printing in china No Media Kings Do-It-Yourself B

By Hamish MacDonald
UPDATE:Hamish has started a DIY Book podcast!
Back in 2000, I wrote an article for this website about how to produce your own book. Things have changed considerably since then, both in the technology available to individuals and in the services available in the marketplace. It’s all good newspaper for us independent publishers.
The original article was called “DIY Book Production.” Aside from being a clunky term, you now have more power than that: You can be your own press. I now produce my own books at home all along, and in this article will unravel what I’ve had to learn and acquire in order to do that.
Generally, self-publishing involves an opposite relationship of work to money: The more work you’re willing to do, the more money you can retention; the more you want to just bounce to an end product, the more it’ll cost you.
Self-pub: Four times more options than in 2000.
When I self-published my first novel, doubleZero, in 1999, I wanted to create a book to sell in stores. A big folded-over photocopy sandwich didn’t entreat to me, but I really didn’t understand how else one could make a book, so I laid out the pages and the cover, then paid Coach House Press to do the creation work.
There may have been other ways to do it, but having written a book about Y2K, I didn’t have the time to detect out. Now, though, there are four main options available:
Offset printing
Print-on-Demand
Hand-bound hardcovers
Perfect binding
Here’s a synopsis of each (with special accent on the ones I like!):
Offset printing.
Offset printing is a high-volume printing method that uses large machinery to convey text and images from metal plates to rubber pads then finally to paper. Coach House Press is a sterling sample of a traditional press who attention about their work. Their price was also the best I found — cheaper by $1,500 at the time than any print bureau.
Cynthia pipes in: I second that recommendation wholeheartedly. The moment I walked into Coach House to argue the printing of Some Words Spoken, my nervousness dissolved. They are crafty elves who understand the feeling and flavour of books.
One of the largest chapters of the printing cost is the set up of the colour reception. Once it’s up and running, leaving it to print 1,000 covers instead of 500 is not that much of a feud. We printed extra covers and stashed them, so when our books sell out (!) and we need another 500, the covers are prepared to go. We’ll merely have to pay for the black and white guts of the book, and the binding.
The colour of the cover might shift when it goes to press. Your pretty proof from the designer might not match the final product. Make sure you get a proof from the printer and make any colour corrections at that point. Once they’ve burned printing plates, it’s too late for you to be fussy.
You obtain a lot of books.
A great sprint of books is not much more priceless than a short run. You get a lot of books.
Expensive. In 1999, I paid $3,000 because a run of 500 books.
Because of the mechanical set-up prices, a short run of books is practically as expensive as a long run. You probably don’t want thousands of books. Even 500 is an dreadful lot to move.
It’s a one-shot handle.
What you need:
A completed manuscript on disk, formatted the way you want it to emerge in the book (or “typeset”). A finished cover design on disk. Cash. Print-on-Demand.
Newer digital printers don’t need to be mechanically adjusted to alternate between jobs, so PoD publishers can print copies of work as needed.
I’m niggling about how my work looks, and the one PoD service I looked into seriously (the reputable CafePress) involves rotating your pages into funny-sized PDF files and uploading them to the hidden maw of a webpage. I’m generally comfortable with Internet anything — online banking, making purchases, auctions — but I’m used to revising and reviewing and revising and reiterating until I like what I’ve created; I didn’t feel confident about what I might get from this method and took it no beyond. So my discussion of Print-on-Demand ends here.
Less expensive than traditional typography.
No stockpile of unsold books. Bookstores won’t carry them. Each has to be ordered at a retail price, which stores won’t pay. Stores also can’t return them if they don’t sell, which is the train they’re adapted to.
The cost per book to you, the author/publisher,printing in china, is often near to the retail price.
The cover templates they attempt are often yeechy.
Some PoD shops promise and charge for sale and improvement they have no aim of conveying (listing you in a extensive list, case in point, does not count as promotion). The way these businesses pitch themselves activities on the emotions of frustrated but ambitious authors. For a more thorough discussion approximately PoD, peruse Jeff Yamaguchi’s “Print Non-Demand“.
What you need:
A completed, typeset writing on document to upload. You may need to have it in PDF format, which I’ll speak about in the “Software” section under. A ended cover design (unless you select one of the publisher’s designs, which is routinely cheaper). Cash.
Ultimately I’m cheerful I didn’t work this route, for instead of tying my work into a company’s PoD service I learned the emulating 2 methods, which have been a amusement breakthrough in my profession.
