Vanity Publishing to Nurture a Needy Ego

The logs and photos from Galena's two winters in the islands have been collected and published in book form. Using the services of LuLu.com, I have created two full-color, 8 x 10, hardcover books of about 120 pages each. These books contain all of the text and even more photos from the logs as displayed on this site.

I've made a combined volumn containing both trips plus our maiden voyage taken in April of 03 as we brought Galena home from Florida. It is available as Galena's First Voyages at $57.80 and has over 270 pages of pictures and text.

Since we'll be heading down to the Bahamas again in November, I expect to have another book available about this time next year.

This book publishing idea started with my very good friend, Capt Ron. He showed me a photo book he had built by some on-line company. He has been collecting pictures of his cruising life for years. Over the years Ron has filled several photo albums with memories of days afloat (Capt Ron is old world; I don't think he even owns a digital camera). He took his favorite pictures and scanned them and sent the images to a company that printed and bound them into a book.

I was impressed with that book and I thought doing my own would be a kick. After all, I have the logs and pictures from Galena's two winters in the islands (04-05 in the Bahamas and 05-06 to the British Virgin Islands) as displayed on this site. And I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of a story and said, "There's a picture of <fill in a subject> on my web page." So I decided to have them printed and bound into books. That way I could bore people right there onboard Galena with a quick flip of a page.

I couldn't remember the name of the company that Ron had used so I did some internet searching and came up with LuLu.com. For the low, low price of only $17 plus $0.15/page they will print and bind an 8 x 10 color hardcover book for you. All you have to do is submit the file to them.

LuLu requires that you submit a pdf file. They will convert files from most word processor files to a .pdf for you. But I have a utility that will do that for my MS Word files. I wanted to be able to review the file before saying OK to the project.

So I took all the html files that make up my log for the first trip and loaded them into MS Word. I had to manually insert all the referenced files. Then I created the pdf file that LuLu wanted. I sent that up, select a cover photo, and ordered a couple copies: one for the house and one for the boat.

Unfortunately, that's about the time I decided to read the instructions. One of the first instructions says to order a single copy to proof read before making your book public.

After reading the instructions I realized that I had failed to follow the rules for a well made book. The most important of which was that I had not had anyone proof read the document. There were a lot of errors in the text. And the pictures were not well placed. Some of the pictures were off the edge of the page, some were off-center.

Perhaps most importantly I had used the images from the web site. Those images were only 72 dpi because that's all you need for a computer screen and the smaller file sizes load much faster. LuLu recommends a minimum of 300 dpi for quality photographs. I had most of the photos stored in that kind of resolution on the CDs that held the actual camera files from the trip.

When the books arrived 10-days later I saw that the pictures were not of high quality. But still, having that book in hand was very cool. Now, when I'm talking to someone about the grand adventures we've had on Galena and I come to a point in the story where a picture would help make the point, I can just flip open the book and show them.

As I put together the files and images for the second trip I followed the rules much more closely. In that book I replaced all the web-quality image files with files that were at least 1MB in size. I put all the chapter heading pages on the right-side of the book. I used better title sheets. But even after proofreading the file I found when the books arrived that I had missed a few things. There were still misspelled words and fragmented sentences. There were even problems with some of the facts as stated in the text.

Still, the second trip book was much better than the first. The pictures were noticeably sharper. The stories flowed better. The picture placement was better considered. I've rebuilt the first book with my new knowledge of the rules and good publishing practices. I've rebuilt both books with tables of contents and better pagination. The first book is now much better than it was.

Anyone out there with the urge to get published should check this out. Honestly, holding your own book in your hand is a trip.