A Blurb About Blurb.com

I shot Detroit BBQ Company at the 2015 Pig & Whiskey Festival in Ferndale, Michigan earlier this year. The goal of that shoot was to create my first coffee table book.

I already had an idea of how I wanted to book to be put together, I just didn’t know what I was going to use to actually make it. I did a Google search for “create your own coffee table book”, and blurb.com ended up coming out on top after comparing my options.

Blurb.com offers a web-based “editor” for the creation of photo books, as well as a couple different stand alone desktop publishing applications. BookWright is their newest one, which is the one I ended up using to create my book. I won’t get into the nitty gritty, but overall, the interface is very easy to use once you go over everything and figure out what everything does.

I decided to make my book a landscape 10 inch X 8 inch softcover on standard paper. Finding the specifications for the creation of a Photoshop template was probably the hardest part of the whole project. After combing the entire blurb.com site numerous times, I was finally able to find a specifications page.

With the Photoshop templates created, I was able to start creating each page in Photoshop, which I would then upload to BookWright and use to actually make each page of the book.

Once the book was completed in the BookWright application, you go through the upload process which uploads the book you created to blurb.com. You then go through the add to cart and checkout process and your book is ordered. It was actually quite simple, which kind of worried me in regards to the quality of the final product that I would be receiving. It was either going to be really good or really bad.

10 days after ordering, it arrived. To my surprise, it was right up there with a book you would see for sale on the shelf at Barnes & Noble.

21 photos were selected out of the 927 that I took to make the 26 page coffee table book.

Turned out good if you ask me.

I gave Tim from Detroit BBQ Company the one and only copy that has been made (so far) as a gift earlier today. His reaction was exactly what I was hoping for too!