Today I got a little bit further along on my quest to have a template that will help me generate paper books and online PDF portfolios/books.

This afternoon, I used to template to crank out a 24 image portfolio. That’s about as big as I’d want to go without giving more thought to structure than it currently has – right now it’s just a test job, with 24 photos from this years SoFoBoMo effort thrown in to see how it worked.

The differences between print and online versions, and between portfolios and books are slowly starting to become more clear as I go through the process of making things and am forced to actually confront actual problems and make concrete choices.

For instance, it seems to me that a portfolio is a much simpler structure – you don’t need quite as much front matter to a portfolio as you do for a book. Some of that structure – bastard title page, frontispiece, and half title page – might make sense only for books, and not so much for a portfolio. I can see a preface or forward for both books and portfolios, I guess.

The paper version/online version differences are growing more clear, too. If you’re generating a PDF for online viewing, you have different resolution needs, and you probably optimize the PDF differently. Those are hidden technical PDFy things. Beyond those, the on the ground experience of viewing a PDF online means that you’ll probably treat things like blank pages and spreads differently in online and print versions. Beyond that there are a host of issues which are basically traditions in the print world which might make no sense in the online world – the practice of having bastard title pages at the front (which was used to make it easy to identify unbound books) is a good example. Another example would be the idea of combining the frontispiece and title page to fill both functions (display an image, provide title, subtitle, author, publisher info) with just one page that also serves as a sort of cover for the portfolio as well. So an online version might have the cover, frontispiece, and title page collapsed into the first page, the second page would be the copyright page (or maybe move that to the end), followed by a preface/foreward/dedication/acknowledgements and then the body and back matter

I’ve also been going through my books on book design again. When I first went through all that study for SoFoboM 2008, I got headaches trying to learn book design. This time around it seems to all be making sense. The challenge is in taking hundreds of years of tradition and figuring out which bits are useful in an online context, and which are not. It isn’t always clear up front what parts the baby and what parts are the bathwater. As a general thing, I’m finding that if I’m not sure, better to leave it in until I figure out why publishers have been putting it in books for hundreds of years. My working presumption is that the people making books in the past were smart clever folk and not clueless idiots.

Today’s goal was to take one of my two SoFoBoMo 2009 books and do the work needed to generate a PDF I could upload to Blurb, to get an actual printed copy using Blurb’s recently announced/introduced PDF to Book service.

Blurb provides InDesign templates that you can download, and I did indeed download them. There’s not really much to the templates (in my current understanding) than the right page size, bleed settings, and margins, along with some simple instructions created on a separate non-printing layer in the template.

I took the path of setting the page size and bleed to match the Blurb template for the book content. I’ve discovered InDesign’s Layout Adjustment controls, which make it much simpler to adjust page size and still have all your photos, text frames, and so on stay aligned horizontally and vertically on the new pages. I was making just small tweaks to the page size, so I didn’t resize the content of the book, just let the page size change adjust the white border on each page.

The Blurb PDF->book service requires you to upload one PDF for the book content, and one PDF for the cover. So one of my first acts was to take the cover out of the ‘content’ pdf version, and create a new ‘cover’ InDesign file. I started the cover from the Blurb provided soft-cover cover template. It took me a bit of puzzling to figure out how to get stuff aligned properly on the cover – my InDesign skills could use some improvement.

But, after a couple of hours of fiddling, I had PDF’s for the cover and content that I was ready to upload to Blurb. I went to the website and used the ‘make a book from your PDF’ process they have there to upload the two files. It worked fine – nice and slick. You upload the files, they run some pre-flight checks, and you can either watch the pre-flight process run, or you can go away. Either way, you get an email telling you the files uploaded ok, and then another email with the results of the preflight check.

First time through, BOTH my files failed the preflight. The feedback they give on why your files failed seemed pretty detailed – mine both failed because the page size was wrong, and the feedback tells you what size your page is in the PDF you uploaded, and what size they expected.

I solved the content problem pretty quickly – somehow I’d managed to mangle the bleed settings when I did my last check before I generated the PDF to upload – I realized you needed the ‘inside’ bleed set to zero, but when I set it to zero, I didn’t ‘unlock’ the settings, so I set the bleed to zero for all edges. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense – if you get to this stage with your own file, and look at the dialog, it will all make sense. Anyway, once I’d found that, I generated a new PDF and figured I’d upload it and see if that fixed the problem.