Hand-bound hardcovers.
It’s easier than you might think to create a hardcover book of your work. There are endless fun ways to adapt the handmade book process, too: For Christmas 2005 I made all my own presents — journals, photo scrapbooks, even a pop-up stage with a wee cartoon actress for a friend of mine who’s in the theatre. These were a real buffet. (Don’t ask me what I’m act next year to top it!)
Complete autonomy: You can do it all yourself and retain complete control.
Easy start-up.
Can be done with general materials.
Produces a result that’s individually satisfying and has a quality feel to it (a hardcover book!).
Easily adaptive to a wide diversity of creative projects.
Hand-made work occupies a bonus space in people’s minds if it’s done well. A time-consuming process.
Stitching can be shifty above all.
Longer books involve some unwieldy sewing.
Difficult to put your title and name on the cover (block printing, silkscreen, and Japanese Gocco printmaking kits are some options, but I haven’t tried them).
There are good explanations of the process here:
DIY Planner – Bookbinding
Toby Craig’s paperback assembling photojournal
To be genuine, though, it took me a while to get the hang of “saddle-stitching” pages together. I found it hard to follow even the best of graphs. I eventually got it when I read Peter and Donna Thomas’s wonderful Making Books by Hand.
Now that I have the hang of it, it’s actually fun, virtually medical, to sit and stitch a book together. Producing a novel this way, though, is not so much fun. Where my wee book of short stories or a daily contains ten or twelve “signatures” — sewn-together teams of pages — my third novel makes up twenty-six signatures. That’s a very, very long thread, and a lot of bits of folded-up paper to keep organized while seaming them together.
Here’s how to do it yourself:
For these afterward two sections, I’m going to separate the materials section into two options: “Minimum” and “Press”. The minimum requirements ambition allow you to get started and learn without many initial investment, if whichever (relying on how many craftsy material you’ve got lying nigh the house). The “Press” materials are in case you resolve, as I did, that you wanted to generate store-quality books at family, without having to go out and pay for advertisement print shop services anymore.
What you need:
A completed, typeset manuscript printed out. A finished cover design. A sharp blade and ruler. A rotary-blade guillotine. Your pages will be much more even using one of these. Hard paper board for the covers. I was using matting board like you’d get from a framing shop until I found large grey boards in an art shop that cost a fragment of the price.
Bookbinding board is available, but the board will not be seen, so it doesn’t need to be fancy. I’ve tried corrugated cardboard, but it’s too puffy; it doesn’t feel like a proper hardcover. An awl for punching small holes in your pages. Or you can also sink a pin into a piece of dowelling. I use a model-maker’s drill, which is like a watch screwdriver with a 1mm drill bit, and drill through all the pages before folding them. You can also get eggbeater-like hand-drills that will accept a small bit, but I found this harder to control and snapped several bits. Heavy thread. You can run it across beeswax to make it easier to work with and fewer possible to knot. Paper. Regular copy paper will do, or you can use an ivory stock for an antiquey look. Heavy paper or paper-backed cloth for mantling around your cover. Ordinary cloth can work but lets the glue drip through, which looks spermy. PVA Glue.
I thought this must be someone special while I bought it from a paperie, then discovered namely the same age matter namely we peeled off our hands as kids. A bone direcotry. This helps you make sharp tucks in your pages. More and more masterpiece supply shops have bookbinding materials like these.
How I do it:
Print out the book. (More on this in the “Software” section below.) Cut the pages in half (I rather to make smallish books). Fold the altitude sheet in half to see where the spine is, safe all the sheets together with bulldog clips, then drill four holes along the spine of the pages.
If it’s a really thick pile, I wreck it into smaller chunks, because the drill can get cracking at an angle or not get entire the course via.
You can also just use an awl to punch holes through your pages. Make one mock-up page as your hole guide and use it on smaller groups of pages. Fold the pages with your finger, or bone folder. Group the folded pages into stacks of pages, no more than 5 or six pages per stack. If you look at any hardcover book in your house closely, you’ll probably find that it’s made up of folded-over groups of pages like this. These are “signatures”.
If all the pages were just stacked and folded over, they’d swell out in a U-shape on the right-hand side. Using smaller groups of pages, or signatures, prevents this. Sew the first signature:
in the first hole,
out the second hole,
in the third hole,
out the fourth hole.
