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Blurb and Founder Interview
Qusetion: What is the history behind Blurb? How did the idea of online book publishing develop originally?
Blurb: Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb, founded the company in 2005, after thinking about the idea for a couple years prior. She conceived the idea for Blurb when she had a break after selling her second start-up, and had the opportunity to relax without being a CEO for a little while. Eileen is a photographer, and had spent some time taking pictures of the people she knew from building her two previous companies. She would talk to these folks while taking their pictures, and then ask them to send her a few paragraphs on the things they had discussed. Before she knew it, she had about 40 images with accompanying text and wanted to create something she could share with people. A website? No, the content was static, not dynamic, and it wasn’t the right thing. A book? Perfect. And someone had to have come up with a way for people to make short-run quantities of their own books on-demand, right? The combination of desktop publishing, a backend ecommerce engine, and a printing process that would allow book printing in quantities starting at one must exist…
Nope.
Eileen set out to find Blurb, and it didn’t exist. She tried other books, and simply couldn’t find anything professional enough that she felt good about having it represent her work. The idea stuck in her head, and in 2005 she started Blurb.com.
Qusetion: Blurb is a new company, how did Blurb avoid the issues that usually trouble start-up companies?
Blurb: One of the issues that troubles some start-ups is that the product launches before it’s ready, doesn’t work well and customers are unhappy. Blurb avoided this by spending its first year (and $2M in venture funding) on building the software application BookSmart. Blurb hired professional book designers, and built a product designed to help consumers quickly and easily make professional-quality books without knowing a thing about pacing, design, white space, gutters, bleed, etc.
Qusetion: Blurb seems to have a strong focus on community, Blurberati being a good example. How has fostering a strong community helped Blurb and it's users?
Blurb: Community is critical to Blurb’s success. We're seeing adoption across many groups that each identify different and specific uses for their books - the long-tail principal applies here, as an individual might have an audience of 350 people in a community who would be interested in their book, and Blurb enables anyone to not only create a book but provides the back-end distribution and ecommerce engine to reach and sell books to relevant communities.
For years now, people have been sharing images and stories exclusively online with communities. This is still very vogue, but there’s increasingly a hunger to share the tactile and the physical – thus the advent of companies like Blurb and Moo, who help people take digital content that exists online, offline, and compose something real – books – that they can share with their social communities.
Also, other communities – like Flickr, one of our partners – are rallying around Blurb as well. There are now Blurb groups on Flickr. We built a slurper to automatically slurp in Flickr photosets to our BookSmart software. We want to make it easy for people who already belong to communities to promote their own books in the communities they belong to and have created. We’ve built the tools to make it easy for people to post “Blurb badges” on their blogs that link back to their book for sale in the Blurb BookStore, to recommend books they like, and to share easily with other Blurb users or any community they choose.
Qusetion: Authors now have a way of independently selling their books with Blurb, how will this affect publishing in the future?
Blurb: Companies like Blurb can help with projects that aren’t in the sweet spot for traditional publishing. Publishers have a low-end need for low-number publishing runs, and they don’t have a strong option for servicing these clients. Blurb has created a synergy with traditional publishing between not just print on demand technology, but the BookSmart software. If there are books that are graphic or visually illustrated, those are expensive to make because traditional publishers have to hire a book designer. The economics and turnaround times don’t work. So all of a sudden, in a world where the software is free, you can make one, drop-ship one, manage the whole back end ordering and fulfillment and distribution for free, and this becomes a great model for traditional publishing. The problems they have on their small projects – creating, printing, turnaround times (usually too short), not set up to send books of one to 500 people – are gone by working with Blurb.
For individuals, there are other questions about working with traditional publishers – what will publishing do for you? If you’re not Stephen King, what can traditional publishing do for an emerging artist? If you’re bringing the audience, you’re giving up 90%of the cover value of the book for all these parties in the middle, and the return for the author is unclear. There are people out there who already have audience – through their blog, site, or community – and what Blurb is doing is creating new ways for these people to reach their audience
Qusetion: Blurb's business model is book publishing, is there any interest in expanding beyond book publishing and into other print formats, (such as brochures, gift cards, etc)?
Blurb: Right now, we’re focused on books.
Qusetion: There are a wide variety of books that are for sale on Blurb, what are some of the publishing surprises Blurb has encountered from creative users?
Blurb: BookSmart has been designed to eliminate ‘mistakes’ and help anyone create something that looks professional the first time around. Image sizing mistakes are easily avoided too – BookSmart warns you when an image isn’t sized to look good on the page, so you can zoom in or out as necessary before uploading. Books should be double- and triple-checked before uploading to avoid spelling errors and make sure everything is tight.
Qusetion: There are a wide variety of books that are for sale on Blurb, what are some of the publishing surprises Blurb has encountered from creative users?
Blurb:Creative Blurb users have done some amazing things. Dan Milnor is a professional wedding photographer who has made 23 Blurb books since January! Wil von Iersal is a photographer in the Netherlands who is making a book each week – he has received so much attention in Holland that he now has a weekly radio show to talk about his books and the stories behind them.
Qusetion: What emerging technologies and trends does Blurb see as important to online book publishing?
Blurb: The community aspect remains huge for book publishing – the idea that now anyone can not only make a book, but market that book and create a market for that book is awesome. That’s the disruptive element in all this – it’s not enough just to make a book, but what makes it disruptive from a business point of view is that now your mom with an audience can make a professional quality product and market and distribute it globally overnight.
How big can the book business be if it’s not throttled by the tyranny of retail economics? If everyone with a decent Internet connection and an idea make a book with a cash outlay of 12.95?
Qusetion: Besides Blurb's recent global expansion, what are Blurb's future goals?
Blurb: We’ll continue to enable anyone in the world with an idea and an Internet connection to not only make books, but to market and sell those books, and to have fun doing it.
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