Seascapes and my ghost of time

while my own blog blogged for two weeks on autopilot, I've been eagerly waiting on the proofs for my first print-on-demand (pod) publication to arrive.

My ghost of time is a bit of poetry with some of my seascapes - the deliberate ones, often done en plein air, as well as the accidental ones - where abstract pieces took a turn to the water.
 

So, last Monday the book arrived, I made some more changes and put it on the public bookstore at Blurb.

I know others have published with them before and in terms of quality and price they seemed pretty competitive.

I tried to find some info on quality control of their publications. I came across this flickr discussion group and became a bit worried as to the lack of quality control and indeed the huge variation from print to print. The attractiveness with pod is that it doesn't require money provided up front, it's an easy and convenient ordering process regardless to where you are. But, if each copy turns out different and of variable quality, this can be a problem.

So, while Blurb does seem to have problems with quality control (colour variations, notably a magenta cast; and problems with binding seem far too common), their customer service seems very good and helpful. - Which means, if there is a problem with the copy, they are helpful in providing a new one.

Now, My ghost of time is not going to be the next bestseller neither do I intend to use it as marketing/portfolio material. It's a project that's been simmering for a while and was important to see to fruition. I ordered one hardback and one paperback. The paperback came out very nicely, the hardback has some issues with the binding.

But: the layout and the quality of images turned out very well. I chose their standard landscape format (25x20cm) which actually provides fairly sizeable images.

• Have you published your artwork? As print-on-demand? Conventionally?
• What are your experiences? With quality? As marketing material?
  
• Do you have plans on publishing some of your artwork?

• Blurb offers a full preview of My ghost of time here
• Here are the posts from my own blog about the project