Here’s the one hitch I found in the otherwise excellent website upload process Blurb has put together – I wanted to upload just the one PDF file and have it pre-flighted again, but to replace one of the two PDF files you need to go through the whole process again, typing in the title, author, specifying the size and paper and cover type, and uploading both files. That’s a bit of a hassle, and it doesn’t seem like it should be too hard for Blurb to fix, so I expect that to change in the future as they get feedback.

My new ‘content’ PDF passed the preflight, but of course I’d just uploaded the same old cover PDF again, so that failed.

The softcover PDF generation is a bit tricky, because the width of the page is dependent on how many pages you have in the book (because that tells you the width of the spine). I spent a disgusting amount of time banging around on the Blurb website before I stumbled upon the ‘book calculator’ that tells you what size the cover should be, but eventually, I found it, calculated the new size, and adjusted my cover in InDesign. Uploaded the new PDF and it still failed the preflight. I still had the width wrong.

This time around, I adjusted the size of the design in InDesign based on what the preflight said it wanted. Again, it turned out I’d somehow screwed up the bleed settings. After adjusting the page width, I had to go and adjust the columns on the cover layout, and then adjust the alignment of the stuff on the cover. Fortunately, I have a really simple cover design and was a bit more clever about centering things this time.

The PDF I got from that go ’round passed the preflight check with flying colors.

I went and ordered a copy. We’ll see how it turns out when the book arrives. I was amazed that 2nd day deliver was some piddling amount (like 30 cents) more than regular delivery, so I paid extra for second day delivery. Now I remember that the last time I ordered from Blurb it was shipped from a spot less than 15 miles away from my home, so perhaps I’ve wasted 30 cents. Oh, well.

UPDATE:

One thing I forgot to mention is that in addition to the InDesign templates for both the content and cover, Blurb provides a really super useful thing – an EXPORT preset file. You fire up InDesign, go to the PDF preset stuff, import this file, and it adds a PDF preset which makes InDesign emit exactly the variety of PDF that Blurb expects. I downloaded this preset file along with the templates, read the instructions, realized I needed to use this preset thingie, and Voila! I had an easy way to generate the PDFs in exactly the right flavor, color, charm, spin, charge, format, PDF variant, sub-variant, options, and religious denomination that Blurb wants and expects.

This preset file is the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, the dog’s bark, and the full nine yards, all rolled into one. I did not spend more than 30 seconds messing about with the PDF export dialog and its many rooms, crevices, buttons, check boxes, drop-downs, etc. and apparently I got the right variety of PDF right out of the gate. Yowza.

The idea for SoFoBoMo was shamelessly stolen from NaNoWriMo. As we work out plans for SoFoBoMo 2010 and beyond, we’re continuing to look to the clever and creative folks at the Office of Letters and Light (the non-profit that was formed for NaNoWriMo).

One interesting thing they’ve done is to have a laptop loaner program, which lends laptops to folks who can’t afford them. I guess the analog for SoFoBoMo would be a camera/laptop loaner program. That’s out of our reach for right now.

They’ve also got spin-off events, like Script Frenzy (“30 days. 100 pages. April. Are you in?”) in which participants write a script or screenplay in one month. That sounds so cool, I might give it a shot next April.

But all that’s got me thinking about what might lie beyond SoFoBoMo. I’m not talking about ending SoFoBoMo, I’m talking about what *else* we might do. We’re a long way from being ready to try to do more than SoFoBoMo. But it’s never to early to ponder, and so that’s what I’ve been doing.

Here are a couple of ideas:

The Brandenburg Challenge

This is inspired by Jim Brandenburg’s amazing book Chased by the Light. You’ve got three months. Create a PDF book containing one image made each day in that period. The catch: you must make EXACTLY one exposure per day. That means that you get up each morning, and during the day, you let the shutter go exactly one time. The image you get is the image that goes in the book. No retakes. No bracketing. No skipping days.

Like SoFoBoMo, this is a challenge that scales according to your expectation. It could be trivially easy. It could be monstrously difficult. It all depends on your expectations of what your book will be like.

The Long Look

One of the things people say when they dismiss SoFoBoMo is that it’s not possible to do a good book in a month.

I don’t agree with that view (just look at how many outstanding books there are), but they do have a point: the one month time limit constrains what you can do. SoFoBoMo is an exercise in focus – it takes focus to make the photos, lay out the book, and get it all done in a month.

So the Long Look is the opposite challenge. It’s not about compressed time frames, deadlines as motivation, or brief but laser intensity.