This makes Signature One. Sew the second signature so it’s joined to the first:
into the first aperture of Signature Two,
out the second chasm of Signature Two,
back into the second aperture of Signature One,
out the third hole of Signature One,
back into the third hole of Signature Two,
out the fourth hole of Signature Two…
…And so on. (This is the bit that takes practice and is laborious to describe. Others do a better job; see the resources on.) Once all the signatures are stitched, knot the two ends of the thread together, clamp the pages between two hard pieces of board with the spine sticking out, and glue the spine fairly heavily with glue.
Leave this clamped together and put it alongside to dry. Cut two pieces of embark, each the same size as one of your folded pages, and cut a third board just smaller than the spine-width of your sewn-together signatures (which now make up a “book block”).
Cut a piece of cover cloth or paper a little bit larger than the size of these boards, allowing some gutter-room between the boards since your cover will need to hinge open and closed easily. Cut a small bit off the four corners diagonally so they won’t cluster up when folded, brush glue on the inside edge, and tuck them in, pressing down so they linger flat. Cut two pieces of decorative paper the same size as your book’s pages and fold them with their fancy side facing inward.
When your book block has dried, put a small quantity of paste on either end and paste these “end papers” to the block. Smear glue aboard the inside of your cover and stick the outsides of your end papers apt the cover. Close the book and brace it between boards or put it beneath something cumbersome, and leave it to dry overnight.
When it’s dry, open your book, separate the edges of any pages that are stuck together, and sign it!
Here’s how my books look in hardcover:
Perfect binding.
This is afterward the same technique that any press uses to make a book book. It didn’t happen to me until recently that I could do this, also.
You can, with some practice, produce a result that’s just like what people are used to seeing in stores.
You are entirely autonomous.
It’s quick.
The materials used in each individual book are cheap (card stock, regular paper).
It’s not a one-off: Money you cost setting this up gives you the aptitude to do this over and over, as opposed to paying for the run of just one book. Set-up can be expensive (if you go the route I have; it doesn’t have to be).
After years of trying to go the traditional publishing route, I wanted to bound back into the indie game and recapture the fun and pride spirit of producing my own work. Making 400-page novels using the hardcover method is so time-consuming, though, that I couldn’t reasonably charge a cover-price equal to the time spent making each one. And I want to make it effortless fhardly evermeone who might be quaint to buy my books.
My mother stumbled cross a site called Gigabooks.net, started as a project by a man named Chet Novicki, who found himself giving self-publishing advice to so many friends that he decided to make equipment and atlases to help others self-publish. I’m careful of anything online that targets aspiring authors, but this fellow is giving good information and selling quality gear. I bought a hand-binding press from him, which wasn’t cheap, particularly when you multiplication obligation to it, but it’s been just the greatest shove to my self-publishing exertions.
Of way, you could make one of these yourself — or in theory, one could. I can’t, though; I haven’t got the tools or materials to do it.
Copyshop versus ownership.
From Jim: An option I used with Infinity Points, a hundred page novella I published in ’95, was to use a copy shop. They photocopied the guts of it and I supplied thick stock, full colour covers that I got an outputting service to do from an Illustrator file.
The copy shop absolute jump and trimmed the books which ended up being 5.5×8.5 in size. 500 of them cost about $1500. However, I really had to hound for a copy shop that would do it this inexpensive, I basically called every one in the yellow pages and left a information narrating them the best quote I’d got and querying them to call back if they could buffet it.
As happy as I was with the ultimate product, I wouldn’t do such a high-end novella again: you can’t really price 100 page books at much more than $10, and if it’s selling in the store that means that $4 goes to the bookstore, $2 goes to the distributor, $3 goes to the copy shop and the remaining $1 is probably swallowed up by incidental costs — the copies you gave away, etc. In the best case scenario that your print run sells out you’ll barely break even.
As I mentioned before, I paid $3,000 in 1999 to have my first book printed by an offset press. I’m sure it costs more now. I’ve blown a just amount of money in the quondam few months setting up a press at home, filling up my bedroom with all means of curious equipment. But even after having bought all the “Press”-level of gear and having the capacity to do this all myself for any book I want to print, I’ve still spent about a grand less than what the print run of a single book cost (and that book is now topically out-of-date).
