5 Things to Know About Book Printing

Short run, long run, bleed, trim, print on demand, CMYK treatment. Are you recognizing these words or are you wondering what the heck I'm talking about? If you're an author and you don't know what these things mean, well my friend, your physical book may not meet your standards when you hold it in your hands. So this video on things Every Author Might Not Know But Should Know About Book Printing. Well, it is book you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of this fabulous self publishing company called Book Launchers. I'm also the author of four books, two specifically written four authors. Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed. You can pick them up together over@self publishand succeed.com bundle and when you do, I have included some special gifts to support your author journey. Now let's talk book printing. Many authors underestimate the complexities of printing. They dream of a beautiful full color hardcover book with an embossed cover and then when they go to order that they find out that they're going to have to get a new mortgage on their house to pay for it because they have to order thousands of copies months and months before launch. And then they're going to have to charge their readers like $60 a copy. Probably not going to happen. All right, so before I get into a bunch of things you should know, let me ground whole conversation in what really matters, focusing on what you need to succeed with your bigger picture goal. Because of course holding a beautiful book in your hands will make you feel amazing. But is that what needs to happen in order to achieve your goals? In other words, are you going to be more successful when you get fancy and complicated with your book? In some cases you have to have color inserts in your book like Patrick Chauvin's book for Pilots and has color charts that must be color. They cannot be converted to grayscale because they won't translate. In those cases you can use print on demand, but it's not as cost effective as doing a long run print order where you order 500 plus copies of your book so that you can get the cost per copy down on each book. If you are confident you can sell a few thousand copies of your book, then it's worth it to invest in the print run because you'll get a much better per unit cost and a more consistent print quality across all books. But if you can do a simple grayscale book, even if you have some graphics in it, it can still look really great and you have more options and it can be done more Affordably. What matters is whether these choices will help you sell more books and reach more readers. And even more importantly, reach your bigger picture goal as an author. All right, so let's talk print specific stuff, shall we? First, let's talk print runs. You should understand long run, short run, and print on demand. Long run printing is essentially anything over 500 copies, and it's done offset. It prints from plates. And I did a video explaining what offset printing is, so I'll link to that at the end. Essentially, because they literally set up plates to print your book. It's more consistent, but it's way too expensive to do for a small number of books. But the more you print, the cheaper it gets because you've spread out the cost of the setup across more copies of the book. If you do long run, then you're having to set up a seller account with Amazon or some other wholesaler to sell and distribute your book. It's doable, but it's an extra step and something to know. A short run is something under 500 copies. It's done digitally. This is one of the great options of our day because it allows you to personalize books if you want to do that. Like when I'm sponsoring an event or I was sending out review copies, I set up a specific page inside of my book that says, hi, NSA speaker, hi early reader, and I give them a special personalized message. So these digital print runs allow you to do that. Of course, it also allows us to have print on demand, which is a beautiful thing that allows us to print essentially one copy at a time so as the book sells, it can be printed and shipped out. The big thing with print on demand or short run is that there's no make ready step of setting up the plates. So there's no cost difference between printing one copy or printing 1000 when it's digital. The beauty of print on demand is that whether you do it through Ingram or KDP or one of the other companies like Draft2Digital, which is basically just using Ingram for their printing and distribution of the print copies. But regardless, the Beauty of that versus the long run, or even printing 500 copies yourself, is that you don't have to do anything after the file is set up. They are printing and distributing the book to retailers for you. Well, you got to market it so it sells, but that's a different topic. All right, next thing, color profiles. Color is a big deal when it comes to printing. You need to get the files right, which is actually a whole other conversation because a lot of file types don't actually print as nice, but that's a different thing. So when you're printing in color, it needs to be with CMYK versus rgb. And if you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, well, you better make sure you have a professional designer who also knows book publishing working on your team. CMYK is an acronym for the four ink plates used. Cyan, magenta, yellow and key, which is black. This is stuff I am not an expert on. It's why my team is big and full of specialists, because it is just not possible to be an expert in all the things. You should see them geek out about fonts and colors. If you want to make Kassy, our lead designer, happy for a month, just buy her a new font package. I'm not even kidding. Let me do my best to give you the basics on this so you know the fundamentals. And then if you need more expertise, well, I'm not your gal. But if you're an author wanting a team of professionals that can help with all of this, well, you're in luck. We absolutely can help. You can schedule a call with us here@booklaunchers.com apply anyway. The CMYK model works by partially or entirely masking colors. The ink reduces the light that would otherwise be reflected from a white or