News, Local history and Thanet issues from Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate see www.michaelsbookshop.com I publish over 200 books about the history of this area click here to look at them.
Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.
Out of interested, why do you have to leave some photos out? Is it due to cost or maybe to avoid duplication?
ReplyDeleteThat's where the web comes in - you can put all the left-overs up on the web so they are still viewable. Space online is effectively infinite and virtually free. You just have to find the right balance so your customers don't give up buying the books because all the information and images they want are there already! That's the argument every publisher, newspaper and magazine has had to have over the last decade. Plus you want to keep enough in reserve for the follow up book...
ReplyDeleteOne suggestion: when you put your groups of photos up on the web (snapshots or scanned images), if you could add a line break between each one <br />, or even a Paragrph break (two line spaces) <p> then your loyal audience could see them by comfortably scrolling down, rather than rather uncomfortably scrolling horizontally.
I know it's a bit fiddly when you're adding as many photos as you do after a good day down at the harbour, but the results are worth it!
Chris I am limited to about 130 pages per book as I print and staple them in the shop the alternative being to send them to an outside printer with an average investment of at least £2,000 per book. With 110 local books in print this would mean an investment of £220,000 so far, or as another example I do a reprint of “Twilight of Pistons” about the Manston airline selling for £9.99 the first edition was published by the author, he told me that he had 800 done at a cost of £12,000 the book retailed for £39.95.
ReplyDeleteWhat I wanted to do was what I did with my publication Photographs of old Ramsgate i.e. on photo per per page and produce it in A5 for connivance of handling and A4 to chop up and put the pictures on the wall.
I suppose the bottom line here is to keep all my local history books under £10 and me out of the bankruptcy court.
Zumi I have published some of the books I sell complete online bits of others and others with no content online and frankly it doesn’t seem to make any difference to the sales of the hard copy. One or two people tell me they have tried printing them out from the web but it costs more in ink than buying them in the shop.
ReplyDeleteI thought I had put page breaks in this last lot, they don’t come up Mr Sideways for me, I will try to sort the others out sometime I have often wondered how many pictures I have got published on the web.
Apologies, of course the latest lot of postcards were beautifully arranged in a vertical manner, so you've clearly got the hang of it. I was just thinking of your own pictures of powerboats etc in the Summer, completely forgetting this week's treasures... It's this going to work every single day, my brain is protesting, I'm just out of practice.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comprehensive explanation Michael.
ReplyDeleteI have some old photos on flickr. I imagine you've probably seen them all before but I thought I'd point them out just in case you haven't.
Chris thanks for the pictures many of them I hadn’t seen before, you have to appreciate my interest in local history is only about 3 years old. And my knowledge and experience in this area very small. People are inclined to think otherwise because I have published so many local history books since 2004 which is all frankly rather difficult.
ReplyDeleteZumi sorry about the never mind the quality feel the width pages, one day I will go there if I can find them and delete the worse pictures and make them stack up. I am afraid with my appalling knowledge web publishing I do things in a way that makes people who understand html go pale and run for cover. There are probably loads of pictures on the site not even liked to anything so no one can view them. I get many interesting emails complaining about the site some times from people who have had no sleep the previous night look at it. Hope you recover from full time employment soon.
ReplyDeleteWhere you at Ramsgate Harbour to see the New Endeavour? Late sixties I think.
ReplyDeleteJeremy I think you may mean the square rigged sailing ship that that was in Ramsgate Harbour beside the brick arches from 1969 to 1973 Australian owned like the New Endeavour she was called the Black Opal. I worked on her rigging and engine and will try to dig out some pictures and write something detailed about her, I am afraid it was all rather a long time ago. I know she wasn’t originally called the Black Opal and is now called the Black Pearl, has been pulled up out of the water and is used as a restaurant in Malta. I have looked at their website but most of the information about her time here is wrong so it’s not much help.
ReplyDelete