The challenge: you’ve got ten years. Do a book with photographs made, at least one per month, on a single subject. Examples: one photo per month of ten years of your child’s life. One photo per month, taken from your front door. One photo per month, taken at the same street corner and aiming the camera the same way. One photo per month of everyone in your family all together.

My first blush reaction was “Oh, that’s easy”. My second reaction to this idea was “oh, crikey, that’s hard.”

It’s all about discipline over a decade. It will probably span multiple cameras. If you do it with film, what are you going to do if film goes away during the decade? If you do it digitally, you’re propagating the project across changes in computers, software, cameras. And those are just the technical challenges.

If SoFoBoMo is a sprint, this is running a marathon.

Light blogging, I know. Most of my attention is going to exploring a non-profit corp for SoFoBoMo.

But this was pretty exciting for me… I just got this email, from Clare Selley:

Dear Paul

I just wanted to say thank you for running SoFoBoMo – it got me to put together a book about my city which has now been accepted for commercial publication (with several tweaks, relayouts, text added, etc!)

Without SoFoBoMo I never would have had the inspiration, drive and target to put the book together and now I’m getting paid for it! I’ll be mentioning the challenge – and the website – in the book’s acknowledgements, I hope you don’t mind me quoting the rules!

~Clare.

That’s just incredibly exciting. I mean, a SoFoBoMo book, accepted for commercial publication.

On behalf of everyone who’s ever participated, I’d like to congratulate Clare. Clare, you are awesome. You are awesomely awesome.

I hope all the folks who’ve participated in SoFoBoMo get a thrill out of this. Every single one of you helped make this happen. SoFoBoMo is about getting a book *done*, not about getting it picked up for commercial publication. But when someone who did a book for SoFoBoMo gets it published, I think we all deserve a big helping of feeling thrilled.

And here, by ‘big helping’, I mean “break out the big bowls, pile it up high, maximum sized helping”.

Time for a little update on the future plans for SoFoBoMo.

The small news is that the date for the next SoFoBoMo is set: the fuzzy two month window will be from June 1, 2010 to July 31, 2010. As before, you get to pick any contiguous 31 days period inside that two month window.

The big news is that we’ve now set up a steering group to make the decisions. This was the first step in an effort to build a stable structure for running SoFoBoMo in the future.

Things in the works:

1. Careful consideration of creating a non-profit, 501(c)(3) qualified corporation to hold all the rights to SoFoBoMo, accept contributions, pay costs, and so on. Right now it looks very much like this is a go, and I’m just working out details of the arrangement. The goal here is not to create some monster organization, but to do what we need to do to shield the folks working on SoFoBoMo from legal problems, make it easy for folks to support SoFoBoMo financially, and to provide enough structure to make SoFoBoMo continue in a stable way into the future. If you have experience is starting such a corporation, I’d love to get your thoughts on that, please send me email.

2. The web site will be expanded and many new and wonderful features will be added. Things planned: many resources for people on topics like book design, PDF generation for both Mac and Windows, and probably some stuff containing the accumulated wisdom about how to be successful at getting a SoFoBoMo book done. When we have some of the structural decisions on this done, I expect we’ll be asking people to contribute to that.

3. We’ll be adding a discussion forum, tightly integrated with the main website, that gives people a place to get together, support one another, chat, discuss, moan and weep, etc. Our hope is that this forum will help ease the feeling that this year’s SoFoBoMo was not as convivial as last year’s.

4. We’re making a push to have SoFoBoMo escape from the fetters of its anglophone origins, see this post.

If you go look at the map on the front page of the SoFoBoMo website, and look at where all the participants are, you’ll notice an interesting thing: we had a lot of participation in places where English is spoken, and not much in other places. Naturally, we want to share the goodness of SoFoBoMo with everyone, regardless of what language they speak. So we’re embarking on a program do exactly that.

The brave man heading up this effort is Colin Jago, of auspiciousdragon.net fame.

Colin needs help. Over on his blog, he writes:

One of the great things about photobooks is that they are not constrained by either the language of the photographer or that of the viewer. Most, even accepting that not all, photobooks are about the pictures.

This year there were SoFoBoMo participants from around the world but the vast majority of them were English speakers. As a part of the plans for SoFoBoMo 2010 we would like to find ways of encouraging people who do not speak English to participate. We’ll need to find places to publicise the event and help with translating parts of the site.

In the immediate future we would like to get the following short text translated into as many languages as possible:

Solo Photo Book Month – The worst photo competition in the world.