light background. People call this subtractive color model because ink subtracts the colors from white light. Rgb, which you should not use, is the opposite. It's additive. It's the combination of primary color lights. Black isn't a color, it's the absent of light. So why does this matter? Well, because of computer screens. A computer monitor mixes shades of red and green and blue light to create color pictures. That's not how the CMYK printer is going to work. If you want, it's going to use light absorbing cyan, magenta and yellow inks. So what happens? You look at your RGB screen and think the book looks good and then you print it out and don't like it. So there is a lot to know here and I'm surely going to get something wrong if I keep going. But my point is just to make sure you've got a pro on your side and that you know this is something you need to watch out for. All right. Third thing is bleed and trim. I sometimes joke that I started Book Launchers so that I would always have a team to figure out this stuff for me. And while that's not the total reason I started Book Launchers, man is it great to just be able to let my team figure out all these things so I don't really have to know because I pulled my hair out the first time I was doing a book trying to figure out what these things were and make sure I didn't mess it all up. I'm going to keep it real simple for you. Bleed is a printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the line where the book will be trimmed. The bleed is super important because getting it right ensures the color will go all the way to the edges of the COVID when it's printed. It's why you can't just use the same cover file for soft cover as hardcover or it will look amateur because the sizes are different. The bleed has to go beyond the trim line or you will have a white line on the outside. I've mentioned trimming, but what you are likely familiar with or you'll need to know when you go to design and upload your book for printing and is trim size, which is essentially book size. After each copy is printed and bound, the book is mechanically trimmed. So the size of every book is uniform and every page is uniform and the trim size dimension is something like 6 by 9. Trade paperback sizes will range from anywhere from 5 by 5 or 5.5 by 8.5 or 6 to 9, which is also known as US trade. Of course there are plenty of other trim sizes, but the prices do get impacted the fancier you get because of the wasted paper, which increases your print costs. Common sizes for Nonfiction books are 5.5 by 8.5, 6 by 9 and 7 by 10. Of course I could go more into this, but let's switch to treatment. Ananda Raja's book A Stroke of Gratitude has a beautiful cover. It doesn't come through in this picture, but it's got embossing which is raised letter and a foil treatment and it is just stunning. This required an offset print run with a printer that could do that. Here's the thing though, hopefully you caught what I said. This kind of thing doesn't show through a digital image very well. So when you're actually looking at the physical book, it's stunning. It catches your eye. If it's sitting on a table, you'll probably gravitate to it. But in today's digital era where your books are likely going to sell via that little thumbnail image, those extra touches that make the book feel so good with when it's in your hand and would sell it when it's physical, they don't help it sell Digitally. So it goes back to my original comment about making sure the things you do are going to appeal to your reader and help you achieve your bigger picture goal. Many authors will still do a beautifully bound and designed book, but as a limited edition, maybe for a Kickstarter campaign or to give clients. So it feels more like a luxury item. And doing that makes sense because again, it aligns with your bigger picture goals. But going to that extra expense and effort to sell it on Amazon might not make sense. Okay, so we've covered trim, color bleed, print runs and treatments. There's so much more we could cover. But one last thing I want to talk about is binding. Books with covers made of flexible paper are called paperbacks or soft covers. Books bound in stiff board covers are known as case bound or hardcovers. Perfect binding is how most books are bound in self publishing, print on demand. This is perfect binding. And this is how most books are bound these days. Actually, the paper is ground down, the back of the paper is ground down. A cover is then glued onto the pages of the book. Essentially they just grind off the paper so it sticks better to the COVID And this is used on almost all paperbacks and many hardcovers too. It's fast and cheap, but in the past it would actually be the reason book pages fell out. The glue didn't hold. Especially if somebody would open the book fully wide open, the way my brain understands these things. You also have case bound and it's basically the same thing, but it's bound to the hardcover case, but it's still glued right in there. There's also a binding called lay flat binding. Perfect bound books have a square binding. You saw that when I held up the book that it has that square and end. They won't lay flat no matter how hard you try, unless you stretch it out and risk damaging the book. So if you want a book where someone can write in it, like a textbook or a journal or refer to like a cookbook, you're probably going to create a book with lay flat binding. And this involves creating a free floating spine. There's also saddle stitching, which is what you would do with a short book that doesn't have a big enough spine for a perfect bound. It's kind of like a staple. Think children's book or shorter book overall. There's also coil or spiral bound. Ingramspark also has cloth bound as well. But most of us nonfiction authors are going to be using perfect bound or case bound for your print on demand books. Okay, that was a lot. And I could have said more, but let's change it up and head on over to this video right here, which is all about taking that fabulous book and turning it into a course. And this video right here, which is all about offset printing, so you can see how that works. Both are guaranteed to be a lot of fun, so head on over and say hi when you get there.