just finished my photobook!!

[marlajb]

Gayle,

My book was 80 pages. Blurb's pricing is a little different; they have one price 1-40 pages, another 41-80, another 81-120... so I was really trying to keep it to 80 pages. I love that pricing system -- I don't have to decide if each page is worth the cost per page like I did in Shutterfly... and since it wasn't a very long trip, it was easy (this time).

The longest book I've printed with Blurb was 115 pages -- it came out very nicely, too. I just checked on the site -- the maximum is 440 pages, but 160 if you want premium paper (which I always use).

This was the first time that I used Photoshop to do my pages. I saved them as jpg's and imported into Booksmart. For my previous books, I just used Booksmart, but it is not good for real scrapping (you can't tilt photos, layering is difficult, etc.). I was more than a little nervous to see how it turned out with the imported jpgs, but it's absolutely fine.

As for the 1/2 inch trim, yes, they do really trim everything, but not quite that much (it's probably more like 1/8, but they want you to be safe). I was afraid of losing things, too, so I made a layout in Booksmart that left a 1/2 inch border and then filled that border with a coordinating paper (it basically looks like I matted everything). I guess you might not like that if you have stitching that goes over the edge; it worked for me.

I started using Booksmart a few years ago to make a book out of our family blog -- they have a program that "slurps" all the text/photos off a blog and puts it right in Booksmart. I've been really happy with their quality. Shutterfly was ok for quick books, but I always felt somewhat limited (that's probably not the case any more, I haven't used them in over 2 years).

Let me know if you have any other questions.