My Blurb.com book - with a problem...

Remember when I was ordering a blurb.com book to bring down to New York City as a little press kit? 

Here it is! Overall it looked great, except for one problem which I'll get to at the end of the post. And I'll introduce you to my new friend Calla - who REALLY had a great blurb.com book when I met her!

I got the idea of printing a blurb.com book from Lauren Liess of Pure Style Home. (See Lauren's post on her portfolio book here. )

Isn't a little book the best? The images and captions came out great, and it was so convenient to have the book to hand to people at the conference so they could see the jewelry I made. I got so many nice compliments on it!

One of my favorite pages was in the back that highlighted some of my "press hits" - lingo for when my jewelry has shown up in the media. Wouldn't you know I met the author of one of those books that featured my jewelry in NYC that weekend!

{bad text}

So what was a problem with the blurb.com book? I used their online software to design the book, which was fairly easy. I previewed everything carefully. But when I got my printed book in the mail - on the first page - a paragraph of text got formatted all screwy and part of the paragraph got completely chopped off!

Can you call a real person to discuss customer service with blurb.com? No, no phone number given. I had to email. Let's see if they can fix this for me - I hope!

{Calla Gold and me at the MJSA Expo NYC}

And here's my new friend Calla Gold. She's an amazing private jeweler, and yes, that's her real name - her career must have been destiny. She brought with her a hardcover blurb.com book  "The Language of Jewelry Design by Calla Gold"

This is the amazing thing - you can go to Calla's website and download the e-book version for free, or use blurb.com to order a book yourself! Brilliant! Not only does blurb.com allow you to print a book, but you can publish it as well!

Loretta

p.s If I did another book on blurb.com , I'd skip the online software and submit my own .pdf files to have more control over the finished pages. Remember how Lauren was a little disappointed in how her greens printed? I had a similar problem with how some of my whites printed. Probably no one noticed this but me, but when you are a designer, you just want everything to be perfect!