As commercial book publishing crashes, personal book publishing is booming. Personal book making entails printing high-quality books in very small quantities, including quantities of one. New technologies permit anyone to print one copy of a softcover or hardcover book, including all-color photo books. These printed-on-demand books are indistinguishable from commercially printed books. In fact, some of the books you buy on Amazon are manufactured with this same technology. You just can’t tell the difference.

However, being able to print as few as one copy — instead of a minimum of a thousand — shifts the economics of bookmaking toward individuals with more passion than money. For the past two years I’ve been producing high-quality books in very small quantities using several different services. I’ve shown these finished books around to many people, including those in the New York publishing industry and media, and everyone has agreed the quality is first class. Several of the photo books I’ve made look like coffee-table artworks, and cost about the same, yet I can produce them one by one on demand. I’ve also made text only books which appear to be store-bought trade paperbacks or hardcover books from the bookstore.

Having tried most of the services available and created dozens of books, I’m ready to recommend the best services to use. My advice is slightly complicated, because the success of book making and book publishing pivots around your aims.

To turn a text manuscript into a regular book, either softcover or hard, I recommend Lulu. Their website has a very thorough step-by-step process which will enable you to make a book with the least amount of money. A 100-page trade softcover book in black and white will cost about $7 to print. Lulu will walk you through the edit, design, and production sequence. They offer templates you can follow. Once in digital form, you can easily order one book or many. Lulu will also offer help in getting your book out into the world, but it can’t really help you market or sell it. That will be your job as a self-publisher. If you are a more sophisticated book maker with your own design skills you can send Lulu a PDF file of your designed book, and simply have them print it, at the same prices. This is the way I use them. Finally, Lulu can also print full color books, including smaller full-color paperbacks. (These could run $20-30 a piece for 150 pages) The overall process of getting a book printed is smooth and fairly hassle free.

My recommendation for the best personal color book printer is Blurb. Blurb produces color books very similar to the iPhoto books you can order from Apple. Using iPhoto Books is slightly easier than using Blurb’s software, particularly if all your photos happen to already be in iPhoto, but it works well enough. The idea is that you can drag images (photos or illustrations) into template book pages, add text or captions where you want to, then hit a button and have the finished book mailed to you. (all these systems work with PCs and Macs)

A few of the books I’ve made in copies of one.

The results from both Apple and Blurb are marvelous. In fact, these books are astounding. That’s because they both use the same back-room engine, the HP Indigo 5000 (as do the other color book makers like Snapfish and MyPublisher). The Indigio is essentially a high-speed, high-quality liquid-toner printer that will print your photo book several pages across. (Lulu on the other hand uses a dry toner process called iGen3 from Xerox) The final result of a Indigo-printed page is a very richly colored, very finely detailed image. It looks like a page from a color magazine. The color-match is pretty close to the image you see on your monitor, with this exception: I’ve notice that printing on paper is far less forgiving of blurred or out of focus images. The human eye notices less-than-perfect sharpness on the page more than on the screen, so you have to be far more ruthless in your editing when making a book.

While Apple and Blurb both produce lovely printed books with well-crafted covers (in quantities of one), Blurb does it for a lot less money. A 100-page book of photographs will cost $100 with Apple iPhoto Books, but only $39 with Blurb. They are currently printed on the same machines. Blurb also offers more options for working directly from PDFs. Recently they announced an easy way to make a printed book version of your blog (or any part of your blog) which I have not tried yet, but will soon. Apple actually subcontracts their bookmaking to MyPublisher, so this is not their focus. Blurb, however, besides having the best prices, is the most dedicated to servicing the widening long-tail of personal book making.

For instance Blurb has noticed that while most people start out by ordering one copy of a personal book, they quickly come back for more. Ordering 50 or more copies is not uncommon. Furthermore, once people discover how easy it is to make a book, they make a lot of them. Maybe several a year. A book has an authority and weight that is not easily dismissed in this digital world. For instance, some people have discovered that by mailing out very nice books out of their reports, business plans, or even Powerpoint presentations they got more attention and calls back because “people won’t throw a book out!”

I’ve also played around with different sized books. MyPublisher offers a truly coffee-table size photobook ($60) that is very impressive. I filled it with snapshots from a trip to Italy we made one year. At the other end of scale, I’ve made a number of itsy-bitsy books the size of a deck of cards with Apple iPhoto and MyPublisher books. I was first handed one of these diminutive works by a photographer who was using this cute booklet as her portfolio. Cool. I’ve made little ones this size devoted to curious themes just to hand out.

