I had a book published!

Click the photo below to see large size – that is my recently published photo book! Fresh off the press! My book! Pictures don’t lie do they?

Flemming Bo Jensen Photography - book, cover

…so what if it is just me publishing me – I still had a book published!

Flemming Bo Jensen Photography - book, pagesI find while travelling and shooting that people I meet are always very interested in seeing my work; last time I decided that I should bring some sort of mini portfolio with me and might even make some sales that way. So I simply used one of the online ‘create your own photobook’ services to print a compact portfolio book for travelling. I used the company MyPhotoBook as I had read great things about them and they offered a small 15×20 size book, perfect for travelling. Blurb.com is another service getting good reviews, but they didn’t have the compact book I wanted.

See photo on the right for some sample pages (and why I’ll never make a living doing product photography. I couldn’t light a scene to safe my life, I depend on the sun). Print quality is actually quite good and the paper is very nice. Quite heavy paper with a nice semi-gloss finish. Colours are spot-on, for 4-colour press printing I am actually very impressed by how accurate the colours are. The prints could be sharper though, perhaps due to the small size of the photos.

My book! Even though it’s me publishing me it’s still rather nice to browse my own book! Certainly inspires me to print a much larger book – and one day see my books in a bookshop with customers queuing round the block! Hey it could happen. Well, I can dream anyway!

22 Comments on “I had a book published!”

  1. Hi Flemming, its a great idea and gives as it gives you an idea of how you work will look if you ever do decide to publish. I did the same thing on my mac with Iphoto and you send it off to apple and about a month later you get a book back. I want to do another once I get back from WA. Congrats its looks great.

  2. I've been thinking about doing something like this for quite a while! Seeing your product and hearing good things about the company you went with is definitely some more motivation for me. Looks nice, how much you selling them for? 🙂

  3. Heh, ya can't put a price on art can ya 🙂 It's too expensive to print book for sales this way, one book at a time. Although Blurb.com is pretty cool as they enable you to sell your book in their online bookshop!

  4. Thanks Michael! Yeah I quickly threw the layout together. You download this book software from the publisher to create and design the whole book from scratch and then upload for printing. It is super easy and works very well.

    Btw you’re spot on mate, it’s a bit short on waterfalls but has heaps of straight horizons 😀

  5. Cool man, did you do the layout? I had a book printed for my parents as a Christmas present a few years ago, they loved it. I can only imagine that it`s missing a waterfall shot but at least all your horizons will be straight.

  6. Cool work Flemming.
    I did something very similar for my friends baby boys first birthday. It’s awesome how you can just import a few photos into the layout of choice, upload and it arrives in a week.

    There is a need for a low cost printing solution for books, that retains the quality of the photo, and is printed on quality paper.

  7. Thanks Thomas, yeah it's pretty cool to so easily be able to produce a book!
    I agree on the low cost printing solution, it's not terribly easy though, printing quality photos on quality paper at low cost.

  8. Cool Flemming – well done. It's also something that I have been wanting to do for a long time…How were they cost wise ? And I assume that is 15cmx20cm ? 🙂

  9. Good stuff Flemming.

    If you ever get to publish and print into the mainstream I'd like to see you be a bit more specific on the location. An example being " The Kimberleys Western Australia" instead of The Kimberleys Australia". We here in Western Australia don't want the other states thinking our beauty is their beauty. LOL.

    I've posted a wave dreaming and not a Hawke Dreaming on my blog mate.

  10. sorry mate but is that horizon crooked?? I had an Asuka book printed and the quality was amazing. Each page was super hi gloss and looked like a fujiflex print. Very expensive exercise but the wow factor is WOOOOOWWWW.

  11. Tony, thanks mate. It is indeed 15x20cm, sorry forgot to mention that 🙂 Printing that size 36 pages was about 60 AUD.

    Jamie, thanks, it does look really cool!

    Merv, cheers! And I see what you mean and I agree, WA and NT is in a league of their own 🙂

    Christian, haha, cover looks crooked but it's not 🙂 That black horizontal line is not the horizon, it's the top of the ranges.
    Christian, what do you do with pano images, spread them across two pages?

  12. awesome Flem!
    i got excited for a sec there and thought a book of your photos will look very good next to my Fletcher books… but you just teasing!! :-p

    looks great hey!

  13. Good to hear from someone who has had one done. I downloaded the Blurb software (and subsequently get a bit of spam now) a while back to see what it would be like but I may consider the company you've gone with.

  14. Your site and blog really inspire me to keep my camera on me at all times!!! Art is my thing as you know, but photography is also a passion – your landscapes are awesome!!!

    Jason

  15. Just wanted to say I was very amazed with your book and congratulate you on producing it yourself. Nice pictures, very clean. I admire landscape photography very much.

  16. It is great to publish your own book… $60 bucks a pop… ouch, whats the retail price 🙂 When I got my book published I out sourced the image insertion and CMYK profiling to CFL in Australia. If you do it again I recall they sharpened my images to counter the softening that happens with offset printing.

    1. Hi Matt. Yeah at 60 bucks this method is way too expensive for mass producing books, this was just 1 copy for myself. I can see that I need to sharpen quite a bit as well, that offset printing kills the sharpness.

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