The fall season is almost here and for many of us, that means football, tailgating and good times with family and friends. We’re celebrating the start of the new season with all new book sizes and cover styles. We’ve bolstered our photobook lineup with the 7×5 Mini Brag in hardcover and softcover styles starting at just $9.95. Plus, you can now make the 8.5×8.5 Simple Square in hardcover and the 8.5×11 Ultimate Portrait in softcover. Have you already made a Simple Square softcover or Ultimate Portrait hardcover and want to change to one of the new cover styles? Just select the “Copy Book” link while signed-in on your Inkubook member homepage and we will give you the option to change the cover with a single click.

Order any book, whether it’s one of the new rookies or one of our old veterans, by Sunday, September 27, 2009 and enjoy free standard ground shipping to U.S. addresses (or $8.99 off any other shipping method). Just enter code KICKOFF09 during checkout. (Code may be used once per customer. Not valid with any other offer or promotion).

So get started today. It’s always free to join and get creative with Inkubook. You only pay for printed photo books.

It’s too late to make a photo book for mom but it’s not too late to order her an Inkubook gift card. Photo book gift cards make great gifts for moms who love to make digital scrapbooks & photo books. Just order online and you can have it sent electronically or print it out and put it in a card. It doesn’t get much easier than that. 

Check it out: http://inkubook.com/gift_cards/default.aspx

You’ve worked hard for your money and we think you deserve to keep more of it. So, for a limited time, regardless of income, everyone qualifies for the 28% photo book savings bracket at Inkubook. All you have to do is make a drop-dead gorgeous photo book or online digital scrapbook and order by Friday, April 17, 2009. That’s it. No complicated forms to fill out. No receipts to dig up. We’ll even let you order up to ten copies of your book at the discounted price. Now that’s a sweet deduction.

Just enter coupon code INKUTAX09 during checkout to claim your deduction. You deserve it.

Note: Offer cannot be combined with any other offer or promotion. Coupon may be used one time per customer for up to ten copies of the same book. You may not file an extension to get the 28% discount past the April 17, 2009, deadline.

Spring might not have officially sprung yet, but it’s not far off. Soon it will be time for gardening, soccer, baseball, Mother’s Day and graduation parties – all fantastic photo book-worthy occasions. At Inkubook, we’ve been busy getting ready for the spring photo book season by making several improvements, including enhancements like deleting photos from your photo gallery, working with text in your photo book, new photo book backgrounds & layouts and more.

To help launch you into spring, Inkubook has a sweet BOGO offer to share with you: Buy one photo book of any size or page count and get a second copy of the same photo book free!  With savings of up to $69.95, now is a great time to make a drop-dead gorgeous photo book. Make one as a gift and keep one for yourself!

Don’t miss out. This offer ends St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2009. Just enter coupon code SPRINGBOGO during checkout to save some serious green! Offer cannot be combined with any other offer or promotion. Coupon code may be used one time per customer for one photo book.

Enhance your rugged travel photos with the
backgrounds from the Outdoor Adventure theme.

If you like outdoor activities like hiking, mountain biking, camping or fishing, you’re probably really looking forward to spring about now. It’s the time of year when the boat, sport and travel shows come to town and we’ve all had enough of the cold. As you gear up for spring it might just be the perfect time to break out the photos from last year’s camping trip and make a great travel and adventure themed photo book.

When we first started creating themes and collections of backgrounds for Inkubooks, we thought we had all our bases covered. We had a variety of family themes, kid themes, and travel themes, not to mention the more practical themes such as cookbook, business book, and portfolio. Then someone on the Inkubook team said, “Where’s the manly outdoors theme? You know…the one for people who like to hike and camp and stuff like that?” That’s when we realized that we’d overlooked the outdoor enthusiasts in the crowd, and we decided we’d better correct that situation PDQ.

Swatches from the Outdoor Adventure Theme

Hence the Outdoor Adventure theme was born. All of the backgrounds in this collection are clean and simple, so your photos can do the talking. This theme is inspired by the types of trail signs you might see in a state or national park and the color scheme runs toward the colors you’d find when shopping for gear at an outdoor outfitter: foresty green, earthy sand, and fiery orange (although it’s not quite fiery enough to be called blaze orange).

If your vacations and weekend getaways are about roughing it with a tent, an outdoor shower, and a camp stove instead of a down comforter, a whirlpool garden tub, and a five-star restaurant, this theme is for you. Look for it in the Travel category when you start a new book. (And if you prefer a more luxurious vacation, you might want to check into our other travel themes.)

We’ve heard from lots of people during the past couple months, and one of the things that has become very obvious is that people have been dying for us to release the 11″ x 11″ Great Big Square. OK…maybe “dying” is a little too strong, but there’s definitely been an outpouring of enthusiasm for this bad boy.

The time has finally arrived. The Great Big Square book is here. Like all hardcover Inkubooks, it’s printed on silky 100lb. archival-quality paper and is bound in a durable laminate cover. It’s perfect for collecting scrapbook layouts or honoring a very special person or occasion.

If you’re a scrapbooker who’s been waiting patiently for this size to be released so that you can make a book of your LOs, this link opens a document that gives details about how to size your images appropriately for the pages.

