Self-Publish your Africa Travel Book

Your unique Travel experiences will make a great book!

With changes in the book publishing industry over the last decade it has become easier than ever to plan, compile and publish a book of your family vacation, overseas tour, cruise, or just your road trip to visit Disney-world.  Your photographs and journal notes can be assembled into a unique record of adventures both at home and abroad. No longer do vacation photos have to be relegated to an old computer hard drive or lost in a box in the attic.

Anyone can publish a bookstore quality album or journal that records your experiences forever and that can be read and enjoyed for the rest of your life. The cost of printing a 100 page, full color, 8in. x 10in. hardcover book can be as little as $50.00. (Estimate from Blurb.com) The minimum order quantity is one copy. For wider distribution, and for a book that you might want to publish hundreds or thousands of copies of, the printing cost might be as low as $18.00 to $20.00. (Lightning Source, Inc.)

Planning and preparation is the key to containing costs.

These days printing costs are low.  It is the preparation of the manuscript and getting it into the correct format for submission to the printer that is liable to cost money. The key to keeping those costs within reason (say - a few hundred dollars) is PREPARATION.

 

PLAN: Most travelers spend a lot of time planning their trips and making reservations well in advance. Planning for a book of the trip can begin at the same time, long before the first flight or filling the gas tank for that first days drive.

Here are some things to consider:

Bring home some banknotes to include in your book.

• Read up on your destination.  Keep a folder. Print out website pages, maps, calendars, and other information about area attractions and keep them in the folder. All of these items can be scanned and printed in your Travel Book.
• If using the services of a travel agent or a tour company, save the schedules, correspondence and itineraries, and invoices that they provide. These too might make useful additions to your dairy or journal notes.
• Save those little items from the trip that we often discard; ticket stubs, hotel receipts, gas receipts (remember when gas was $1.50 a gallon?), museum fliers, boarding passes, menus, etc.
• Pick up those fliers from hotel lobbies and tourist information centers that are always available for FREE.  They contain loads of useful information about the local area, its attractions and its history. This is helpful when writing your daily journal notes or when editing the final content for your book. Some can also be scanned and included as extra illustrations along with your photographs.
• Save small denomination bank notes from the countries you visit. These will always make colorful additions to your Travel Book and often provide beautiful designs describing a countries culture and history.
• Don’t forget to save maps. Mark your maps with places you visited.
• KEEP A JOURNAL!  While traveling we often get busy and forget to write things down.  It doesn’t have to be a day by day, hour by hour, personal diary. Take a few minutes at the end of the day, when everything is still fresh in your mind, and write down the little things.  Especially write down the names of people, tour guides, local villagers, etc that you meet, and whose names you will forget if you don’t write them down!
• While you are there, shop around for inexpensive reference books on animals, especially birds and even fish if you scuba diving or snorkeling!  Phrasebooks are helpful too.

PHOTOGRAPHY: There are scores of books and tutorials on the subject of taking photographs.  Whether you are a complete amateur or a seasoned professional many of the basics will remain the same.

Some important considerations:

• Whether you have a $5,000 digital, single lens reflex (SLR)  or a $200 digital point and shoot camera, the MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO KNOW HOW YOUR CAMERA WORKS.  Every camera comes with an instruction book and it is absolutely essential that you take the time to read through it carefully, practicing each operation with your camera as you do.

• Make sure your camera settings let you take high resolution photographs that will reproduce sharply in a book. You should have a minimum 5 Megapixel camera.  Most today are at least 10MPs. A 5MP camera will allow you to take a photograph that is at least 2400 pixels wide by 1800 pixels high.  Photographs taken at this resolution will print sharply in a book up to 8 inches wide X 6 inches high.  (The rule of thumb is – each 300 pixels will print as a 1 inch finished picture size. Therefore a 2400 x 1800px image will print sharply as an 8 in. x 6 in. image in a book.)

• Learn and understand how much memory your camera has. Take extra memory cards or thumb drives with you. 

• Learn how long your camera battery will last and take an extra battery. Most cameras today have chargers and connections that will adapt to plug-ins in other countries. Make sure you will be able to recharge your camera batteries whenever you are going.  The same advice, of course, applies to laptops and other electronic devices.

• If you are accustomed to transferring your photographs onto a laptop or other device then make sure you make backup CD's as well. The worst thing that happens (yes – it happens to all of us!) is that we lose some precious photos from a place that we may never visit again. 

Take photos of unusual things!

• When taking photographs on a tour or vacation trip, always keep in mind that you are taking photos that will be used to illustrate a book and that will be complimenting the text. This may be a new approach for most people. 

• Include people pictures and get close!  Most of us forget the importance of filling the viewfinder with our subject matter. Use a flash when taking people pictures in shade or towards the sunlight.

