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iainblack

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Folks, a colleague turned me on to an excellent website (blurb.com) where you can import photos into a book template and it is printed in Holland and delivered to you (much like Moonpig). His 56 page book is 8x10 collage cost ?24 plus ?5 postage and it looks the business. He used a 5mp camera and the images are excellent. You can also scan them in but the sharpness is not too good. It took him about 3 hours to compse the pictures and text.

I was thinking that we could bring together a group of our Tokai Strat photos and have a page or two per guitar. We could agree a text format with Owner, model number, date of purchase / manufacture and any other spec items.

The postage is ?5 up to 5 books but I am not sure if we can send to multiple addresses. If we were to order 10 or over then we get a 10% discount. We may even have non contributors who would be happy to buy one or if you wanted to get a bulk order of 100 we could even sell them on amazon!

I am going to do one of my Daughter over Xmas holiday so if anyone is intersted in doing this I would be happpy to coordinate. We could even have a page for photos from the Tokai convention. PM me if you are interested or have any questions. You may want to check out the website.

I think it would be pretty cool for the money and we don't tend to print out digital photos so it would be a great coffe table book to drool over. Let me know what you think,

Iain
 
Cracking idea Iain! Only problem I see is getting people to sign up, we had enough of a problem getting more than 10 of us together for the convention, but if we can get past that then It would be great to have a nice printed book with some lovely Tokai pics, especially if they were our own guitars,

If you can get something going I'll happily contribute pics and a bit of text of my limited Tokai collection :D
 
Readers' wives? :D

They guy who sold me my sonic blue ST-55 was a portrait photographer, so I've got some decent (though unfortunatley small) photos of that.

I could offer my services as a proofreader too.
 
Cool, that is six of us and I would suggest 2 pages per guitar (centre spread!). I have 4 strats so that is 8 pages. Let me know how mnay guitars you want to feature and I will work out an individual price.

Are we making it strat only as I think a separate Les Paul one would be excellent.

I will look into whether we can share the template to look at the layouts / final draft. You would have to download the software but I may be able to send the file for you to view the book. I would be looking to do the 8 x 10 collage layout which will use about 6 photos over the two pages including a text box. I would think at least one full length photo with another close-up of the body and maybe the headstock. I was only going to include photos of the guitars but you could have one of you playing it?

jpeg files of 1.5 mb and above will give the best results however you can try a high resolution scan of photos and they will work but may not be as sharp.

I will have a look further over the Christmas holidays and maybe set up a questionnaire to cover all the options and variable you may want.

Is everyone happy to offer the book to other members who may not want to contruibute but would want to buy a copy to drool over?

Iain
 
Afraid all my Tokais are Les Pauls so if we're going Strats only I would have to wait for the next one, but I think a book containing both would be nice.

Happy for other forum members to buy copies :D
 
wasn't someone supposed to be writing a book about Tokais ??

the ideal person would be Tony Bacon ...he's produced some great stuff..

you'd need a "house style"...of decent photography ...

we don't want to see strats draped over a clapped out old sofa with the

missus knickers drying off in the background :lol:


...or maybe we do :p
 
just out of interest how many Tokai forum members are there....?

is it enough to tempt a publisher ???

a local newsreader i know..... has just published his "autobiography"...and

hardly anyone knows who he is ....so maybe it's worth there while ...
 
Would everyone be happy with a mixed book - more pages, economy of scale. I just thought that from the convention there were more than enough strats to do one book to inpsire the many les paul owners to do a separate one, some of their photos have been fantastic and the majority have visible wood grain whereas most of the strat we see are a coloured finish.

p.s. Jockai - as long as the knickers were ironed!
 
I have one or two Tokai Strats I could contribute. :wink:

So the idea is that we each take pics of our own guitars & they are compiled into a book? If that's so, then I concur that we need to agree on a minimum resolution & a "house style" of pics so that it doesn't look like a random collection of low quality pics stuck together in a book. We need decent quality images & a standard (non-distracting) background.

Should be achievable shouldn't it?

Mike
 
Have to disagree about the background Mike :wink:

I think some of the nicest shots are out-door shots with something interesing in the background, scenery, furnature, whatever, a pile of pics with a neuteral background would be dull IMO.
 
JohnA said:
Have to disagree about the background Mike :wink:

I think some of the nicest shots are out-door shots with something interesing in the background, scenery, furnature, whatever, a pile of pics with a neuteral background would be dull IMO.


Fine, I'll see if I can book Tower Bridge for a photo-shoot the first week after New Year is over......

:wink:
 
Mike, you have the concept correct however I was going to use existing shots on the basis that this chap just used his best holiday photos over the last 10 years on a 5 megapixel camera and it looks the business.

If I can get the template saved and share it with the contributors then we may be able to have editorial approval. You can zoom into shots, crop them rotate them etc. so it is not just pages of photos.

Check out the blurb.com webpage and they show you some samples layouts. I can try and get some screen shots of a couple of uploaded pages with my photos in them for you to coment on,

Iain
 
Folks, I have downloaded the software and done a bit of research on sharing draft books. There are two ways of doing this: it talks about prinitng off a pdf so I am not sure if I can save a pdf and circulate it or even post it on here. the other option is to save a draft to the website and give you all access via your email addresses.

Over the next few days I will do a mock up of two pages just to show the layout and quality.

I have had a suggestion that we could follow the age profile of models '54, '57, 62' etc with Springy, Goldie and Silverstar models as I think we have enough of each type of guitar (Strat, Les Paul). If there is enough interest maybe an all other models volume?

For a proposed title - The Tokai Registry (subtitle) Members Guitar Collection Vol. 1

Will post again when I have a mock up to share,

Iain
 
I think, if we're going to do this, there's something to be said for doing a book on each guitar type - Strats, Les Pauls, Teles etc. It will need some co-ordination to avoid duplication - it would be nice to have a range of models & colours, like we had at the convention.

As for order, do we do it by age (starting with 78/79 Springys, moving through to Goldstars), or by year of guitar copied (starting with '54 Strat copies, ending up with '70's copies (Silver Stars))? Either could work.

Is this something we would want to sell to all forum members? And maybe on eBay as well?
 
Hi Mike, thanks for that. This is what I propose for now unless there is majority opposition:

1. We do a Tokai Strat book first
2. Everyone who wants to contribute send me a list of strats, model, date of manufacture / purchase and date of model it emulates
3. I will compile the list in a proposed order and we debate on here to an agreed structure. I think this would be good to show a rage of colours of diffent models - we'll need a subsection for coloured headstocks!
4. People will send me their files via email and I will upload in the agreed order and then I will publish for approval by the individual.
5. For the front dust jacket I was going to put the shot of all the Strats lined up from the convention and on the back the grinning idiots holding their pride and joys fromt he same event.
6. Proposed title - The Tokai Registry (subtitle) Members Guitar Collection Vol.1
7. Once all contents agreed we can go to all members on this forum asking for order quantities to get a cost of publication.
8. We could do a reprint for ebay and amazon but we would have to agree on the basis for this - non profit?

Lots of options, please give me your feedback
 
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