I agree - the idea is a good one, but there are many details that would need to be worked out. This is the kind of thing which may not respond well via polling, because people don't know enough about what they would be buying into. I think the proposal needs more development, and once it becomes more tangible the level of interest may pick-up quite a bit.
I agree. The point was to see if there's enough interest, and take it from there. Currently at 35 interested in submissions out of 481 who read the post. Although it's been a very slow trickle of votes, we should be well on the way if we get 100 submitters, which doesn't sound unreasonable when we start fleshing this out.
Since this would be the first LL Yearbook, I strongly feel we should go the Keep It Simple, Stupid -route. Off to your list, and expanding on Charly's post:
- format
- number of pages
- who prints, where, to what quality standard
Unless we have some people with publishing experience (according to poll we do)
and who would be interested in layout, pre-production, printing, etc. (ie. lot of time), we should go for the tried and true.
Leica Users Group used blurb.com, and it seems to be a decent product online - no idea how it pans out in book form, though. Would be glad to hear from user experience. Googling for reviews gives fairly positive reviews, although I was unable to find any with obviously high photographic printing standards.
- technical criteria for image submission
- artistic criteria for image selection
- details about the selection process - selection committe, how organized, etc.
- content themes, organizing principles for the content, or is it totally unstructured
I'd prefer to keep this simple: everybody who submits an image gets an image published. To make this more interactive and fun, we could set up a sub-forum where people could submit up to, say, three photos, and members could vote for their preference.
Alternatively, if we limit strictly to 1 submission per person, we could vote for the top 10 images which would open the book, with Honorable Mentions for some categories (Best Landscape, Best Abstract, Best Macro, Funniest Image, Best Pixelpeeping, Most Extravagant Gear...). That would also open the forums for some Academy Awards -style lobbying which surely would make things more... interesting around here
And I feel the cover should go for Michael
Leica guys had a book with 258 pages, which I assume is 200+ images, and given the interest here I think we'll be around that level in the end - so there should be no need to limit the # of participants.
- text and artist information to be provided for each image
This should be limited to X number of words, freeform. Some people want to provide technical details, some explanation of the shot, some background information, some poetry. I don't see a compelling reason to tie people's hands on the content.
- pricing and margin available to the endowment
- risk sharing in case of sales disappointment
- time period for expected return of costs and margin
- sales and order fulfilment arrangements
Here's blurb's
pricing for large-format (13" x 11") books.
Blurb.com offers printing as needed, so there's no need to have anyone of us to physically ship anything or tie us to a fixed printing run. Nevertheless, somebody has to handle the transactions, and donate the proceeds to the Fund. We might be able to come up with a smooth arrangement with blurb if we approach them with this - it might be possible that they manage all the transactions without us having to do any heavy lifting.
Depending on blurb (or whoever we choose) pricing structure, we should be able to set the price so that there's an X% markup on each book which goes to the fund. This might get complicated from taxation POV, so that's something whoever manages the fund has to figure out (Michael?).
I'd be interested in the large format landscape version with Premium Paper. We can set up a poll about this later, but I'd be interested to hear what you guys think - they don't come cheap, going for upwards of a hundred bucks depending on the page count, although smaller books with soft covers are quite attractively priced.
There are my thoughts on this. If somebody has contacts in Leica Users Group (or is a member), I'd be very glad to hear from you so I could ask some questions from their experience in setting it up for themselves, as well as on blurb.com. Send me a PM.
Let's keep brainstorming on the ideas above and in earlier posts!