Always photograph the people around you.

• For each scenic photograph you take, take one of people and other subject matter. Photograph food, animals, your accommodations, your tour guides, local housing, local roads, unusual signs, a glass of wine, a bottle of beer, local clothing and architecture.  If in a National Park or Game Reserve photograph the campfire, the table settings, the guides and camp staff, and the 4WD vehicles you ride in. Always photograph the words on plaques describing historical places.  When you forget what the place was named and how old it is, you can always go back to your photograph for the detail.   This saves a lot of time having to write it down in your journal!

A Mopani worm. Don't ignore the little things!

• When photographing an animal or bird or an insect(!), make sure you know what it is called. Don’t label a Cape Buffalo as a Water Buffalo!  No, no, no!  And don’t call an Elk a Moose.  The same idea applies to plants; flowers and trees. Take notes.

• Photographs give us an infallible way to recall dates and the order in which events occurred. Digital photos are tagged with the date and time they were taken and this information is often very helpful in putting captions on our images.  

• While waiting for a connecting flight at the airport, take photos of the departure schedules that are displayed on the large airport monitors. Take a picture of your plane through the concourse window. Take a photo of the meal you are served on the flight.  Today, we don’t pay for film and developing, so it costs nothing to take a lot of pictures.  

• The list goes on and on.  But as you are taking all these photographs, your travel book is taking shape in your mind.  With a rich supply of photographs, imagine what a great Travel Book you will be able to create.

THE MANUSCRIPT: Now you have all this stuff.  All these memories of your trip are in a folder or saved in files on your computer. What do you do now?

•  Get organized.  The greatest cost savings you will be able to make in getting a Travel Book into publication will result from organizing your text narrative and your photographs in a logical, easy-to-read sequence.

• Type your story into a MSWord document.  Edit it carefully.  Edit it again. Check for spelling and grammatical errors. Take out extra words. Have someone else check it for you and offer their opinion.

• Go through all of your photograph files and save only those that will be used in the book in one folder.  Name it appropriately “final pics” or similar.  It is always a good idea to put a date in the name of the folder. (E.g. “Galapagos_May-2011” or “Yosemite_June-2010”)  Make a back-up copy of this folder and transfer it to a backup hard drive or save it on a DVD or CD.

• Of course, many of your photos may need editing. This can be time-consuming but can raise the quality of the Travel Book. 

• Now, remember those brochures and schedules you tucked away in a folder even before the trip began? Grab those and decide what you will want to scan and save as digital files.  Dig into the bottom of your luggage and pull out those banknotes, and ticket stubs that you brought home with you.  Scan these as well. (Scan at 300 dots-per-inch (dpi) and save them on your computer.)

• In your typed manuscript mark clearly where the photographs and scanned images will be located.  This is an important step and will save a lot of time in the final compilation.

Now you are ready to take the final steps to getting your story into a Travel Book.  There are a number of Print-on-Demand (POD) companies that enable us to load our images and text into pre-set book templates.  Kodak Gallery and  Shutterfly are good examples.

I am going to use www.blurb.com as an example as I have used them to create over 80 books and am accustomed to their programs and software. 

From the Blurb website you can download a Blurb BookSmart template onto your computer.  This proprietary software is free and includes an almost unlimited choice of page designs that can be adjusted to suit each individual’s unique requirements.  Book sizes range from pocket sized 5 x 8in, to 7 x 7in, 8 x 10in (portrait or landscape), 12 x 12in, or 13 x 11in coffee table size books. Blurbs prices are the lowest anywhere and, like most POD programs now, it is only necessary to order a minimum quantity of one book. 

Once you have mastered the basics of the BookSmart software, you can import the text and photos, and preview each step as you progress. Blurb offers extensive tutorials and an on-line help desk to guide newcomers through the basic process. When the final version meets your approval, the book file is uploaded to the Blurb website and it can now be ordered. Delivery usually takes about ten days from the time the book is uploaded to Blurb. 

Some folks are not prepared to take the time required to learn the Blurb program, or may have the computer skills to figure it all out. Blurb offers the help of many experienced “bookmakers” on their website. One can go to the “hire an expert” page and scroll down the list of over 200 authorized bookmakers to contact for assistance. These are experienced publishers who work independently from Blurb but who are accustomed to using its software. 

If you believe your book is destined for wider distribution through the internet bookstores such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, etc., BookCrafters can convert your manuscript into the formats accepted by Lightning Source, Inc., (LSI) one of the world’s largest POD companies. Once uploaded to LSI your book can reach the online bookstores Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. You may become a best selling author and gain widespread fame and  notoriety. (Just kidding!)

For ideas and resources go to: self-publish-your-book.com. 

To see a sample Travel Book click on this link:

Tanzania by Joe McDaniel | Make Your Own Book