My Clarification of My Publisher

Last week I mentioned how I'm on a conquest to organize all our photos and get them in photo albums. One of the things that has held me back from doing this before is the cropping. I send my pictures off to Costco, but then Costco crops them to 4x6, which usually means a little off the top and a little off the bottom. It's not their fault, but if I'm not careful then I get photos back where people's heads are chopped off.

To avoid this issue, in the past I have manually cropped all the photos that I wanted printed. I hate this. It's tedious. It's too many decisions for one little photo. I don't want decisions. I just want it done.

That's where My Publisher came to the rescue. I just take the photo, drop it into the photo box on the template, and voila! I instantly see how it's going to be printed. I can zoom in if I want to crop it closer, but if it looks fine--no heads chopped off, no missing feet or hands--then I call it good. My Publisher has saved my photo sanity, and I'm just as tickled as a kid in a candy shop. With real sugar in the candy, mind you. None of this hocus pocus sugar free stuff.

 

However, I wanted to clarify what I said last week about the books being $35. Turns out, as I learned when I went to buy the book, the first 20 pages are $30. Then every page after that is $1. Somehow I had overlooked this little fact. My Publisher even has a feature in the program that lets you know how much your book is going to cost, but I failed to use it.

So. When I took my gorgeous photo book to the "check-out," I was a little distraught to see that my 91-page book was going to ring up as $100. I'll confess now that I would have paid $100 because I'd spent all that time and energy and enthusiasm and prayer in that one book, there was no turning back. But I was seriously bummed that my plan of creating a book for every six months wasn't going to work.

However, the silver lining is that because I'm a Costco member and had downloaded My Publisher from the Costco photo site, then I got a discount. Their coupons may change at any given moment, but it appears to be that currently the deal is 45% off orders over $100. For orders under $100, the discount is 25%. This means that if I had a 90-page book (totaling $99) my total would have been somewhere in the ballpark of $80-ish dollars (there's shipping to take into account). My 91-page book (totaling $100) cost $62, with shipping.

Thought you should know since I had even verbally mentioned to a few of you how amazing it was that I was getting nearly 100 pages of photo album for $30. I lied. Or rather. I was mistaken, and now I am correcting my ways. The lessons learned: if it seems too good to be true, maybe it is. AND, it's worth it to be a Costco member. I'd say, even if you weren't interested in buying toilet paper and diapers in bulk, if you're planning on doing a bunch of photo albums, it's worth it to get the Costco membership. Plus, who can beat their $1.50 deal of a polish dog/hot dog with a soda? Brilliant.

If you're interested in looking at more family photos than you ever thought you wanted to see of my family, here's a low-res version of the album (it takes several seconds to load). I'm taking a break from putting together 'January-June 2007' because clearly this is a project that once I start, I can't keep away from.

*****

(c) 2008 Creature Bug. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Sarah]

yep, that pricing thing happened to me to on my first book, good old costco helps out once again. nice looking book, i really like that monthly picture/header page, me thinks i'll have to use that for my books. way to my publish!

[Margaret]

I have a few head cropped shots too, but am too lazy to do anything about it. It does take lots of time to preview every photo. Your books are amazing and are worth it at any price!

[Inkling]

Yeah, that's what I meant about too costly for me to do right now. Sounds like about the same pricing as Shutterfly, where I usually get mine done. I think I'll just assemble them all and then print a couple per year. By the time the boys are grown we may be caught up.

[violetismycolor]

ah...what wonderful memories you are making!