A lot of photographers have considered making a book, but various concerns have stopped them. Heck, the same concerns stopped us. We worried that our photos weren’t good enough. We worried that we didn’t have enough photos. We worried that we couldn’t write the text, or couldn’t present a nice layout, or that we didn’t have the time to do a good job.

SoFoBoMo gives us (and you) a way around those fears. There’s no requirement that the photos be good (but we suspect you’ll be surprised by how good yours are). There’s no requirement to have any text at all (but that doesn’t mean you can’t write pages of flowing prose). And there is no requirement on quality of layout. There are just three constraints: all the work must be done in one continuous 31 day period that falls completely inside the two month window, the book must contain at least 35 photos, and you have to generate a PDF of the book. That’s it.

SoFoBoMo started in English. People joined in from all over the world. We’d like to see more people join in from more countries and in more languages because photos speak for themselves. If you would like more information please visit www.sofobomo.org If you could translate any of the information pages then we’d be delighted if you would help. Please contact lingo-at-sofobomo.org

It is free to participate. There are very few rules and absolutely no prizes. It is a lot of fun. You’ve nothing to lose.

If you can help translate this into any language I’d be grateful if you would contact me. Either leave a comment here (which I won’t publish – I’ll email you) or use the email address in the text above.

If you can help, please, follow this link and go leave a comment on Colin’s blog post, or use the email embedded in the quoted text.

Now that my SoFoBoMo books have been done for a while, I’ve had a chance to step back and do a bit of thinking about how my own SoFoBoMo experience went this year. I expected a repeat of last year’s experience, but fortunately that’s not what I got.

I went into the fuzzy month window clueless about what I wanted to photograph, but mostly unconcerned. Last year I had detailed plans, all of which went out the window when I picked up the camera and began. That’s the way it is for me – if I have plans, I end up throwing them out more or less straight away. So this time, I planned to have no plan, if you get my drift.

And sure enough, I ended up thoroughly wrapped up in the project I started on without even being sure I wanted it to be my SoFoBoMo thing this year. So wrapped up in it, in fact, that it was clear to me more or less from the outset that the project would continue on well past the end of SoFoBoMo. That change of plans put SoFoBoMo in a different light. I was suddenly confronted with the question “How do I crank out a book from a project which is just barely under way?”, which is a very different proposition from “How do I do a project which I can finish and turn into a book in 31 days?”

In the end, I decided to try to use SoFoBoMo as a springboard – a way to get some momentum to carry the project forward. My plan to was to make a lot of photos – as many as I could in the time allowed, and then to do a rough edit, picking out some interesting ideas, and then very quickly and without a lot of existential anxiety, sort of slam them into a book, upload the result, and then quickly move on. I wanted to use the goal of getting a book done to be a goad to get started on the photography, to use the book as a way to pick out some of the interesting ideas I’d come across, and perhaps write some text that did the same thing – just sketch around the ideas for the more long term project.

In the end, the first two photo sessions netted me enough photos that I could, with some ease, go over the 35 photo minimum. I continued on, though, making a lot more photos. In the end, I had so many photos that I just cut the book in half, called the first part “Part I”, the second part “Part II”, and did two books. I could have done one higher quality book, but remember that I wasn’t aiming for quality – I was aiming for momentum and insight. To make matters more confused, at that point I was only vaguely articulating this momentum not quality concept to myself. I’m convinced that this was the right move for me. To be sure, I’ve seen some really high quality books in the pool of completed books this year – but part of the charm of SoFoBoMo is that each of us comes to the process with different goals, and each of us thus gets to optimize the experience to suit who we are and our needs of the moment. That this makes it hard to compare SoFoBoMo books is, I think, a very positive thing – everyone understands that if you compare two books, you are comparing an apple with a duck.

In any case, this decision of mine has netted me some interesting feedback, all of it useful and all of it deeply appreciated. One sort of feedback has been observing that there are some lovely images in there, and the ‘quality’ of the images is high, which might mean a lot of different things.

Another sort of feedback, equally useful, has been that the books don’t seem to have a concrete narrative, don’t seem to be very cohesive, and are not very tightly edited, with some ideas unexplored and others sort of hammered to death. And all that’s true, too. The image sets are NOT particularly cohesive, because while I was whacking out the books, trying not to let the effort needed stall the project, I had not yet (and still have not yet) entirely sorted out what the entire project is about. It’s just begun, and I expect that over the next few months I will have a few of those moments where I’ll sit up sharply in my chair before the monitor, and think “Oh! OHHH! I think I have figured out something important!” And when that happens, the direction of the whole enterprise will shift in some subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) ways. Worse, I fully expect that this will happen repeatedly, to the point where I’ll look at those first photos and think “Oh, damn. What could I have been thinking when I made these?” Actually, that’s already happened.