What you need:
A finished cover design. A colour laser printer to print your own covers. They’re a lot cheaper than they used to be. (Mine’s a Xerox Phaser 6100; ) Cover paper (card stock). Spray varnish to keep the toner from flaking off laser-printed covers. Printed-out inside pages. Paper-folding machine. Instead of the hour it can take to fold the pages of a full-length novel, this machine cuts the job down to minutes. (Mine’s a Martin-Yale 7200.) A sharp blade and governor. A heavy-duty guillotine paper cutter. These can tear through hundreds of sheets of paper in a little while, and can make the sides of your book peerless even and flat. Contact cement. Some sort of clamp or frame to squeeze your folded pages between. A handbinding press. This holds your pages together, onward with the cover, so you can clamp them together tightly then glue them. (From Gigabooks.web.)
How I do it:
Print out the book. Cut the pages in half. Fold the pages. Stack the pages. Put the pages into the press along with a printed cover. Put adjoin cement along the spine, making sure to cover all the page-edges, then fold the cover over the spine.
Let dry. Fold the tracking corner of the cover paper in, or neat it off. You’ve got a book!
Perfect-bound copies of my books:

Joe Ollman adds: Here’s how I perfect-bind my books by hand. The cover stock must be thick enough to hold a crease. Make a creasing board with a piece of wood, xacto knife and ruler. Cut a groove a millimetre deep and broad where the creases of your cover need to be, then use a butterknife to score them. Once they’re scored they’ll fold easily and without cracking. Apply a bead of glue to the inside of the spine, insert your pages and rub it down so the contact point is made. Then stack them spine down on a bookshelf, putting oppression on the sides and the top, for an hour know next to nothing of. You can leave it untrimmed (decal style) or you can go to a print shop and use their trimmer to give it a smooth edge.

For detailed directions for perfect binding, you can also visit Chet Novicki’s site at Gigabooks.net. He’s very generous when it comes to responding questions about the process.
Software for designing and printing the pages of your book.
In my first version of this article, I said that you had to have way to the (very expensive) program QuarkXPress to do the typesetting of your book’s inside pages. I was wrong. I was working as a graphic designer at the time, so that’s what I was confirmed to using. Now, though, I’m a copywriter, and I have seen the coverage of today’s word processing programs. You can do as with much to lay out your text, and more easily, in programs like:
Microsoft Word ($399, Windows, Mac)
Softmaker’s TextMaker ($49.95, Windows, Linux, Pocket PC)
OpenOffice.org ($0 — free, open-source software, Windows, Linux, Mac)
Justification and footers.
Most books have their text “justified”, meaning that it’s poised from left to right so that either margins are square. I tried to do that in Word recently and educated that the program is very wrong at it. If there are only two words on a line, you all over with something that looks…
like…
…this.
Badness! So if you’re using Word, use the left justified option (straight along the left side and “ragged right”). I deem that TextMaker knobs this much better.
Also, make sure to put page numbers at the base of your pages. This will help immensely when you’re printing and arranging them. It was really fiddly work to set it up, but I think it was value the difficulty to create detach “sections” in my books so I could just have page numbering on the story pages and not on the caption page or the “About the Author” page. (In Word this is found in “Insert/Break/Section break types/Next page”, then mucking about the adoptions in “View/Header and footer” until you get the proper pages to digit themselves.)
An imposing program.
One of the huge stumbling-blocks for the self-publisher until recently was a task called imposition. If you take a see at the sheets of paper that make up a book, you’ll look that what’s printed on them is actually jumbled up so that when the sheets are folded attach they make one consecutive book. Back when I did doubleZero, the QuarkXPress extensions to do this cost a thousand dollars or more.
Since then, a company called Blue Squirrel has amplified a program called ClickBook ($49.95), which will intercept any job you can bring to the printer and rearrange it into books, booklets, posters, and of sorts other formats. I can’t mention enough good entities about this agenda, because it makes something feasible from home that just wasn’t ahead, and it makes it linear. (The math of working out imposition makes my pate spin.)
ClickBook can now also save your entire job as a PDF file. Normally you must be very cautious about bringing all the fonts and images you’ve used along with your file if you’re going to use a print service. Nothing’s worse than seeing your favourite typeface evaporate and be replaced by a system font! (Okay, perhaps trade injustice is a bit worse.)
If you’re concerned about this but won’t be using ClickBook, you can use the freeware program PrimoPDF on Windows to ‘print’ to portable files that will look exactly the same on any microprocessor, and on the Mac (OS X) you can choose to “Save as PDF” from the Print dialogue box.
About duplexing.
