Working Directly with a Printer

Some people make a distinction between self-publishing by working with Lulu, CafePress etc. where they are geared towards one-by-one books, vs working directly with a printer and having that printer create 50 or 100 books for you which you then distribute and sell. Really, in both cases you get the ISBN number, you create the publicity and promotions for your books and then the books get made by a printer. It's just in one case you personally pay for all the books up front (the printer route) in hopes of getting a slightly cheaper price. It means of course you have to be able to PAY for all those books up front, which many people can't afford to do.

Let's take an example - my Badge of Honor book, at 368 pages. Lulu prints this out at 4.25" x 6.88" for $11.89 a copy. Compare this with Gorham Printing, a random book printer I found on the web. They actually have 368 pages listed on their site chart, cool! For 25 copies (their minimum order) that is $12.80 a book. I'd have to order 50 of them to get $10.09 a copy. So that's $500 I'd have to pay, out of pocket, to save $2 a book. These are small size pocket romance novels - so it's not like I can inflate the price high to recoup costs easily :) They're already over twice as much as a book on a typical store shelf would cost.

Sure, if I order 3,000 copies of the book, the price gets down to $4.15, which is about what the book would sell for in a store. So if I paid $12,000 up front, I could then sell the book for a "typical store price" and not make any money back at all :)

How about another publisher, Tri-State Litho? for 50 copies of my 368 book they want $750 up front - which is $15 a book. This is even more expensive.

Some companies lure you in. Keystone Press has a wizard which promises $5.68 per book with only 50 ordered. Unfortunately for me their smallest is 5x8, but still. It seems a nice price. But don't forget the $105 for setup - oh, and the shipping costs too. It does end up being *relatively* reasonable in the end, if only their sizing was better. But I'm not fond of companies that have all the costs hidden like that, and would rather work with someone that had it all right out in the open.

In many cases it's challenging just finding someone to support your size option. Lulu and the others have a wealth of sizes and shapes for you. I find that many of the printing-oriented self publishers don't handle the nice, small paperback size. I had to skip over several during my investigations because they wouldn't go that small.

You can say that you get better quality from these other options - but all of the cheaper companies will take returns if something doesn't come out right. So it might be a bit more hassle to send back the few books that aren't quite right - but if you're saving $10 a book, for many of us it's worth it. Plus, can I really convince someone to pay $20 or more (building in some sort of a profit to that $15 base price) for a high quality printed typical romance novel?

In any case, doing your own printing can become VERY expensive, very quickly. You start to see why finding a "real publisher" or working with a "real agent" is very helpful if you want to do volumes of sales. We haven't even begun talking about the free copies you'll want to send out to reviewers ...

Gorham Printing Price Sheet
TriState Litho has an online price wizard
Keystone Digital Press Price Wizard

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