book
By anders pearson 11 Jan 2007
I’ve been drawing and painting a lot in the last couple years. Obsessively, perhaps.
A few months ago, I was looking at the shear volume of work I’d produced and realized that it was actually enough to fill a book. That idea kind of stuck with me and I became fascinated with the concept of having my own book. As an unknown, there was no way any publishing companies out there would bother with me, and I didn’t really relish the thought of having to deal with a publisher anyway. So I did some research and found that technology has recently made a print on demand model actually pretty feasible.
Lulu.com looked like the best of what’s out there so I ordered a couple of random books from their site to check the quality and I was pretty impressed. The prices are a little high, but considering that not too long ago it really wouldn’t have been financially possible to publish a book without doing a print run of hundreds of copies, it’s not too bad.
I don’t really know jack about anything print related so I roped in some friends to help me photograph the paintings that were too big to scan, lay everything out and put it into a pdf with the right settings, and design a professional looking cover. They came through for me and put together a complete package that makes it look like I’m actually a real artist or something. Neat.
Anyway, it’s now available. You can order a copy directly through lulu.com’s online store.
The 158 page color printed 9x7 inch paperback version is $28.23. That’s actually just the base manufacturing cost that lulu charges. I make no profit whatsoever on the book. This is purely a labor of love for me, not a money making venture. There’s also a free PDF download available if you either want to preview it or if you have access to your own book printing equipment and want to print it yourself.
The license on the book according to the site is the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.5 but that’s only because Lulu.com’s publishing interface didn’t include the option for the Public Domain which is what I prefer. In other words, do whatever the hell you want with the book. I don’t care. I’m just happy that it exists. If you like it, you can buy me a beer some day.
Again, thanks to Catherine, Marc, and Jessica for helping me out on this, one of my more involved crazy schemes.