Publish Online Project of the Month: Kia Sportage

Michael W. Perry says:

Beautiful, most certainly. But all those marvelous pictures at exotic locales and in unique lighting don’t come cheap, much less the videos. I shudder to think what they cost.

The old expression “words are cheap” has a double meaning. It can mean mere words in comparison to deeds. But it can also mean that conveying ideas with pictures can cost far more than doing so with words. The old expression “a picture is worth a thousand words” may end up meaning that picture costs more than a thousand words. Add to that the fact that it’s much harder to get a picture or a video right than a bit of text. Even ordinary people are used to the expensive standards of movies and network television. It’s hard to play that game if you don’t have the money. What you do ends up looking like an ad for Crazy Al’s Used Cars.

I’m not down on that KIA ad. I’m just pointing out that, while creating it with Adobe tools isn’t that hard, creating the raw materials to make it cost quite a bit.

Check out my most recent books and you’ll find that I’m using a workaround, creating covers and chapter introductory photographs from inexpensive stock photos. I’m lucky. The books are about when I worked in a children’s hospital and there are lots of pictures of cute kids in a hospital setting pretending to be sick. But I were writing on a different topic, I tell myself, what would I do to make it more visual? I draw a blank.

I’m hardly alone. Even large publishers from authors who always have bestsellers tend to use little, if any, images, not even line art sketches. I have a sense that a lot of print and ebooks could be better if they were more visual, but I don’t see it happening. People expect books to be all text, so all text they remain. People expect car ads to be visual, glitzy and expensively done and they are, even for people like me who’d rather the car ads gave more technical specs.

And there we are stuck. Books that are sea of text and ads that appeal most to two-year-olds. It does seem there should be ways to make books more varied without silliness like making the text dance around.

I’m actually finding a use for Publish Online to offer previews or samples of my books without the cost of printing and shipping them. But I’d love to hear more ideas, including how ways to tweak that dull text into something that’ll make the sample more than just a slice of the book.

In short, it’s easy to make a KIA Sportage look exciting. I’d like to find a way to at least make a discussion of the contents of a book seem appealing. If I can’t say, “Zero to sixty in six seconds,” what can I say?