Preparing Video Studio Corners

Are you gearing up for gardening too? Or is that in your far distant past?

I've made references over the last 7 months to my project of updating and producing new editions of my Family History and Genealogy e-books. At first I thought it would take me about two weeks - so I should be done at the end of February. Well, those books have grown and become quite something!

Just last week I researched how to design modern attractive covers for these e-books. I feel like I did a fairly good job on that! But I won't show them to you until next week. That's when I think I'll be ready to sell them from my genealogy site. :) There are four books altogether.

The family history that I wrote from 1985-88 was done on a shoestring budget (too short to tie around a finger!) I typed up the stencils on an old Underwood typewriter (yes, before computers), and then I cranked off the pages on an old manual Gestetner that had been given to me. I bound each of the books by hand too. So now, I've transcribed that book, making it digiral, added an assortment of photos - including coloured ones, and updated the genealogies in the Appendix. It is MUCH improved!

The other three books were done as print books which I printed and bound myself as orders came in. Now they are all e-books too, and one of them has tripled in size from about 200 pages to over 600 pages! With photos!

I want to encourage those who buy these e-books, that if they prefer a printed copy, they may print it out themselves and bind it in one of two ways. Or they could take the printed pages to a print-shop and ask them to bind it in a matter of a couple of minutes. They might charge a dollar or two for that service.

But it has occurred to me that some people will complain that they don't know how to do all that. So I plan to prepare some how-to videos to put on my site to show them that it isn't that hard.

Now, I've looked around and the backgrounds behind my head as I'm doing these stages, printing and binding are rather cluttered. I can't really think of any way to tidy up everything around my computer and printer, so I may just have to live with that, but for the binding, which I do in my little basement, I have an idea. I will start on that today!

It involves hanging some curtain rods in front of my storage shelves, focusing some bright lights in that direction. Then I want to turn some upholstry material into a solid, more or less flat background, but then hang some soft, brighter sheer material over that to make the area less severe-looking. I'll use these corners (I've identified 3-4 that should work) for these how-to videos, and hoping that I can get into doing more of such how-tos, I will consider these corners as my video studios.

Of course, I will have to do some serious down-sizing and getting rid of some stuff to make more than one such corner possible. So I'm hoping to get one corner done this week, and maybe by spring I'll have got a couple more ready to use.

When my sister Elsie moved to BC in the 1990s, she gave me her two manual machines for binding. One punches the holes and the other holds the cerlox comb until I've carefully threaded the punched page holes onto the curls. But it only takes about 5 minutes to bind a book that way.

Oh, and I also have a laminating machine so that I can laminate the covers to make them more durable if the book is to be opened and used quite a lot. They also make the covers look much smarter, more attractive! Of course, I do that step before the binding process.

[Back to Archives Index ] ~~ [Back to Main RoseBouquet Page]