From now until November 30, 2008, when you buy one Great Big Square you can get a second copy of it for FREE! Use code ELEVENBOGO when you check out. (This offer cannot be combined with any other promotions or offers.) You can print this coupon and keep it close to your computer so you have it handy when you need it.

I am frequently awed by the magnificent works of art that people are able to turn out through digital or traditional scrapbooking. I mean, I can barely draw a rectangle using a software application or put a stamp on an envelope without it being crooked or upside down. So I can pretty much forget about creating a beautiful scrapbook page. I am, of course, envious of the people who are artistic and use Inkubook to collect their LOs.

This is a gorgeous layout, but some of the text on the
right page gets a little lost in the gutter.

Making a photo book of scrapbook layouts is one of the most popular uses of Inkubook, so even though I’m jealous I can put my envy aside in the interest of helping to bring more beauty into the world.

It’s not uncommon for someone who’s working on a layout book to ask our support department the following question: “How do I need to size my layout so that it fills the full page?” Consequently, we’ve prepared a PDF that will hopefully fill in some of the blanks. This PDF addresses such things as

• What is the size of the page before it’s trimmed?
• How much of the page is trimmed off?
• If I have text on my page, how do I avoid having it run into the gutter?

I could go into all of those details here, but the PDF describes it much more concisely than I ever would, and it includes four very nice diagrams that show all the trim lines. It’ll be better if you just check it out.

If you’re still having difficulty knowing how to size your image after looking at the PDF, our support team is standing by to answer additional questions. You can access our live chat support service through our Support page, or you can email support@inkubook.com.

Here at Inkubook, “We want to improve” is our middle name. Sure, it’s virtually impossible to fit on a standardized form, but getting better is important to us so we live with the inconvenience.

Getting better at what we do means taking the feedback we receive seriously. One thing that has come up often, both in responses to surveys we’ve done and in conversations you’ve had with our support staff, is that the full-page bleed layouts necessary to upload your very own scrapbook designs aren’t easily found. We plan to rectify that as best we can as soon as we can by making sure that the full-page bleed layout is available by default in the Layouts gallery. In the meantime, though, we’d like to give you some tips that might help you find it when you’re looking for it.

Currently the full-page layout for the 8.5″ x 8.5″ book is not in the Layouts gallery when you start a book. But we do have one. You just need to add it to your gallery so that you can place it on your pages. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure you’re on a page of the book (not one of the covers) and click the Layouts tab.
2. Click More at the left end of the gallery. This will show you all the available layout options for this size book, and it looks like this: 
3. The full-page bleed layout that you’re looking for (one without any other photo or text continers) is in the second row, second from the left. See the picture below for the exact location. We’ve included a shockingly pink arrow and callout so you can’t miss it.
4. Click the layout then click Apply. It’ll be added to your Layouts gallery and will be placed on the active page.

Here’s where to find the full-page bleed layout in the 8.5″ x 8.5″ book.

In the 11″ x 8.5″ landscape book and the 8.5″ x 11″ portrait book, the full-page bleed layouts are a little easier to locate because they’re already in your Layouts gallery. There are two pictures below to show you exactly what you’re looking for.

This is where the full-page bleed layout is in gallery of the landscape book…

…and this is the location in the gallery of your portrait book.

You are now properly armed with the information you need to put your digital LOs (or scans of your traditional scrapbook pages) into a drop-dead gorgeous book.

Just so you know, one of the other bits of feedback we’ve received is the suggestion that we should create a feature that allows you to apply the same layout to every page. We think that’s a great idea. We don’t want anyone to get repetitive stress injury from having to drag the same layout onto every page of a book. This is a feature that we definitely plan to implement. In the meantime, we hope you’ll bear with us as we work through the list of all the things we want to do.

We’re standing by to hear more of your feedback, so please use our Feedback form to send us a note. Otherwise, we encourage you to get started on your book. If you make one that you’re really proud of and you’d like to share it with us, use the Invite Friends feature to send an invitation to ckughen at Inkubook dot com. If you give us permission to use it, your book might end up in one of our sample galleries!

One of our Inkubook members is a fantastic scrapper named Vicki. Actually, we’re pretty certain that lots of our members are fantastic scrappers, but Vicki gave us a shout out on her blog that really grabbed our attention and made us blush with pride.

Vicki, who lives across the pond in Bristol, UK, found out about our free book promotion, so she decided to try us out. She couldn’t possibly have been more complimentary in her review of us. Best of all, she was really pleased with her book when she received it. Check out the picture of one of her spreads.

A beautiful spread from Vicki’s Inkubook.

Not only is Vicki a scrapper, but she’s a designer, too. She’s currently in the process of releasing a set of elements called Autumn Dream, which has designs and colors that make us want to run through leaves on a crisp fall day before coming inside for some hot chocolate. Make sure to have a look; we’re certain they’ll make you have that autumnal feeling, too.

If you’re into scrapping, check back tomorrow for some hints on how to find the elusive full-page bleed layouts necessary to upload pages you’ve designed. We’ve had lots of questions about that, so we’ll have some answers for you. Please let us know what other comments you have or what problems we can help solve. And if you’re ready to get stated making your own Inkubook of LOs, hop on over to the site and sign in.