That leaves me with a list of issues to explore as I take the project forward: narrative, repetition, breadth of coverage versus narrow more focused view.

Onward.

So, it turns out that there’s PDF, and then there’s PDF, and to do the blurb PDF->blurb book thing, you need to take your book and crank out not just any old PDF, but specifically a PDF/X-3. (side note: if someone told me that a PDF/X-3 was in fact an experimental aircraft, I would believe them).

Now, InDesign will happily crank out PDF/X-3 format. Or at least, when I go to the ‘export’ panel on my mac, that’s one of the options I can pick. Of course, if you’re going to use InDesign, you have to pay the Adobe tax, both the fiscal one and the sort that raises your blood pressure every time you’re forced to contact Adobe Support. Anyone know anything about third party PDF software for Mac and Windows? Could you get by with just Adobe Acrobat and your handy-dandy word processor?

Far and away, most of the email I got about SoFoBoMo this year had to do with PDF’s. PDF’s that were too large. Trouble cranking out PDF’s. PDF’s from Windows. PDF’s from Macs.

What the world needs is a good summary of the options for cranking out PDF files for all platforms, but especially Mac and Windows, and especially ESPECIALLY Windows.

Any volunteers to lead such an effort?

Quite a few folks have written thanking me for the whole SoFoBoMo thing. I appreciate the thanks!

I’m happy so many folks have found SoFoBoMo to be worthwhile.

And that brings me ’round to the points behind this post.

First, let me bring to your attention two folks who have done yeoman’s service: Bernie Sumption, who did the website work, and Gordon McGregor, who with Bernie set up the blog aggregator and who has been SoFoBoMo’s foremost cheerleader. Thank you, both of you.

Second, while I appreciate the thanks, the thanks should really go to the nearly 900 people who participated this year. Each and every one of you contributed to the effort. Whether you registered early or toward the end, whether you finished a book or not, whether you blogged about your experience regularly or not at all, whether you were one of the ones helping people solve their problems or one of the ones being helped, your participation helped make SoFoBoMo 2009 a smashing success. Without the folks who participated, there would have been no SoFoBoMo. Thank you, each and every one of you.

And finally, I just spent some time browsing the page of completed books. It is, by any measure, extraordinary. Books done with sophisticated wunder-cameras. Books done with cell phone cameras. Subjects ranging from architecture and landscape through mother’s wisdom and on to quotidian scenes. Books done at every skill level, using bookmaking tools ranging from the simplest possible to professional level. Books that follow traditional book design principles, and books that test the limits of what photo books can be. Even my wildest dreams of what it might be like when I first floated the idea of SoFoBoMo pale when compared to the reality of this years 200+ books.

So – to all of you who participated – thank you, thank you, thank you. I am, like Miranda, astounded:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

In about 11 hours, the SoFoBoMo 2009 two month window closes here on the west coast of North America.

When the window closes, registration will close. There will be a week or so after the close to give folks a chance to work out any uploading quirks and get their PDF files uploaded, and then we’ll shut the upload off as well.

Right now there are 879 people registered. Rather to my surprise, there’s been a big rush of registrations in the last ten days – I don’t know if those were serious registrations or people joking, or people who are confused about when the whole thing wraps up.

Also, right now there are 188 books completed and uploaded. I know there are a few books which have been completed but which aren’t uploaded for various reasons. That’s ok – you don’t have to upload your book, although it’s more fun if you do. And if there are folks out there who don’t want to share, or don’t want to share the whole book (for whatever reason), you might consider uploading a ‘placeholder’ PDF, which will let us know that you finished but don’t want to share your book. I guess next year we’ll have some check box to indicate that you’ve finished but don’t want to upload, but for now even just a single page PDF would serve the same purpose.

I expect that we’ll see a rush of uploads in the next few days as the surge of last minute finishers manage to upload.

Yes, there will be another SoFoBoMo. And, of course, there will be some improvements. If you have suggestions, feel free to leave comments on this post or send me email.

One interesting observation: last year we had 170 participants and 60 finished books. This year we’ve got more than 5 times the participants and more than 3 times as many books finished. I wonder what things will be like next year.