Underwater images - Margriet Tilstra

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A contest to win a ticket around the world in 2008 inspired me to write my first dive travelogue. One of the rules was that the size of the story was between 1000 and 2000 words, including an introduction of 45 words. Before I realized that, MS Word showed me that I had typed more than 3000 words. I noticed that more and more fond memories of our trips were coming up. Occasionally I took a look at my dive log to refresh my memory. I had fun and I wrote a few more stories. I did not win a prize, but I did learn a different way of writing instead of standard family stories with holiday snapshots.


In January 2012, I had 950 dives in my dive log. The magic number 1000 was coming. Over the years I had taken several beautiful underwater pictures. And thus arose the idea to combine my underwater photos and my stories in a real book. I wanted it to be special, not an ordinary book though.


A neighbor with a full service media agency made a first draft. With my limited knowledge of software, I composed the book in MS Word Publisher. After several weeks of evening and weekend work, it was ready. A local printing house made a proof, the large size of the book was the limitation for printing. It could be bound with PUR glue, but case bound with thread could only be done manually. The unit price was far above 100 euro and that was not my intention.

Looking for an affordable printer I contacted companies in Belgium, France, Italy, Slovenia, Hong Kong, Singapore and China. The best offer I got from Shanghai, with a minimum order of 500 books. The price per book was not too bad, but 500 books at once was a large amount, even in U.S. Dollars. I approached a few publishers in the Netherlands and Belgium to ask if they were willing to publish my book. Unfortunately the economic climate was bad, so they fell back on scripts in their stock.


In the meantime, I found out that the pictures I had dragged from Apple Aperture to MS Word Publisher were edited by MS Word. The quality was not good enough for offset printing. The only option was to re-create the entire book in Adobe Indesign. That was an expensive software and is now only available in the cloud for a monthly fee. The Adobe service desk told me that the licenses of older packets are transferable. Through my sister I came into contact with a graphic designer with a Creative Suite 5.5 version he was willing to sell. Now some Indesign lessons and I could start rebuilding my book.


So much for the status. The book is in progress, if you are interested please have some patience. If you have a clever idea for affordable printing of the book, or do you want to sponsor this project, please send me an email.


Around the world in 1000 dives

Book Specifications