How to collect material for my book?

We offer help with the collection of all necessary pictures, texts, with their sorting and preparationfor design and editing.

Do you want a custom made book but you find your available picture and text material insufficient? Do you have too much material and you could use a second pair of eyes to sort them?
In this section we show you how to assemble raw material that supports the structure of the book best. We collected the most frequently asked questions from our clients and the below answers may be a great help to you as well.

I have the pictures but I don’t know where to get appropriate texts?

The easiest way to collect texts is by downloading quotations, poems and short stories from the Internet. However, it is not absolutely necessary for a successful book to contain texts. Pictures can tell a story by themselves and we will do our best to make the graphic design dynamic. The best pictures will be stretched to the size of a full page while lower resolution or less relevant pictures will be formatted into a layout in smaller sizes.

I have texts but don’t know where to find pictures to accompany them?

Your most obvious resource is the Internet. Use search engines such as google.com or a stock exchchange site and type in keywords of your topic. For example if we wish to put a subtle picture behind our text body we type ”background” into the search box than make a selection that we want to look at only pictures available for download in large size. This is a very important point because print quality will depend on picture size and pictures that show well already on the screen are of substantially lower resolution than the ones we need to achieve good print quality. A large picture on the computer screen will print clearly approximately in one third of that size. The search engine will bring up a lot of nice backgrounds. Choose the one you like best and download in the largest resolution available.

I would like original artwork in my book. Can you create it for me?

Yes we can. We work with several graphic artists and painters that represent different artistic styles. We can introduce their work to you. You describe your design direction and we help to make it come true.

I have too many pictures. How should I sort and organize them?

We suggest to start by making a second copy of all your available pictures in a separate folder created specifically for the sorting. This way you will not accidentally loose any one of them that later you would regret. In this new folder review them with an appropriate picture viewer such as Windows Viewer and delete the ones you surely don’t want to include in your book. During this processes you will make a mental summary of available pictures. After this first sorting, review them a second time and get rid a few more of them as you see fit. You will find pictures that depict almost the same exact scene and would be disproportionally lengthy or pictures that are irrelevant to the purpose of your book. Make a decision about the approximate number of pictures you want to see in the finished book. Count the number of pictures you have left in your sorting library. Keeping this in mind review the folder one more time and delete the number of pictures in excess. The more you look at the pictures the clearer you will be able to decide what type of book you want to create.

Be careful! Sooner or later you might feel overwhelmed. In this case take a break, step away from the computer for a few hours or sleep on it one night!

In what format should I send my pictures?

The most ideal formats are jpg or tif. It is very important that you rename your files to reflect the order you want to see them printed. This way our page editor will make no mistakes about which picture need to go where in the book.

How do I decide about the cover picture?

When you have pictures available, choose the one that is the most beautiful, best quality or most relevant or suggestive to your topic. If you don’t have pictures you can find one on the Internet as described above or you can have our artist and illustrator draw or paint one especially for you. Covers can look very beautiful without any cover pictures. Instead of a picture we can graphically edit the tiles with a special letter type or stamp a sketch, add embossed ornamentation, foil stamp framing or the like. Review our reference work pages to get an idea of possibilities.

How do you process paper-based pictures?

We scan them. You can bring the pictures to us in person or mail them to us preferably in registered mail. We digitize and edit them. If you want to scan them yourself use the highest resolution available on your equipment or a minimum of 300 DPI. Name your pictures in the order of appearance in the book  (e.g. 001.jpg, 002.jpg, etc.) and send them to us. Our order confirmation e-mail will contain a link and a detailed description about how to upload your pictures to us.

I want to preserve the original hand writing on documents. Is that possible?

Of course it is. Send the original manuscript to us as described in the above paragraph and we will process and insert them into the book. It will look more beautiful than the original. 

How many pictures can you put on one page of a photo-book?

We usually put 3-5 pictures on a single page. Better pictures look really good stretched to fill an entire page. Sometimes we design a single page with numerous smaller pictures to create a dynamic layout as well.

How will your page editor know what text belongs to what picture?

We ask our clients to rename their pictures in the order they want to see them printed in the book (e.g. 001.jpg, 002.jpg, etc.). We also require them to mark the file names at the location in the text body where they want to see the pictures appear. This way our editor will know unmistakably where to place the pictures in the text body.

My text document is too long and I don’t want my book to be too thick.
What can I do?

A simple solution can be printing your book on thin paper. Think about the old vocabulary volumes containing thousands of pages. Another, more elegant solution can be to divide the work into several volumes. We create a slide-on box (5 sided) that holds these volumes together showing only their decorated spine. The surface of the box will be finished according to your request. It can be printed with the exact same decoration on it as the cover of the volumes contained within. We can also make a decorative box that holds the volumes on all six sides.

Do I have to format my texts?

No you don’t unless you specifically want to. As a rule we edit and format the entire text sent to us. First, we create sample pages to show our graphic design direction based on your original requests communicated to us. We change these designs as requested until you find it satisfying. Based on this design we edit and format the entire text body.

Do I have to prepare the Table of Contents and figure out page numbers?

Similar to the Word editor software we create page numbering automatically and you do not need to worry about it. If you wish we can make the Table of Contents section for you.

What format do I need to send my texts in?

If you want to do the editing and formatting yourself we ask you to send us a high-resolution pdf file. If you hire us to create the graphic design and page editing of the texts, it is enough to send us the document in a .doc or .odt file without formatting. 

What text material should I put on the book covers?

Covers usually show the title of the book and its author’s name. You can add the name of the recipient of the book, sometimes along with a personalized message. It is not necessary however to put any text on the covers. A picture, a sketch may sufficiently decorate the cover page.

Following the above preparation work we are ready to start manufacturing the book copies for you!