The traditional form of book publishing — printing books on paper — has a degree of resonance that an electronic book pad arguably lacks. You might decide to augment your electronic publishing with paper publishing.
One of the attractive aspects of electronic publishing is that it embodies minimal up-front costs, and no long-term commitments. You don't have to warehouse electronic books, negotiate a deal with a distributor for them or arrange to ship them to your customers. None of this can be said of paper. A printed book may be easier to curl up with in bed — electrons cost a lot less to transport.
In reading this page, keep in mind that printed books are typically an expensive undertaking. This shouldn't immediately predispose you against them, especially if you feel that readers exist for whatever you've written, but you'll probably want to be sitting down when you review the quote for a printed book.
Going to Press
We've been involved with books since long before they were electronic, and if you'd like to get your manuscript printed as traditional books, we can assist you with this process.
Printing is a weird and slightly funky industry — to some extent because paper is a commodity, like oil and wheat, for which the price is constantly fluctuating. As such, while we'll be able to provide you with a specific quote for your book project, this section will deal in very rough numbers.
Getting a book printed requires that it be typeset — which means desktop-published in the new millennium — laid up and then actually printed.
For reasons we won't get into unless you're unusually curious, the book printing industry likes to see books formatted using a desktop Publishing application called Quark Express. Confronted with a Quark Express document file, book printers can transfer electronic pages directly to printing plates, without actually having to print the pages to paper and then photograph them to negatives, as was done during the dark ages of the twentieth century.
Direct-to-plate pre-press saves a fortune.
You probably won't want to buy and subsequently teach yourself Quark Express, which has a monster of a learning curve. Most of the work of printing a book that you'll be paying us for will be setting your manuscript up in Quark. The hypothetical 480-page novel that's previously turned up on this page would cost about $1500 to set up in Quark, allowing that we were provided with a suitable electronic source document, such as Microsoft Word files.
Actual printing costs are a bit tricky. Much of the final bill for printing a book is actually the setup costs for the press that will print it, and then the wash-up costs after the print run is complete. Ink and paper are relatively cheap. As such, if you want 1000 copies of a 480 page novel, you'll probably be looking at about $4000. If you want 5000 copies, you'll probably be looking at about $8000.
When we print books, we request quotes from a number of printers, as the print costs of individual printers vary with things like the paper they have on hand, and how much work they have on at the moment.
We can advise you about issues such as paper selection, cover stock, the use of color and other arcane aspects of lithography that will affect the final magnitude of your bill. Some of this stuff is pretty obscure, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can get soaked.
Finally, we've been dealing with a printer in Asia of late — they have very competitive pricing, and their work is second to none. The only catch is that their books have to be shipped half way around the world by sea container, so they're not exactly quick.
Every book is different — we invite you to contact us if you'd like us to quote on yours.
Sage Council
Before you decide to invest in a printed book, you should have two specific issues firmly by the throat, to wit:
- How will it be printed.
- How will it be distributed.
The first issue is why you probably need us, or someone like us. Commercial printers will print pretty much anything you tell them to print, but few of them will review your plans and advise you when something you've specified is going to make your book unusually expensive, or unattractive, or difficult to ship. Actually, commercial printers typically live for clients who show up with a book cover sketched on the back of napkin and a floppy disk full of Word documents.
Hiring us to turn your documents into a book before they get anywhere near a commercial printer will usually save you several times what we cost.
Here's a simple example. As was noted in the gray box at the beginning of this page, four-color printing costs a lot more than single-color printing because of the additional plates, presses, setup, wash down and alignment required to accomplish it. If you're printing a book with some four-color in it, you can reduce the cost of the four-color printing therein by only printing four color on one side of the pages.
Books are printed in "signatures" — large sheets of paper which are subsequently folded and trimmed to produce pages. If you take an 8½ by 11 inch sheet of paper and fold it in half sixteen times, you'll have an idea of how a printed signature works. You'll also have an idea of how tricky it would be to identify where to put the four-color pages so they all wind up on one side of the original signature sheet.
There are dozens of aspects of book printing like this to keep track of.
Distributing your printed books is something you'll want to educate yourself about before you start choosing paper stock and designing a cover. Getting a book you've published yourself or had published by a small press into conventional distribution channels is exceedingly difficult. Perhaps that should be "virtually impossible."
It can also be somewhat perilous.
Unless you've written a book that is intrinsically attractive to a huge audience — something truly shocking involving the British royal family, a diet that will allow for the loss of twenty pounds per day without any exercise whatsoever or a foolproof method for choosing winning lottery numbers — few book shops will want anything to do with it. Actually, there aren't all that many bookshops left — most have been subsumed by the big box bookstores, and they'll want even less to do with your book.
Niche-market books that sell a few hundred copies per year don't command the attention of businesses that sell a few hundreds copies per second.
Some of the on-line book retailers will let you sell your books through their pages, which seems to be a side door into mainstream retail distribution. You should read the terms of these distribution agreements carefully before you commit to them. They typically involve fairly thin margins — you'll receive a relatively small portion of the sale price of each book, even though you'll have paid for the entire cost of its printing — and you'll have to undertake to ship orders for your books when customers buy them, a not-inconsequential activity.
Prior to signing a check for a print run, you'll need to figure out how you'll attract the attention of your readers, how they'll find and pay for your books and how you'll get paid. We can assist you with this to some extent — you might want to have a look at our marketing page. This having been said, no one can wave a magic wand, a magic pen or a magic web page and conjure up a readership for you.
One compelling reason to get your books printed is that they're selling so well electronically — which means that this page probably shouldn't be the first part of our web site you look at.