Book Publishing: Offset Printing vs Print on Demand

I just had a call with someone asking me how many copies of her book she had to order when her book launched. It made me realize that some folks still don't know that we live in the greatest time in publishing. The time where your book is printed on demand. Gone are the days of storing a thousand copies in your garage unless it's the right choice for your book. Stick around and I'll explain the difference between offset and print on demand. And when it's right for you to do what. Hey there. I'm Julia the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, your professional self publishing team that will help you write, publish and promote a money making impact. Creating Nonfiction Book We've helped some smart, cool authors write, publish and promote their books to achieve their goals and help their readers. Here are just a few of the fantastic books we've worked on recently. Aren't they lovely? And part of what we do is help them make money from their books. And in many cases that means creating a course from their book material. Which is why I am sporting this fantastic thinkific hoodie. Because thinkific takes fantastic care of our clients when they want to create a course. It's a wonderful platform for building courses. And recently they had a great event online free. You can check it out just for authors on how to turn their book into a course. So I'll put a link to that below so you can check it out. Now when we work with clients, we will help them create print books, softcover or hardcover and ebooks and even audiobooks if they want it. Pretty much every nonfiction author needs to do a print book and an ebook. Now as part of the process to create print books, we set our clients up with accounts@kdp for Amazon.com distribution and IngramSpark for distribution everywhere else, including bookstores, Amazon and other countries, and more. You can actually see Ingram's global distribution options in a link below@the IngramSpark.com website. What people may not realize is IngramSpark and KDP are print on demand publishers. Print on demand is exactly how it sounds. Using a digital file of your manuscript and cover, the book gets printed when it's ordered. The benefits of this are fairly obvious, but let me hit on my favorites check mark. While retailers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Chapters Indigo will likely keep a quantity of your books on hand, if you're selling a decent volume of copies, there's no warehouse required to store your books while you wait for them to sell another check. The speed of this process is so impressive, in less than a week from finishing your book, you can be holding a copy in your hands and another check mark. Less waste. I've seen some sad social media posts where distributors go out of business and just chuck thousands of copies of books out. That almost makes me cry. For the trees, for the authors, and for the people who could have read those books. And check because it's on demand. If you have to change your book for some reason, the change can take effect fairly quickly. One of our clients printed a bunch of books with offset printing and changed his book jacket after the fact because he had thousands of books to begin with. The new book jacket won't be available until he prints another run of books and sells out those first few thousand. Lucky for him, he actually sold the few thousand very fast. But that's not always the case. Thousands of books can take authors years to sell in some cases. So now what is offset printing? Print on Demand is digital and done with ink. It's different than offset because offset uses plates where inked images are transferred or offset from a plate to a rubber blanket, then onto paper. The offset process is a lithographic process which is based on the repulsion of oil and water. There are Some really great YouTube videos of Offset printers in action if you're really curious. Bottom line, it's meant for mass quantities and it's much cheaper if you're printing thousands and thousands of books as soon as especially if you're printing in color. To compare as an example, let's take a typical 260 page non fiction book printed with print on demand. It'll be probably roughly $4. But if you print 10,000 copies with an offset printer, that copy might cost you under $2. So you can enjoy a fairly significant savings. But where are you going to store 10,000 books until they sell? Now there's a slight, a slight little itty bitty tiny. There's a slight quality difference. If you look closely at a print on demand book beside an offset printed book, you can see the difference in the ink on the page. The quality of print on demand has come so far though that your readers really will not know the difference. To me, Print on demand through IngramSpark makes so much sense for the majority of authors. Retailers will still buy from them. The costs aren't that great and you can just order the books when you need them. The only reason to me that that you wouldn't do print on demand is if you know you're gonna sell high volumes of books in the thousands and profit per copy is your most important factor. Now Tell me, have you done offset printing? Tell us about it below. And if you have a topic you'd like me to cover, let me know that below in the comments too and I just might shoot a video for you. And when you comment the day a video is released you'll be entered to win some fabulous noboringbooks Book launchers swag and make sure you subscribe to the channel. And when you do that and comment, you will join the ranks with some fabulous folks who have become my YouTube besties. Folks like Gene Hobbs, David Wong, the Seamstress, Melissa Wardley and April Jones. Thank you so much for your comments and support. I appreciate you so much. Have you seen this super cool video right here about starting your own publishing company? It's not very complicated and it makes your book look so professional. Or this new video I just put out? They're both great so click on the one you want to watch the most and I'll see you there.