MacMost Now 189: Print and Sell Books with Blurb

In this MacWorld Expo special, learn about Blurb.com and how you can write, design and print your own books and sell them online.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: 1: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's Macworld Expo special. Let's go and take a look at a way to print your own books. So I came across a very interesting service at MacWorld expo and it's called BLURB and it allows you to go ahead and layout an entire book whether it's a bunch of photographs or a bunch of text and send it in and then have it printed and also sell it at their website. I talked to Jeremy from BLURB.com about it. 
2: My name is Jeremy. I work at BLURB.com. I'm here with Gary at MacWorld. and we're here at the BLURB booth discussing how you can make your own book and have it delivered to your door a week after you order it. This is an example of our 5 x 8 kind of real book novel size. We go up to the 13 x 11 kind of portfolio wedding book size book, printed just for you, quantity one, printed on demand. Basically you download our free software from BLURB.com. You layout your text and photos in our software. Upload the book and prices start at like $4.95 for your own you can be a paperback writer as the Beatles say -- for about $4.95 for a single copy of your book which is pretty crazy. Hardcover is about 10 dollars more you can also sell your book through BLURB.com and mark up the price so if you got a bunch of friends and family and you made a Thanksgiving book for instance you don't have to get 12 copies and send it to every aunt and uncle you can leave it on BLURB.com available for them to buy and you can even gouge your relatives and mark up the price by like $5 and they'll never know and you can keep the profit. So there are -- you don't have to be an advanced designer the program has many templates for text and photos. I guess someone close to the Obama campaign made this book as you can see plenty of text and photo combination layouts really whatever you want it to look like. The software is what you see is what you get wysiwyg so it'll -- what you get back will look exactly like what you designed and books can be up to 440 pages long. Hardcover, softcover. People will bring these to pitch a book, you know, "I have a comic book I want to pitch, here you go" or people will demo a proposal at work "I want a raise because" and they'd bring in their book. There is an architect, the book is over there, it's a very nice book with all of her pre-built architectural designs. It's almost like a catalog. Jewelers use it as a catalog. Really whatever you want it to be. It's a pretty versatile concept. 
1: The thing I really like about BLURB is that you go ahead and create your own book and then sell it at their website and the prices are actually pretty reasonable. In the past I've seen solutions like this but the price just for printing is so much that you have to charge a ton for your book to make any money off of it. But not so with BLURB. You can find out more at BLURB.com.
Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 189: Print and Sell Books with Blurb

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