Julie Broad (Book Launchers) explains practical best practices for using graphics, images, and illustrations in nonfiction books. Key guidance: avoid celebrity/trademark images and don’t copy images from the web without rights; carefully read royalty-free/stock licenses (editorial vs commercial, reproduction limits); decide whether images must be color (color increases print costs) and consider ebooks/website hosting as alternatives; ensure charts/graphs convert to B&W (use patterns, not gray shades); understand photo ownership (photographer retains copyright even for photos of you); prepare files for the interior designer (place markers in Word, keep image files separate), and supply high-resolution images (300 dpi or better, roughly ≥1 MB) in JPEG, EPS or TIFF; watch image orientation for portrait book layouts.
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Are you thinking of putting graphics in your nonfiction book? If you are, and you're curious about the rights to republish, the size of the image you need, and what you should do with your black and white photos, well then this video is absolutely for you. Hey there. I'm Julia, the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on on your readers. And done right will help you grow your brand, build your business and make you money. The best part, you. Yes, you keep all rights and royalties. All right, let's get right to this. Illustrations, graphics, images. What can you use? What should you use in your nonfiction book? This is a big subject and let me first make it clear I am not a trademark and copyright attorney. So what I'm advising are the best practices we recommend to our clients. But you should consult with a copyright attorney if you're wanting to use an image that you don't have the rights to use. I understand and appreciate that a picture can be as valuable as a thousand words. Nothing can simplify a seemingly complex concept like an illustration or a graph. But before you get really married to the idea that a certain image has to be in your book, let's make sure it's a good idea. Number one, generally speaking, it's wise to stay away from celebrity or trademarked images because you do not want to be sued and those images tend to be defended fiercely. Newspapers and magazines use these images under fair use law. As they're using them for the purpose of criticism and comment. They've often paid for the images as well in order to have the rights to use them. 2. Images you download from the Internet, full stop. You don't have the rights to just randomly grab images from someone's website or social media and use them. It doesn't matter if you credit the source or not. You just can't do this. Some people think the Internet is a place where you can take any image and use it. Nope. So now if you are a more savvy user, you may look for royalty free images, but it's still not 100% that you can use that image in your book. There are some great websites I use for getting images for posting on our blog and website and social media. There's sites like Pixabay, Getty, Istock, Shutterstock, and Dreamstime. But first, let's be clear. Royalty free images are not free. There are some that are free. They've been uploaded to the public domain for limited rights usage. But typically royalty free images are licensed for a price and the photographer or the stock agency retain their copyright. You pay for the right to use the royalty free photo to with the accepted terms, but you only pay once and then you can usually use the photo as many times as you want. There are a couple things to note for authors though. The first is that this is a limited use license. If you want to use the image in your book, you may have to buy a more extensive license. Read the fine print. Some are for editorial use only, which is not part of a book. Editorial images can be used for newspapers, magazines, editorial broadcasts, non commercial websites, blogs, and social media posts that illustrate matters of public interest. Again not commercial use. You need to be allowed to have the image used for commercial use for wider distribution or reproduction and as a result you may have to pay more. And some have a limit on how many times they can be reproduced. But good news, it's usually at least 250,000 times. So pretty much an author's dream come true would be to have to worry about selling and printing that many books. Also keep in mind this is not an exclusive agreement. Other people can license and use the same image. Third thing Color versus Black and white. This is a complex question, but the simple considerations are this. Do you need the image? If so, can it work as black and white? If not, you have to enter the color territory where your book print costs will go up quite a bit. The thing to watch out for is that some color images convert just fine to black and white, but others lose their contours, contrast and really their impact. So if you're really keen on having pictures but you want to have a print book that is not in color or for cost sake, you have a couple options. You can have color in the ebook and have a free download option for people who buy your book so they can see the color images. Or you can have those beautiful images on your website and link to them there so people see them. The good part of this is then you're sending them to your website where they can then sign up for your newsletter and stay connected with you for the long term. 4. Charts and graphs Some of our clients have presentations that they give that have charts and graphs and they are meet for their slots. I am a robot. Some of our clients have taken presentations that they've given and taken a lot of that content and put it in their book including the charts and graphs. This can work well. However you have to be certain the color in those charts and graphs converts to Black and white as well. My recommendation is to use patterns to distinguish different lines or pie pieces instead of trying different shades of gray and black to make your point, because those can be really hard to see. Number five Just because an image has has you in it doesn't mean you have the rights to use it. We've seen this with some of our more famous clients. There'll be images of themselves from the media or even stock photo sites, but they can't just download it and use it for their own purposes because they actually don't own the picture. It seems a little bizarre because the pictures of themselves, but the ownership belongs to the photographer. If you took the picture, then you're good to use it unless it contains a trademark symbol in it, in which case you may want to gray that out. Now, a few other little details. Got your pen? You're probably going to want to write this down. Don't try. Try to place your images in the Word document instead. Label the image and the place in the book where it should go in the Word document. Keep them saved in a separate file that you'll send to your interior designer. When you hit that phase, it messes up Word to try to keep them in the document and it changes the size of the image and the layout person's going to need them separate from the Word doc anyway. So save yourself the hassle and do it from the beginning. Your images need to be 300dpi or better. That's dots per inch. Anything smaller and your image will be fuzzy and that's not good. Essentially, if your image isn't at least one megabyte, it's too small. It's gotta be high resolution and the file type JPEG, EPS or TIFF. GIFs are web images only and PNGs are too small. Final point, the orientation of the image matters a lot more than you think. A lot of images on the web are made landscape for rectangle screens, but images in a book are portrait. This requires some editing and can mess with your image too. That was a lot of detail and I could have covered even more. What did I miss? Or what other questions do you have? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbookswag like this mug. Coffee, tea and hot chocolate are proven to taste better in it. Or this oh so soft journal. And when you do that, you'll be one step closer to being one of my beloved YouTube besties like Erin Crowley. XJP 1998 Efren Delgado, Sandra Rodriguez Poetry from the Heart Joyce Robinson, Alan west and Andy W. Thank you so much for always liking, commenting and sharing my videos. You are the best. That's why you're my besties. We have new videos every Tuesday and Friday. Make sure you catch everyone by subscribing to the channel and turning those notifications on. Well, I think you're rather fun. Would you like to spend a little more time together? This video right here is the latest and greatest from the channel, and this one right here is also about images and whether you should put your face on the COVID of your book. They are both pretty awesome. So choose the one you want to see and I'll be waiting there for you with coffee. I'm excited to hang out a little longer.
