marco ryan photography » Photobooks

How to make Blurb Bookshow widget work in WordPress

Marco Ryan — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:54:03 +0000

I was invited to trial the about-to-be launched Blurb BookShow widget – a great little application that allows you to embed a preview of your Blurb book in your blog or website page, thus helping to raise that book’s profile and also in providing the opportunity for up-sell.

I cut and pasted the code as suggested, and it didn’t work. When I read the small print it talked about “Support for WordPress hosted blogs will follow shortly”. So I made a work around that allows you to embed it in WordPress blogs, pages and sidebars.

Here are the steps:

1. You’ll need a blurb account and a book that has been published and is public (with previews turned on). Sign into your blurb account.

2. You’ll also need the Kimili Flash Embed Plugin for WordPress.

3. Go to the Blurb BookShow widget page: http://www.blurb.com/my/book/preview_widget

4. Select the book you want to profile.and then go into the “Copy and Past this code” dialog box . Find the section just after and embed opening tag that begins with (see yellow highlighted area in the image above):


5. Now select only the following from that bit of code: http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=XXXXX. Note this is the bit after the src tag up to and not including the type tag. Also note that I did not copy the quotation marks.
6. Now go to your WordPress post. Switch to HTML mode, and put your cursor where you want this to appear. Click on the Kimili Flash embed button. In the dialog box that appears, you then past the URL that you copied into the Flash.swf tag, that is probably currently saying untitled.swf.
7. Tweak the settings (the size for example) to what will fit well on your page, and you are done.
8. You could also pace this in a sidebar widget, and you can style the whle thing with 

You can see the sort of look and feel of the widget below for a book that I did last year on Cairo.


[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=985751" width="450" height="300" targetclass="flashmovie"]

[/kml_flashembed]



VisionMongers – Making a life and living in Photography
Marco Ryan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:39:25 +0000
Vision Mongers
VisionMongers is the Second of David DuChemin’s books. The first, “Within the Frame” – has quickly become one of the best ever selling photographic book on “Why” to take photographs, and deservedly has raised David’s profile, reputation and following globally hugely.
David’s passion is not the “how to ” photograph something, but the “why to”. He challenges us with questions such as “What is our motivation for perfecting our craft?” and “What motivates us to continue to take great photos”? – is it money, personal satisfaction, reputation? What is is that you have that is unique to you that changes how you look at things through the lens. My experience, my specialties, will be different and therefore my motivation, my angle and my unique opportunities will be different, which will result in a different photographic style.
With VisionMongers, David provides a sketchbook of essential ideas and wisdom for people making the difficult transition to vocational photographer, whether  – in David’s own words -
“that’s full time, part time, or just wanting to get your feet wet with weekend gigs to pay for your habit, and it’s an infusion of fresh ideas for photographers who’ve been doing this a while and need to tweak their business and marketing practices.”
Even if you are never intending to turn pro, this is still the book for you. It is so readable, so packed with ideas, suggestions and insights that reading it inspires you to go out, develop an angle, perfect your craft and celebrate that your style is different from others. It makes you a better photographer – and I am not talking technique here – and it makes you think about your photographic journey and where you want to take that.
Reading the excerpt chapter – available here - you get a sense of how impactful this book will be. It’s not a system, and it’s not a step by step guide to riches, but it is a book that encourages you, helps you and inspires you to “listen to that persistent voice in your head that tells you that you’ve got to follow this dream.”
You can pre-order the book through my store, or you can head over to peachpit press and do the same there. Whatever you choose, go buy the book – it will help you really assess why you take the photos you do, and will help you find that focus (pun intended) to create your own success and reward.



Using Blurb.com to Publish your book
Marco Ryan — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:19:38 +0000
Ever wanted to publish your own Coffee-table book of your photographs?
There are a host of different on-demand digital publishing houses out there and all offer very similar services. There is however a vast difference in quality, price per book, distribution and shipping costs.


After some extensive research I chose Blurb.com to publish my first book. I chose Blurb for three main reasons:
1. The quality of the paper and colour reproduction of the photogrpahs is by far the the best. For photographers that true colour representation really matters. I would argue that is probably the one and only comment you need to know and the other on-demand digital publishers are therefore second best. However there is “nowt as queer as folk” as we say in England, so the rest of this post may be of use to others with different priorities.
2. My second reason was their software. It is by far and away the most, intuitive, flexible and sophisticated. There is the additional option now of designing your book using your own package rather than their software and then uploading a pdf. For those of us happy with Adobe InDesign, they even provide templates. Matt Brandon’s amazing book Catchlight went straight to the top of Blurb’s bestsellers – it will really encourage you to get out there and get publishing!
3. My third reason was flexibility over the book size. Ony blurb offers you the really large book size with a choice of dustjacket or photo-imprint hardcover and the ability to use my own “Publishing House” logo to make it look like my company – rather than Blurb that published the book. I have to say that the finished article is amazing in terms of production quality.
There are only 2 real downsides with Blurb.com at the moment:
1. Their distribution costs are a little expensive. If you are trying to make money out of your books, then opting for a slightly smaller size or less pages really helps to keep the cost down, but in this case I wanted a great gift for those on the trip and so the size of the book, the number of pages, the type of paper (I selected premium paper) was more important than the overall cost.
2.Secondly they don’t currently offer an ISBN option – whereas Lulu.com does. This means that if you publish your book through Lulu.com (using their logos and distribution service etc) then they will get it placed in Barnes&Noble.com, Amazon.com etc – all the big online retailers. At the moment you can still sell your book and make money from it on Blurb.com, but it does not have an ISBN, so anyone looking to order through Amazon or their local bookstore won’t be able to find it.
Anyway, I am thrilled with my book and it has been a great way to check out the service blurb.com offers for the books that I really want to spend some time on in the future. It is not meant to be a portfolio of great photos, but a momento of a recent trip down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan where the focus was on time with the family rather than behind the lens, so really it is a mixture of snaps and the odd decent photo. You’re welcome to have a look (or even buy a copy if you really want to). You can check it out here. I’ve now started putting together my first proper photo book of images taken around Islaamic Cairo….