor uses additive color (color are created by adding colored light).

Is there a way you could share the pages you formatted and saved in "My Page Layouts"? I use (and love) Blurb but not 100% thrilled with the layouts they offer or the ones I have made.

Can laser print inside pages of a Blurb book, but still haven't figured a way to print a copy of front/back cover & spine. Anyone any ideas?
Also have used Photobox (I believe they are a French company). I found their print quality to be very good (edges out Blurb). Unfortunately they don't print to the size I need (13x11 inches)

I am in the process of putting together a large landscape photo book and i read somewhere that because the bindings are not made to fit the amount of pages that you use it will make the bindings look too large if you don't have the right number of pages. Does anyone out there know how many pages need to be produced for a large landscape book using the premium luster paper to have a binding fit the pages without any loose extra space. This really looks bad and i've only see one place where someone mentioned it.

I found the following workaround for printing the cover on a Mac:
1. Display your cover page in "Book Preview"
2. Open the "Grab" Apple application ( use Spotlight to find it if necessary)
3. Select in the Menu " Capture" - "Selection"
4. Draw over the front page, and save the resulting .tiff file
5. Click on the saved image file with a righthand click, open the file with "Preview"
6. You can now paste the cover into the .pdf file with the rest of the book y dragging its thumbnail
7. Save the file, et voilà! (If you want only the cover as pdf, you can always do "Export as pdf" in the
File menu)
Amittedly somewhat laborious, but the end result works! Probably, similar steps would exist for Windows PCs.

Thanks for the coupon code tip. You made me save 20€ a moment ago, so I felt I owed you this!

I was wondering if there is a way to manually move text boxes? When I select a page layout, the text box location seem to be automatically determined, but I would like to change the size and location of the boxes to go with the location of my photos.

I want to save my book as a pdf. Help suggests I do so through File> Print, but I have no Print option in the Drop Down Menu. Any suggestions?

Hi, I'm wondering what Blurb's copyright policies are. I know that there's a long legal document to read but I'd like to hear it from real people too as it is somewhat difficult for the general public to interpret legal policies.

Does Blurb keep the copyright to our books? In other words can they reproduce my book and compete with me on the market?

Please let me know!

Hi there, I have just begun the final stage of an Access to Art & Design Access Course and for our self-initiated Final Major Project I have decided I want to create illustrations and create a children's style picture book, combining illustrations with text, you know like the kind you would find in Waterstones.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with doing this using Blurb (or Lulu or any other online self-publishing company that you know of that would be helpful for this style of book) and if it's even possible as I can't find much info on it, or any info for that matter.
Thank you very much for any help.

Ellie :).

Hi
I have a pdf chart of how everyone in my family is related to me. Is there a way (in very simple terms) how I can upload this pdf to the end of all my photos in my blurb smartbook? I can only see how to import photos not pdf. thanks

Thanks for such a useful post. I have been creating a photo book of my own (7x7) and one of the layouts needs to be centered on the page to look right. In your experience, is it better to center the photo/layout based on the "margin/safe art boundary" or should I just center the photo based on the "page size/trim lines" guidelines? I assume that when the book is bound you won't be able to see much of image that is near the binding? Hopefully this question makes sense. I've seen the same question on the Blurb Community Forums but can't find any answers.

Ordered a Blurb book after the recommendations here and was quite happy with the result. BookSmart worked well, and the settings/options suggested by Martin were very helpful. As others have experienced, the pictures were darker than expected in some instances (Michael's comment about subtractive vs additive color is perhaps more applicable than monitor calibration?). But overall, no regrets in going with Blurb.

I have just finished a book using BookSmart, which I now not-so-affectionately abbreviate as "BS." I've made numerous books with BS in the past and really loved it. I do my photo books on Shutterfly as they have many more and better templates, plus complete flexibility in changing them. However, for text-heavy books like my collection of family history stories, I have to use BS because Shutterfly's text options are inflexible. I used to use my iMac desktop, but after the hard drive failed and the replacement drive was upgraded to El Capitan, BS would not work on that computer at all. It kept crashing repeatedly. So I started over on my laptop (which still has Yosemite), importing a back-up version. I continued to have horrible problems with BS. It would insert blank lines, leave out lines, leave out paragraphs, move paragraphs, scoot photos up till heads disappeared. I took to repeatedly saving my work, even though a pop-up window says you don't need to, because it still kept crashing. I nearly threw the computer, BS and all, out the window! I finally THINK I got the book uploaded, despite server problems at Blurb, in the exact form that I wanted--but I'm waiting to get my book to see if BS surprised me with any more idiosyncratic changes of its own. Fortunately, I have the printed preview to show to Blurb if BS messed it up.

When I finally got a very belated response from tech support, they urged me to try BookWright. After reading your reviews and comparisons, I plan to stick with the hated BookSmart. However I learned a few tips I'll pass on:

When using flow-through text boxes, write your book on a Word document EXACTLY as you want it, and copy and paste it, bit by bit, into BS. Do NOT add a story or change anything more significant than a spelling or punctuation error or you will create a formatting nightmare.

