Your local print shop is unlikely to be able to produce bound books like this one. Book printing is as much a manufacturing process as it is a printing process. Book printers are specialists - you won’t find them printing leaflets and business cards on the side.
The machinery needed for book printing is expensive, and not all machines can handle all kinds of books. The result is that each printing firm has a range of book sizes and types that it can produce. The range is pretty wide for most of them, but when dealing with the extremes of big and small books, colour work and unusual types of paper, you may have to look further to find the right printer. Most mass-produced colour books are printed abroad: China, India and parts of Europe commonly offer competitive prices.
Get printing quotes from as many printers as you can. Any money saved at this stage means fewer books will have to be sold to break even. There are too many uK book printers to list here, but you can find them all on one handy website: www.selectprinter.com.
HOW DO I CHOOSE A PRINTER?
Print on demand
There is an alternative to sticking your finger in the wind and trying to guess how many copies you’ll sell. Instead of gambling on a print run of one or two thousand copies, consider whether your book is suited to print on demand. To print in this way entails setting up your book files with a print on demand company, such as Lightning Source or Lulu.com. Your book is listed on websites such as Amazon and can be ordered by any bookshop. When an order is placed, it is sent electronically to the print on demand company. They print a copy of the book from the PDFs you supplied them. They then deliver the book to the shop that placed the order and issue an invoice on your behalf. When payment is received, they pass on a share of the money to you, the publisher.
It’s an efficient way of avoiding the need to tie up your money in stock (and keeps your living space uncluttered). It also ensures that your book need never go out of print. There’s a catch, of course, and that’s the price you pay per copy printed. It’s higher than when you print a thousand or so copies. Far higher. In fact, the costs are so high that this kind of printing only becomes cost-effective when the book is highly priced relative to its page count because the price you pay is determined by the number of pages in the book.
Let’s say a print on demand company charges a penny a page (black and white only) plus a pound for the cover (full colour). Paperback binding is included in those prices. Your book is a three-hundred-page novel that you want to make available in paperback at £5.99, which is a competitive price compared to other novels on the market. The cost of printing the inside pages will be £3.00 and the cost of the cover adds another £1.00, so that’s a total of £4.00 per copy. This amount is £1.99 less than the retail price. Great - nice profit margin. Except there’s no margin at all, in reality. Unless you’re able to sell the book directly to customers at the full retail price you will have to give a trade discount to retail shops and websites. The average trade discount is almost 50 per cent. Even allowing for the fact that self-publishers sometimes get away with offering smaller discounts such as 35 per cent, that still means the book cannot be sold profitably. And there may be other costs to bear, such as postage. So this method of printing won’t work for all selfpublishers.
Print on demand has other drawbacks. There is no warehouse holding stock of your book, therefore there is nowhere to which shops can return unsold stock. If a shop knows it can’t return your book it may be less likely to order it in the first place.
HOW DO I CHOOSE A PRINTER?
Poor print quality used to be an issue with print on demand, but books printed that way these days are usually indistinguishable from bulk-produced titles. But there will be restrictions on the size, binding and paper types that are available to you. Your book will have to be made from a set of standard ingredients so that it can be printed quickly and automatically.
Some things to aVoid when printing a book
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