There are tons of reasons why people make personal books. Artists can use a clean trim hardcover book as their portable gallery. Cookbooks take on a higher class production when you can add photos of your dishes. I even saw one Blurb-produced book that was a reproduction of a relative’s old typewritten manuscript of poetry. It had a lot of soul. Several friends who were scrapbook enthusiasts decided to switch to classy photobooks (everything is scanned first) when they saw the tidy fit-and-finish of the Blurb books. Photobooks are hot mementos for reunions. We now make a photobook from all our vacations. I attended one hi-tech conference recently at which everyone got an instant Indigo-produced color book summarizing the conference, pictures and all. At some of the foundations I am involved in, we’ve used hard cover color books of a fun meeting or trip as perfect gifts for potential funders. And nowadays Blurb books are inexpensive enough that some high school kids are making their own full-color alternative anti-yearbooks.

Most information in the world today is digital and has no need to ever leave the screen. But the more personal your expression is, and the more personal the audience, the greater the impact you get by making the information tangible. For making text in black and white, use Lulu. For making color pages, use Blurb. Lulu has great online tutorials, and Blurb has released a meta-book, a book which tells you how to make a book. It’s quite well done, with solid advice useful no matter where you get it printed. While you can purchase a Blurb-made hard copy of this book, they also wisely offer a free downloadable PDF version.

A working reverse dictionary is one of the most useful sites out there. We’ve all had those moments when we know there’s a word for some concept, but we don’t know what it is. We need something more than a thesaurus, because we don’t know an equivalent word. Onelook.com‘s reverse dictionary helps. You can even enter wildcards, if you know what part of the word looks like.

I’m not a professional writer, but I write for fun. This tool is indispensable.

Based on comics master Scott McCloud’s recommendation (below), I bought a Cintiq. It does something I’ve always wanted to do since I first saw a computer. This thing is a pen-based tablet that doubles as a monitor. In other words you draw directly on the tablet, just like a paper-based drawing, but digitally. In fact the surface of the Cintq monitor/tablet feels like paper under a pen. Synchrony of image with your movements is almost exact, and the micro difference doesn’t seem to matter. The result is weirdly like ink, or paint, but with all the control and magic of Photoshop. Of course, as a monitor, it will display whatever’s on your computer, whether it’s animation software or a spreadsheet. (You could hook it up to a $500 Mac Mini and have a fabulous digital art studio.) It’s slowly being adopted by film animators and other high-end graphic professionals. A Cintq is expensive ($2,500), big, thick and bulky (it is too fat to sit on your lap like other tablets, but it can lay flat on a desk), but if you are producing digital images for a living, it speeds up your productivity and eases your hurt. It’s fun to use.

– KK

Drawing directly on the screen with the Cintiq Tablet made a huge difference in my artwork, and sped up my workflow by at least 30%, maybe more. It also saved me a lot of hand-strain. Apart from the Mac, it’s one of my all-time favorite digital tools.

In 2003-2004, I lost about a year of work to hand strain, using a regular tablet, mouse and keyboard. I’d work for a couple of hours each day on my comics and get these shooting pains up my arm and have trouble holding the pen steady. I got a good deal on a Cintiq (a slightly smaller model than today’s 21″ monster, but equally suited to graphics) at the end of ’04 a couple of months before I had to begin finished pages on the new book. After finishing all 225 pages by early 2006 using a Cintq, I’d had no hand strain at all; even working 11 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Most importantly, I actually *liked* the way the art looked. I was never that comfortable with pen and ink tools, and liked all the digital options I started getting in the mid-90′s, but my work on the old tablet was always wobbly and lame. Now there’s much more control, confidence and warmth to the drawings.

I was an idiot not to buy a Cintiq in ’99 when I first saw them on display at a New York show. I figured I couldn’t afford it, but I wound up losing a lot more time and money by NOT having one.

– Scott McCloud

Electronic documents are a great tool but there are times when you just need printed copies.

FinePrint installs itself as a printer in your Windows system and will intercept print jobs and put up to 8 pages of output on 1 sheet of paper, though this is often unreadable (at least for me – I didn’t pay for the Steve Austin upgrade when I had laser vision surgery).

I find that 2-4 pages per sheet and printing in duplex saves on paper, reduces printing time, saves on toner and makes documents more portable. It’s great for web pages without printing views that use those narrow columns. You can also edit the jobs and remove / reorder jobs and pages.

MS Office and some other applications have a version of this capability now but none are as robust as FinePrint’s. I have been using it since 2000 and have been very happy with the product.

