I’m tired of the bourgeois obligatory Christmas time gift-giving in my family, so this year rather than the usual bathrobes and “I know you like books on your shelf and this one weighs four pounds” gifts I usually give my siblings I’m wanting to publish a book. I’ve researched the family history a good bit over the past year, collected umpteen photographs of Confederate ancestors and their pissed off looking sepia wives and Census docs and land records and family photos, etc., and I’m writing the text. I want it to look as much like a coffee table quality book as possible- not your standard cheesy coil-bound self published genealogical book but one with glossy pages and different sized fonts and anecdotes in aside boxes and so forth. The plan is to have selected photocopies of the more interesting documents with the full copy available in an accompanying web-site (e.g. rather than the entire listing of an ancestor’s Civil War medical report just his discharge paper with physical description, then the 16 page full document online). I’d like to have an 11 x 17 ancestry chart in the middle for quick reference showing just direct ancestors, then in the text there will be more detailed charts of each individual branch of the family showing siblings and 2nd husbands/1st wives and what not.
So, is this something I can do myself or will I need to farm it out? (I’m decent with PhotoShop and various desktop publishing softwares- not a skilled pro but certainly way better than a novice.) Has anybody ever done anything like this (creating a good looking privately published book, I mean)? If so, what publisher or what vendor did you use? Do Kinkos or other such places do things like this and if so how much should I expect to pay? Anybody ever used an online publishing service?
I’ve never seen anything done by Kinko’s that looked anything other than meh. You might be better off doing it with a private press as a vanity run. I don’t think you could get it done by Christmas of this year, though. If you’d like, I can ask a friend of mine who knows a bit about vanity press companies for some names.
If you are going to be including any of your stories, please sign me up for a copy.
Nah, just strictly “How Grandpa Harry met Grandma/Aunt Sally” type of stuff. I’m including a few gossipy things might be of interest outside the family (“How Great-Grandma Paralee’s One Legged Uncle Frank Avenged the Rape of his Biracial Daughter”, “Our Mother’s Match With Mars Bennett”) but mostly it’s begatting and pics of dead people.
I’d suggest you check out http://www.lulu.com first. They do photo books as well as others, so you might be able to get a few copies at a reasonable price: 20 9x7 pages in hardcover for $24.95, plus 50 cents for each additional page.
I’m just going to 2nd Lulu. I wanted to get a book printed simply for myself–it was literally just a book of some poems and essays i wrote in college that I wanted to keep collected in one place. I couldn’t have been more pleased with the quality/cost of lulu.
Last year I used Blurb.com and was thrilled with the results. It sounds similar to lulu in quality and price range. The size of the books were not “coffee table” but the paper and bindings were of good quality. The software was also easy to manage.
Good on you for creating a lasting gift with great meaning to the history of your family.
There’s a company called Fastbind that produces a machine that can make a few coffee table sized books at a fairly reasonable price. I don’t recall if Lulu can do anything other than their standard sizes. This is a perfect bound book (so is Lulu’s ), which means the edges of the sheets are glued in. This is usually a very good adhesive.
There’s another product that’s associated with Xerox, and I’m drawing a blank on the name right now. It is a book that is stitched and glued with a floating spine. Stitched will give you a superior quality, and a floating spine is very nice - this means the pages aren’t stuck to a rigid spine, so the book will lay flat and gives a nicer quality.
What is the price range you had in mind and where are you located? I can probably recommend someone in Atlanta, but don’t know a shop in Birmingham. The cost of these things is largely driven by the quality you expect out. It really shouldn’t take very long to make them, and the equipment is available to do short run.