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Super cheap publishing (one copy)
Organichu
poopspeesRegistered User regular
poopspeesRegistered User regular
Okay so I guess this might not be a hard question to answer but I know some home computer programs have book templates... but those are basically paper and are stapled, yeah? I'm doing something for someone involving some writing, some illustrations... a little faux children's book, basically. I'd like to optimally get an actual 'book' out of it, hard or soft cover. I only need one copy.
Where can I get this done? What is entailed? Do I scan everything? Do I bring the original pages to the place? Who even offers a service like this? How much?
Where can I get this done? What is entailed? Do I scan everything? Do I bring the original pages to the place? Who even offers a service like this? How much?
Organichu on
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Usually a printing place, repo place have binding options. However if they do not, try to look for a bindery, specifically a bindery associated with bibles and religious documents, those companies usually do good binds and dont require huge orders.
How large is this book?
EDIT: They give you the page dimensions as well as the cover and spine dimensions. You then give them a PDF of the book and that is what they use to print. I made mine in Adobe InDesign.
EDIT EDIT: To be more specific, Lulu uses a thicker semi-gloss paper for its books. CreateSpace used a thinner matte paper, which made the images bleed making them kiinda blurry and grainy.
There are a few other companies out there that do this, but I forget the names. I know a couple other people at school that had their childrens book mock-ups printed using a lot of other sites that had the same quality for a little less than lulu.
I'm not yet positive about the length. I'm thinking in the ballpark of 50-75 pages? This is in its nascent stages. $10 is cheaper than I expected. I guess I'd be willing to spend a maximum of about $1 a page.
So, lulu might be what you're looking at?
I'm thinking that, since every book they print is a single order one (even if its the same book someone ordered two weeks ago) that price should help you expect what your one printing would be.
Thanks for all the info though. I'll have to take a look around.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
They can cut it down to to any shape and use either thermal binding (basically glues the pages together) or spiral binding (like a spiral notebook)
Costs under $5 if you bring them the interior of the book. Maybe $2 more if you want to print your cover on heavy card stock.
(wow i never thought id need those OfficeMax copy center part time job brain cells ever again)
From the sounds of it, you're paying more for the high quality production, not for the ability to print extra copies.
Those of you who used Lulu... is it fairly easy to get your PDF in-line with their specifications, or is it a very fidgety and picky business?
What sort of book are you publishing? If it's just text, then you can upload a word file and their software will automatically convert it to a PDF (Which you can then download to review before publishing).
I've made a couple of hand-bound books before and while it was a fair amount of work it wasn't that expensive, and the end result was very nice and had a really personal touch. For one of the books I was able to print the pages on my own printer (after setting up the layout in InDesign), then fold & cut the pages down and sew them together. To make a hardcover I glued cloth around stiff cardboard and then glued it to the endpapers, and the endpapers to the book (it's a little more involved than that of course - there's a lot of measuring/cutting and burnishing involved - but that's basically the gist of it). I also used iron-on transfer paper to print the cover design on the cloth cover.
The other book was larger and had a softcover, so I had the pages printed at a print shop and then folded them up, bound them and cut the whole block down to size at home. From what I recall those pages were all glued together and glued to the cover, and I had to clamp everything together and leave it to dry for quite a while.
The instructions in this book were a huge help: http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-Publishing-Douglas-Holleley/dp/0970713800/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256220102&sr=8-1
...although I'm sure you could find similar instructions on google if you looked hard enough.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw that out there. An advantage to doing it yourself is that you can make it exactly the way you want (if you're meticulous and patient enough!). Plus it's pretty much the only chance you'll get to buy something called a "bone folder" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_folder).
But yeah, mine is mostly text, but I do have a guy making up some illustrations for it, so I'd need to do at least some editing of the PDF myself.
Well, you could just insert them into the Word document, depends on how fancy you want the layout though.
I don't think it should be too difficult to get the spec correct if you want to do the layup yourself in InDesign though. I've only done book covers for lulu before, not whole book layouts, but they ask for pretty much standard printing spec - ie page size + 0.25 inch bleed on every edge.