Leave it to the Japanese to create a brush pen. This pocketable pen has a super fine brush tip of actual bristles, perfect for tiny Kanji characters, or of course, doodling in your journal, or sketching in your Moleskine. While it’s hugely popular with comic book folks and cartoonists, artists of all stripes have picked one up for their paper work. The feel is incredibly tactile and lovely. It works like a fountain pen, with replaceable rich ink cartridges. Once capped it doesn’t leak as far as I can tell. (There’s a moment of panic when you first assemble it since the instructions are 100% in Japanese, but just insert the ball-bearing end of the ink capsule into the tip.) You can purchase other color inks as well.

Switch off thousands of TVs using just one small remote! When you want some peace and quiet in that local bar of restaurant or office all you need to do is hit the TV-B-Gone button. I’ve used it in bars and clubs, and in the headquarters building of a large South African bank which had too many TV’s on the walls and some of which needed to switched off. It really does work.

[When you press the button, TV-B-Gone takes slightly more than a minute to emit more than 200 popular shutdown codes, like trying every possible combination to open a safe. The instructions include a diatribe against television in general, as if using this product is not merely a prank, but a serious political act. -- CP]

I’ve been keeping journals of all kinds for more than a decade now. Travel journals, self-improvement journals, business journals, and daily journals that now form a foot-tall stack under the desk and a box of notebooks on the shelf. Yet none provide that comparative, year-to-year window into the days of life, or answer the question “How am I doing this year versus last year, or the year before that again?”

That’s where “The 5 Year Journal” comes in. It’s a hardbound, 266-page journal organized so that – as the title says – you can keep 5 years of brief entries in a single book. There are two days on each page, with five years of three-line entries for each day. Now three lines doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s enough to capture the essence of the day. And there’s no reason you can’t keep other journals in parallel for lengthier meditations.

It’s a well thought-out book as well. There are logically placed sections for monthly goal planning, and for monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews. Some of the Quarterly Questions might seem a bit whimsical (“My Favorite… Chuckle… Patience Builder… Tv Show”), but on the whole the author/designer Doreene Clement has exercised admirable self-restraint and thoughtfulness in putting the book together.

I’m looking forward to 2007 to see how things turned out this year.

This is the best thesaurus there is. It supplies more synonyms, analogs, parallels, equivalents and comparable words in English than any other source, online or off. No other thesaurus comes near to it for completeness or breadth. Compiled in dictionary form, like the one in your word processors, there’s no index or cross-referencing. Just look up a word, any word, and it proceeds to overwhelm you with alternative choices (a total of 1.5 million synonyms are presented in 1,361 pages), including short phrases and only mildly related words. Rather than being a problem of imprecision, the Finder’s broad inclusiveness prods your imagination and prompts your recall.

Its single downside, however, is a major frustration: it is not available digitally, in a form compatible to the way most people write these days. It should live on your computer in a pull-down option, or plug-in for Word or the like. I’m totally baffled why it is not. As it is, it’s a huge fat book — a great book! — sitting within arms’ reach when I write, but not near enough for the power that it offers.

A great PowerPoint presentation is a story well-told. A bad PowerPoint is a mind-deadener. Thousands of businesspeople are snoozing away at this moment as slide after slide of fancy-transitioned words, words, and more bulleted words evaporate a
fortune in productivity. Don’t get me started on how badly made PowerPoint presentations are blunting the sharpest minds of today’s college students. Google “Gettysburg Address”+”PowerPoint” to see for yourself.

It doesn’t have to be that way! Beyond Bullet Points shows you how to achieve excellence in presentations. I just looked at my bookshelf and noticed that my third copy of Beyond Bullet Points is missing, having been pressed into the hands of some startled friend, executive, teacher, activist, who was only trying to get out the door of my office.

Here’s what it teaches in a nutshell: The medium of PowerPoint is one of visual storytelling. An excellent presentation is an excellent story. So, the structure of the story is first. Then a storyboard is needed. A storyboard is a series of sketches, or notes, about what you will talk about. These are not bullet points that the audience are meant to read, but visual reminders about what you are planning to say. Last, and least important, you add the words or text. The images rule! You can download admirable Word templates from the book’s website, and get started storyboarding right away.

The emerging storyboard

With images in place

Following the approach of this book, I have spent dozens of hours storyboarding my own recent presentations, and hundreds of dollars on custom photographs and image research. It has paid off. I’ve used this approach on all kinds of audiences all over the world, and it works. Right now, anyone using these techniques has a strategic advantage in being heard — after listening to the second or third speaker reading words on the screen, audiences who see a well-orchestrated visual accompaniment to a well-plotted narrative start waking up and paying attention.

Do not advance one slide further without reading this book.