[MSL]

What little printing I've done has either been 4x6 at the cheapest or most convenient place I could find, or 8x10 at Black's when they had promotions for $1/print.

I'm thinking of maybe printing larger, and in the short term I'm interesting in making some photo books. There are a number of groupon offers out there, but the coupons don't necessarily connect to a printer that is in the same country or that will even ship out of country...

So more broadly - for those who have done printing, and especially photo book printing...

What do you look for in a vendor?
Do you care if they offer software to design the book or if it is all done online?
Do you care if the book is printed in the same country you are located in?
Do you have any other tips before starting on this project or while putting the book together?

TIA.

[frogoutofwater]

I've printed with a couple of different vendors over the past few years, and I think the short answer is that you need to experiment and your wish list will evolve as your skills evolve.

Here's the long answer ...

I started off making some books with MyPublisher.com a few years ago. I found their set-up pretty easy to work with, using their software and dragging and dropping images into their templates but using their downloadable software. Overall, I was satisfied with their image quality and pricing (prepare your book and wait for a good offer - like 30-40% off), but I did sometimes find that their were defects in the books (e.g., black spots etc). It was relatively easy to get that fixed - send a few photos and they'd ship replacement books. What I didn't like was their outrageous shipping costs - that, and the fact that I never seemed to be able to speak to a human.

At about the same time, I tried making books with Blurb, but for some reason I found their software less easy to use - and since MP was working for me, I stuck with them.

I'm very fortunate to live in NYC and I can take classes at the excellent International Center of Photography. Among other things, I started learning how to print my own work and my standards and expectations regarding print quality increased - MyPublisher.com didn't cut it for me anymore. In 2015, I took a pair of excellent courses taught by the founders of an Indie photobook publisher called Conveyor Arts. I learned a lot about book design and the book production process. They are an offset printer, unlike MyPublisher and Blurb's digital printing services. I also started learning Adobe InDesign, which is the software Conveyor Arts uses. It was a steep learning curve (and I'm only part-way up the slope), but it has been very helpful.

I liked Conveyor Arts because of the flexibility of their book design system - practically any size book, any layout I wanted, lots of interesting cover, paper and folding options. And - it was significantly less expensive than publishers like Blurb and MyPublisher when it comes to making "more than a few but less than a lot" of books. Image quality is very high, turnaround was quick (when I gave them enough notice about expected delivery of files) and shipping was inexpensive. The downside is that to take advantage of their best prices, you have to do a lot of the work yourself - and that means properly laying out your book in InDesign, converting your images to CMYK and soft-proofing those images to make sure they look right in CYMK (and not just pretty on your screen).

In 2015, through the course I took with Conveyor Arts, I created and self-published a children's photo book that is now sold at Catskill Animal Sanctuary as a fundraiser for their farm rescue operations. I order the book in small quantities (about 25 at a time), so it's a moderate layout each time and I can refill when they sell out.
https://store.casanctuary.org/collections/books/products/photo-book-cas-anim...ent-photo-book

More recently, I've been looking into doing a large print run (offset printing as opposed to digital printing) with Blurb. I've made a draft of the book through Blurb's InDesign plug-in and requested a quote. The good news is the price is amazing for high volume offset printing. The bad news is that it's a huge chunk of change upfront. I probably will go that route at some point, but I'll need to arrange pre-purchases to fund the book via Kickstarter or something similar.

So, after the "all about me" section, here are my thoughts on your questions:

What do you look for in a vendor?
- Print quality, reliability in printing, and an easy-to-use returns/correction problem if something goes wrong (because it will at some point).
- Reasonable shipping prices (some vendors offer great discounts on books but gouge you on shipping).
- Good promotional discounts offered frequently
- Good quality paper - I usually go up at least one quality level from basic but don't necessarily find much value in going beyond that
- Reasonably quick (and reliable) turnaround on book orders
- Reliable shipping without damage (properly packaged materials)
- Flexibility in page layout, but as a novice I also wanted something simple enough to use the first few times around
- Good FAQs on how to prepare images for high quality printing
- Now I'm interested in channels to sell my book online (Blurb has it), but I'm not sure that's something you need if you're just making a few books for yourself and friends or family
- A not too obnoxious logo in my books (Blurb and MyPublisher put their logo in your book on the back page. You can pay to have it removed, but sometimes the charge to do so is high. So now I just leave it, but I don't want it to be garish.)
- Responsive customer service (a knowledgeable and sympathetic human being who will answer my questions online in a reasonable time frame)

Do you care if they offer software to design the book or if it is all done online?
- I prefer to use software (InDesign) or software I download from them.

Do you care if the book is printed in the same country you are located in?
- No.

Do you have any other tips before starting on this project or while putting the book together?
- Spend an afternoon in a bookstore with a good photo book section looking at books. Or make a photographer happy by buying some
- Even before I start making the book, I like to make small prints of a large number of my images (e.g., on 5x7 paper) and then lay them out on the floor or a big worktable, to see which images work on paper (not all do) and how best to sequence them. Yes, you can sequence them in the software itself, but it's easier to see the overall sequence, and to add and subtract images, if you do it physically. You also might discover that there's some processing work you need to do to get more consistency in the overall look of your images. And, you might discover that you're missing some images - something that you need to tell the story or complete the sequence. Sometimes this sends you back into your digital archives to find something, and sometimes you need to go shoot some more.
- You also might want to get some construction paper in different sizes and cut it up to represent the book sizes that the vendor offers. When you hold in your hands a 7x7 book, or an 8x10 or a 12x12 book, you get a better feel for what you want to do. Get some prints that suit the different book sizes (just print them on a regular color or BW photocopier - they don't need to be on photo paper) and size them to fit the book.
- File organization is critical (and I learned some good practices from Conveyor Arts). I create a separate file folder (with sub-folders) for my book project. Generally, there are two image folders. One has copies of my Adobe RGB files that have been prepared to look good as digital prints and are sized at 300 dpi (or as close to that as possible). (These sometimes look a little different than the base photo file that I keep in my main directory - for example, they might be a little brighter because they're being printed.) These photos also may be named differently than my original files. For example, my original photo files have names like "Clarice-160118-2893", which means a photo of Clarice the sheep taken on January 18, 2016 - with 2893 being the file name from the camera. The file name in my book folder is Clarice-01-F (F for final) and -01 because sometimes there is more than one Clarice photo in my book. The second folder has the same images converted to the color space required by the publisher (e.g., CMYK).
- I also save image files that are larger than what the book currently calls for. For example, although the 7x7 book I'm making really only needs image files that are about 5" long or high (at 300 dpi), I might decide in the the future to make a larger version of the same book, so I don't want to have to go to the trouble of creating publisher-ready files at a larger size. The downside is that these files take longer to upload and sometimes are a bit more cumbersome to work with, but I'd rather have that headache than to have to recreate large publisher-ready files.
- Proofread, proofread, proofread. And proofread some more.
- Ask someone to look at your sequence before you press the "buy" button. And get them to proofread your work, too.

PS - Many years ago (1987!), I worked at Black's Photography in Vancouver. And many years before that, my dad went to school with the Black's sons.