Creating and Selling Photo Books Online

Thankfully, photo book companies help artists and business owners out by providing them the tools and solutions they need to sell their photo books next to creating them. Many of them offer bulk discounts, making it cost effective to order large quantities of your books so you can resell them on your own.

Selling through your photo book builder

A more advanced and convenient option to sell your photo books is by relying on the marketing options provided the photo book company itself. Quite interestingly, only Blurb offers this option for the U.S. market, even though the process itself is easy as pie: you create your photo book like you would do if you were a regular customer (with or without the help of the so-called Dream Team, a group of experts) and then you start selling in Blurb’s shop (or Amazon, Ingram, Apple iBook for that matter). Then you can leverage other marketing methods by linking to the pages with your books from other websites and social media pages. The selected company sells your book with custom prices, consisting of the base price of the photo book, a publication/distribution fee (does not apply to Blurb) and a profit margin you determine in advance. Furthermore, you still have the option to ask for volume printing of your photo book or even start a Kickstarter campaign to finance offset printing, warehousing and shipping.

Self publishing via Blurb

Sadly self publishing via Blurb comes with a price: you can create your book only with the photo book builder (whether it’s limited or not), printing costs are usually pretty high and profit margins are low. However, if you prefer convenience and complete freedom regarding publishing and distribution, this is the best solution of the market.

Selling directly on your own

Many photo book companies offer some way of bulk ordering books that holds several discounts and benefits for companies, groups and other parties interested in ordering one or more books in large quantities. With the bulk order discount, the more copies of the same product you order, the more you can save on said total, provided that the minimum amount of copies is 10 in most cases. The photo book company then delivers all those books on one address, and from then on you can start distributing and selling your self-created books as you please.

There are other benefits as well: almost all photo book companies offering this discount (like Shutterfly, Collage.com, Picaboo and PrestoPhoto just to name a few) can provide you a personalized quote. Furthermore, despite being obliged to pay in advance, certain companies like Photobook America let you ask for a print on demand, meaning that printing starts only when you are ready. If you order more than 100 copies or so, the chosen photo book company usually sends you a sample to see if you need some changes and you often have the option to ask for free (worldwide) shipping. However, regardless of the amount of copies, bulk order clients always get a dedicated representative through whom they can communicate with the company.