ClickBook works along dividing up the pages into smaller pages and arranging several of those out on a single chip of periodical. You’ll also need to run the pages through the printer afresh to print the behind of them; this is shrieked duplexing. My first laser printer wasn’t charted for duplexing, so it smudged the canvases the second time they went through, and it constantly mangled a sheet, which is really frustrating and wasteful when it’s fair one of sixty canvases of paper you’ve already printed one side of. So look in a printer that has duplexing as a feature.
Creating your cover.
When somebody picks up your book, yup, it’s Judgement Day. Err on the side of simplicity when designing your cover. Not too many fonts, no garish colours unless you’re really confident that you’re making a deliberate alternative others will also obliged, and make absolutely sure that the images you’ve created or adapted for your cover are not only ones you have the right to use, but are also at a tall enough resolution for print. What works on a network page will look like some blocky thing from Super Mario World if you send it through a proper printer. Your images should be more than 200 dots per inch (dpi). And, sorry, you can’t just up the numbers in Photoshop; they have to start at a lofty resolution.
Think about teaming up with a designer whose work you like. See if there’s everything you can do for them, and set up a remove accession with them: How many revisions are they willing to make? Get examples of books you like or images that transfer what you’re behind. The more you give your designer, the more in-tune their work will be with your sensibility of the book.
Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia FreeHand, and Adobe Photoshop are the guiding graphics packages. They cost lots. There’s an open-source choice called Gimp, which I really want to aid and use, yet like so much opensourceware it seems painfully complicated. Or else I’m just stuck in thinking modes patterned by the commercial products. There’s also a new program called Paint.NET, produced jointly by students at Washington State University and Microsoft.
ISBN and UPC: Making your book easier to sell.
The International Standard Book Number is a unique identifier assigned to books. Getting your own ISBN helps bookstores keep trail of your book. It also feels cursed chilly when you get it, ’cause it method you’ve produced an officially real book!
When I made doubleZero, I was still alive in Canada, and got splendid help from the National Library of Canada. It was annuals ago, but if it’s a typical administration division, the same staff might still be there until the end of time. In this case, you’d be fortunate, ’cause they were great to deal with. They can set you up with your own run of ISBN mathematics and invest you with the Cataloguing-in-Publication file to put on the inside cover. In interchange, they’ll request two copies of your book for the National Library of Canada packages, which is actually kinda cool to assume (though it did make me think of that scene in the mammoth storehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark).
You can reach them here.
I live in Scotland now, so it didn’t appear right to use the library’s services this time. I was too working on my cover layouts on the weekend and wanted to get my ISBNs instantly, so I went searching and found this site, where I bought mine. ($55 for an, $47 each for two, $44 for three, and so on.)
Once you have your ISBN, you can get a barcode to include on the back cover of your book. Lorie La Fata wrote in response to my original story with a advantageous correlate to a website that will produce a barcode (or UPC symbol) for you. You can reach it here. (Many publishing services would charge you for the production of this graphic.)
A word on copyright.
Some people are so concerned about defending their matchless story ideas (even though there may only be six stories) that they liberally spatter the “©” character throughout their documents. In issuing, this is generally considered the brand of an amateur, because it insults the professionalism or ethics of whomever you’ve decided to share your work with. One copyright mark at the beginning of the book is ample.
How do you register your copyright? You don’t need to. The moment you establish an elemental work, you prop the license to it. If you really feel paranoid, you can send a duplicate to yourself just aboutmeone else and keep it sealed. The post-mark will officially area your work at a point in time.
In lieu of copyright, you might consider protecting your work with a Creative Commons authorization. It promotes a fairer, more modern approximate to mastermind and ingenious attribute by allowing people to use and share your work according to your wishes, not the dictates of a publishing, recording, or movie company. When you go to the Creative Commons website, you can choose from a menu of permissible uses for your work, which will then be coiled into a prerogative that you can include inside your book.
Freedom is yours.
More and more people are agreeable frustrated with the traditional publication industry. Getting out of that corporatised voodoo and back into self-publishing has made me incited about being an founder again, given me the engaging and rewarding craft of bookbinding to play with, and opened the floodgates of my imagination: I’m not concerning myself with being “publishable” anymore, I’m getting on with being the author I am.
Now when people ask me “Are you published?” I don’t get huffy and whinge about “the state of the publishing industry.” I smile and say “Actually, I publish my own work. By hand.”
You can, too.
Hamish MacDonald is a novelist and copywriter who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of doubleZero, The Willies, and Idea in Stone. You can read his stories, download free e-books of his novels, and follow his blog at hamishmacdonald.com.