Book of the Week: Hats for Haiti

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Let’s hear it for the creative good – the people who come together and pool their talents in the hopes of making a difference. We are talking about our friends at Flickr and want to give them a huge shout out.

Hats for Haiti

Take a look at Hats for Haiti, a collaborative book by Tony Eccles and the Flickr community. We caught up with Tony and asked him a few questions about the project – which by the way successfully raised a tidy sum for relief efforts in Haiti.

Here’s what Tony had to say:

Blurb: Why hats? Great idea – how did you come up with it?

Tony: My girlfriend is a teacher and her school had heard about this idea from our National Health Service doing something similar. I thought it sounded fun, interesting and most of all easy to do, so I decided to run with it on Flickr.

Blurb: How long did it take from idea to book?

Tony: It took a lot longer than I thought because of all the people involved. It started off with me choosing a few people to help me pick 150 or so photos for the book. Then the question of copyright and getting permission from the people in the photos came up and I had to send out hundreds of emails. The hardest part was matching the responses to the photographs. Sounds complicated but in total it just under two weeks to produce.

Blurb: How many people contributed? Ultimately, how many made it into the book?

Tony: Over the 24 hours on the Friday we had 675 people contribute. This rose to more than 1,000 before I closed the group for posting. Around 150 made it to the book.

Blurb: How much money did the book sales raise for Haiti?

Tony: The money was raised in two stages. On the Friday of the event around $1,100 was raised in donations from the three main contributors: Amy Spanos, Austin Vinas, and myself.  Since the book was released it has made around another $450.

Blurb: Have you done other Flickr community books? Any on the horizon?

Tony: Not yet! But Since the Blurb side of things was so simple it is something that I will definitely be doing again!

Blurb: Did you put the book together yourself? Did you use Blurb BookSmart® or our PDF to Book work flow? How long did the actual bookmaking take?

Tony: I used the BookSmart software downloaded from Blurb. Simple and effective. I put the book together in about three evenings and it took about three hours total.

Blurb: Is there anything you’d like to add that we didn’t ask?

Tony: Just another big thank you to everyone who contributed!

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