Self Publishing Question

[fray]

I'm interested in making a photo book, or even a portfolio, with a small print run, 1-5 copies. I've looked into lulu.com, mypublisher.com, and printing through iPhoto.

Right now it looks like I'll have to make it in InDesign and export each page and then import those into whatever service I use. (I'd be able to make each page look how ai want instead of being restricted to a provided/lame template.) Kind of a pain but it seems to be the only way right now.

Anyone have experiences you would share?
Where did you go? Quality? Pricing? etc..

TIA

[Lilith]

Did you check to see if lulu and the other places will accept a PDF? InDesign will let you export out everything into a print-quality PDF (without having to do it a page at a time), but I'm not familiar enough with lulu.

[janxious]

Lulu will let you upload a pdf of a whole book, I believe. It requires the pdf be exported with some non-obvious options (At least for acrobat), but it seems to be pretty spiffy in general.

[theacemu]

If you'd like a print run of about 10,000 copies or more, i know of a few decent printers in China that could do it on the cheap. :)

Sounds like that won't help much though.

As ever,
ACE

[fray]

Yep, lulu will take a pdf. I'm trying to find out what kind of paper is used in a photo book as opposed to a normal book. The process is different between getting a photo book and non-photo book uploaded.