It's okay to add photo pages and change them, as they don't affect the text pages. From now on, I will forget trying to use templates that combine photos and text. The text boxes cannot be changed, and they really limit what you can do. From now on, I'll insert several pages of photos together, here and there throughout the book where I want them.

BS's photo layouts are pathetic. You can create your own from scratch, which I did with the first BS book I ever did. However, now I look for a ready-made template that is somewhat like what I want, then edit it from there. In the Edit Page mode, it's easy to add and move both text and photo boxes.

I added numerous family history charts to my book. I printed them out, cropped as necessary in iPhoto (on my non-updated laptop! Love iPhoto--hate Photos!) then scanned them as JPGs. They were easy to use then as full-page photos.

On pages where the text ended halfway and I wanted to add a photo, the flow-through text page apparently gives you the option to add a photo, but in reality it doesn't. The photo will automatically go under the text box in the middle of the page, and there's no way to grab it and move it. The only way to make a page like this is to find a template that has a text box (big enough to hold your text) with a photo or photos below it. Use that template and edit the photo part below, since you can't touch the flow-through text box.

And finally, SAVE, SAVE, SAVE! The pop-up says that BS saves automatically, but after several crashes, I learned that it doesn't. If I had a dollar for every time I had to re-do the same thing, I'd be rolling in dough! What seemed to cause most of the crashes was when I tried to edit text and add or move several paragraphs.

Sorry for the long comment, but I hope these updated tips will help someone. Thank you very much for your excellent reviews!

Hi, I have made and been very happy with several Blurb BookSmart photo books, but recently got a new pc and had to download BookWright and am having difficulty with the new layout, I can't see how to find the spine of the book to enter text, also the first page which was pre written for credits doesn't seem to be there any more. Could you help? Thanks.

Our family's first two books printed by Blurb were fine. I found their software easy to use. However the third book had half the photos printed too dark. I'm a photographer and I'd prepped the photos in Photoshop. I asked for a partial refund or a reprinting, but they refused, claiming the books were within "printing tolerances." I even wrote the CEO but heard nothing back. Now I'm pursuing a remedy with my credit card company. I think part of their problem is that they use various printers around the country, so the results are inconsistent. Still, these books are expensive and I expect quality results. I think Blurb sometimes hopes that uncritical customers will accept sub-standard printing. Blurb can do better in terms of printing quality and guaranteeing customer satisfaction. I am warning the rest of my family and others to avoid using Blurb.

my trade book photos look faded. I fixed them using my computer calibrated with colormunki calibration. should I enhance the photos using the enhance botton on bookwright to get a better result or should I re-edit the photos and make them even more broght and contrasty regardless of the calibrated monitor. Really appreciate your help on this. my first time using blurb was disappointing and would like to print the same book again. by the way I printed it as a trade book using the standard color paper type.. Thanks again for your advice

Martin, Thanks a lot for your advice... I will wait for the swatches and change the trade book to a book with good paper. Thanks again..

I have used Booksmart for a number of projects and been fairly satisfied with the result. Recently I've had a lot of trouble with the program crashing on my newer computer and it's been incredibly frustrating. I have learned how to work with Booksmart well so am not interested in changing to Bookwright. I'm beginning to think that they are not supporting Booksmart as needed since they quickly recommend customers to try Bookwright.

I've created and printed around 16 books through Blurb now and have been happy with all of them. I do use a slightly different workflow though so that I'm not restricted by BookSmarts layout tools. Essentially I create the book (which have been up to 440 pages in size and full of text and photos, including double page image spreads and lots of layout and formatting). I then export this from my desktop publishing software (Pages initially but now InDesign) as a PDF file. From here I convert each page of the PDF to a jpg file and the import these images into BookSmart. I then simply need a single 'full page image' layout for all pages in BookSmart and auto- flow the images into these pages.

Sounds complicated when written down but it's super easy, gives me unlimited page layout options and makes BookSmart easy to use too. It's worked flawlessly every time and means I only really on BookSmart for the final stages of the production.

Al.

Using Book Wright for the first time for a trade book. There is no way to print the spine. My content shows in Preview but not in review during the upload process. Weeks of waiting for email replies from tech support are torturous! Their responses are ignorant and repetitive, as though from a script book. I won’t be wasting any more time with this FRUSTRATING program and unsupportive company.

Hello can you advise which font to use. I am creating a book on someones home. Quite a sophisticated home. Is there a deco style.
thanks Susan

Hi!
I have downloaded some fonts for my first project with Blurb, but I can't find them to add in the pictures, they don't appear in the selection box.
On the other side, no problem using them in Word, Excel, Paint 3D...
Any help/suggestions?
Thanks!

Hi. I was working on a book on bookwright, saved it last night and it saved properly. But this morning when I try to open it, the pages are all blank! I emailed the support team as well but havent heard back yet! If you have any tips to try, I will be very grateful!