My 600th post!

Arcadia Publishing has specific requirements for the photos in your Images book. You receive a written guideline and an editor that answers questions promptly. Your success is practically guaranteed – once your get the photos!

Images of America books are not family history books, so even if you grew up in a community, you must gather pictures. Multiple family’s pictures in the book are essential to telling the story.

In the case of a small community, probably the library will not have enough images to fill your book. You might have a small museum or historical society that stores pictures. Even though our museum is not open, one woman has pictures in her home. Here are the ways I started from 0 and gathered the 200+ pictures I needed for publication in 6 months.

- Our local Kiwanis magazine put in a free ad for me. – 1 direct call and one referral from her
- I walked the streets of Woodlake and talked to business owners, City Hall and Woodlake Police. – 2 donors
- Talking to friends in the grocery store – 1 prospect
- Following referrals from friends – 30 donors
- Cold calls to businesses – 1 potential donor who googled me to make sure I didn’t have a criminal record or wasn’t a sex offender before he called me too late for publication.
- Following referrals from referrals – 3 donors

Organizing was important, and took quite a bit of time as I processed the photos. These are my steps.
- As I started scanning photos, I put the PDFs into files in my document folder labeled by donor’s names.
- Next I created a “Woodlake PDF” and put in all of the donor folders.
- Each photograph sent to Arcadia was a TIFF file, so I processed
allmost files, and put them into a separate file with the donor’s name inside a large folder that said, “Woodlake TIFF.” - I didn’t write about every picture. In order to write, I used an unpublished blog account, because importing each picture to a Word file made Word crash. It is hard to write about a picture when you can’t look at it as you write, so the blog was perfect.
- However, that created another step. TIFF files are huge, so I resized each photo I used (or thought I might use) in the book and saved it as a JPEG, and created another Donor file and put it inside – you guessed it – the “Woodlake JPEG” file. Then I could upload those files easily to my blog, and the ones I didn’t use in the book I could post to FB or in my blog.
- Then I made files for the chapter titles and copied only the TIFFS into those files, numbering them for the book.
- Finally I copied the entire folder, “Arcadia,” onto an external hard drive. I started to copy all of it to the cloud, but it was very time consuming.
- After I submitted the manuscript and pictures, I began copying the JPEG files only to Picasa. I’m still not finished, and I hope it is worth the effort! I have them organized by subject rather than chapter, and I have one folder for all the images used in the book along with the caption, so that if I do another book, I will use different pictures, or be sure to credit the book as well as the donor.

That’s it. That’s how I gathered and organized hundreds of pictures in six months.
Congratulations on reaching 600 posts my friend 😀
What a great idea to use a blog for writing ! xox ❤
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It made it easy. I’ve been writing the blog way for over 2 years now. It was natural. I had to transfer each entry to a Word document to submit to the publisher, but that was a minor inconvenience. 🙂 Thanks for being my loyal blog friend and supporter, MFR 🙂 xox
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Well done on the 600th post, Marsha. I love the photo of the Edmistons. 🙂
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They just look like lovely grandparents, don’t they?
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Yes they look perfect. 🙂
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Congratulations! Happy 600th. I feel weary just reading about all the work you did to gather and sort these photos.
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That’s because you do so much already. You are picturing adding it to the things YOU do. I get weary reading about all of your accomplishments and travels. You are amazing. 🙂
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You are the premier member of the ET fan club Marsha! Thanks.
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🙂 You pegged me! 🙂
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Bravo! It is a lot of work. That’s what I’m finding as I step into the personal historian work.
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Do you advertise? Are most of your clients individuals or businesses?
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WHEW! Bravo!
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