Above is the first blooming this year of the Poor Man's Orchid (left) and the second blooming for the Streptocarpus (right).
Have taken a few days off from studying the medical transcription textbooks and from transcribing medical dictation so that I can work on my book. The 98-page version (printed by Apple) with my drawings, paintings, sculpture and poetry costs more to produce than most people are willing to pay. Two friends and one of my cousins have bought the 98-page version anyway at the single copy price. If I ordered 100 or more copies from Apple, each book would still cost me $43.31, plus tax and shipping.
Encouraged by those three people who bought a copy of my book, I checked around town and found a digital printing company which gave me an estimate for a run of 100 books, which would bring my cost down to $18.60 per book. Unfortunately the proofs simply did not have the quality of the Apple version.
A few days ago, as an experiment, I duplicated the book twice in iPhoto and edited it down to two more affordable versions. The art work-only version is 46 pages, and the poetry version (with one photograph and one painting) is 42 pages. At that page count, the art version costs me $22.73 ($29.66, including tax and shipping). The poetry version costs me $20.77 (27.54, including tax and shipping). If I order 25 or more at a time, I get a 10% discount, bring the price per copy down to $20.43 and $18.67, respectively, not including tax and shipping.
So, with the edited versions, I'm back to about the same price per copy that I would have paid for the 98-page version that the local printer would do and have not sacrificed quality. Clearly I'm not going to make any money on my book this way, but it is a way to make it available. I'm happy with that.
Here are the front covers-in-progress for the 98-page (art and poetry) version, the 42-page (poetry-only) version and the 46-page (art-only) version of my book:
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