By David Gewirtz
Right after I started my first publishing company, the very first book I ever published was both an exercise in risk and in faith. Back then, to publish a book, you had to be prepared to pony up something on the order of $20,000 to print 5,000 copies. Most of my savings and a lot of credit card debt financed that first book.
This was in the days before the big book superstores and way before Amazon. If you wanted your book distributed, you had to do a deal to get it into B. Dalton and Waldenbooks (remember them?). And to be able to do so, you'd have to have enough inventory so each store across the country could stock a few copies.
Of course, if the books didn't sell, they'd rip the front covers from them and return the remaining husks back to you, destroyed specifically to make sure you couldn't resell them. It wasn't a fun business. Due to both pretty good management and fabulous timing, I sold out my first print run, but I found the stress of taking such a large risk on printing to be very unpleasant.
Today, the entire world has changed. First, you don't have to distribute through 2,000 stores to sell your products. You can completely disintermediate the process and sell directly to your own customers through the Internet. And, the printing world has changed radically. You can now print books, calendars, and more "on-demand", one-at-a-time to satisfy each individual order.
We decided to illustrate the use of print-on-demand technology by demonstrating the creation of our first Connected Photographer calendar, shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
Here's the 2007 David Gewirtz Connected Photographer calendar. (click for larger image)
In addition to the printing on-demand process, we'll show you how you can offload the fulfillment process (taking, packing, and shipping orders). To accomplish this, we used CafePress, a service that specializes in on-demand production.
In this article and the next few, we'll take you through the process of selecting the images, setting up the online store, and creating the calendar. The final product is spectacular in terms of both production value (paper, printing, image quality) and, if I say so myself, the images inside. In fact (shameless plug), you can go ahead and order your own at http://www.cafepress.com/zatz.86008744.
Planning the calendar
A year calendar can consist of either 12 or 13 images. If you choose to have a different cover image than the rest of the images in the calendar, you'll need 13 images. If you intend to reuse one of the months as the cover, you'll need 12. We decided to go with 13.
It's important to select images that are of high enough quality and have enough bits to represent a quality image when printed. For the calendar we created, CafePress recommends creating an 11.5" x 9" image at 200dpi.
If you do the math, 11.5 times 200 is 2,300 and 9 times 200 is 1,800, so each of your images will need to be at least 2,300 pixels by 1,800 pixels to print properly. Since 2,300 times 1,800 equals 4.14 million, just about any camera that's at least 4 megapixels should be able to create suitable images.
There's one other consideration. All 13 images need to be landscape (wider than tall). This makes sense since they've all got to fit into the space provided by a calendar's page.
Using Photoshop Elements Organizer to choose the images
Selecting the images is harder than you think, especially if you've got a huge library of images to choose from. Remember, of course, to use your own pictures. Don't go downloading someone else's images and stick them in your calendar!
Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 comes with a wonderful image organizer that made the process of image selection and ordering go quite smoothly. The first thing I did, as shown in Figure B, was to create a new tag.
FIGURE B
I created a new tag in my Projects category. (click for larger image)
There are two primary ways to organize items in Elements: tags and collections. This project used both. Tags are personalized keywords that you attach to photos. They allow you to easily organize and find them later.
Previously, I'd imported most of my photos into the Elements organizer, so now all (all, hah!) I had to do was sort through the pictures and pick the 13 I wanted to use this year. I have thousands of pictures in Organizer, so it took quite a while to choose the pictures I wanted. Fortunately, I'd previously tagged most of my pictures, so I was able to easily reduce my search to my art photos only.
To tag an individual picture, you simply drag the tag onto the picture's thumbnail, as I did in Figure C.
FIGURE C
This truck is about to become October. (click for larger image)
I initially did a rough selection first, tagging about 50 candidate images. Denise and I then narrowed the selection down to about 17, and then, finally, to the 13 finalists that were destined for the calendar.
Using collections to order the images
Collections are like digital photo albums, where you can store and organize photos. The key feature of collections I needed was its ability to order the images, as shown in Figure D.
FIGURE D
Here are the images that'll be in the calendar. (click for larger image)
As you can see, I ordered the images from 1 to 13. Image 1 was to be January's picture, image 2 was to be February, and so on. Image 13 became the cover.
And that's where we'll leave it for this week. Next week, we'll format the images for production.