Ron Pramschufer Celebrity Guru

Ron Pramschufer has been in or around the printing and publishing industry for over 35 years. His experience, including working in the pressroom, bindery, production office and estimating department helped give him a firm foundation to build on when he entered sales and management. He was partners in a small press publishing company in Annapolis, MD in the late seventies and co-invented and marketed two controversial political board games which sold over 100,000 copies in the early eighties. Moving from his home state of Maryland to New York City after his game experience, Ron sold printing services to, primarily, small to mid-sized book publishers for over a decade before founding RJ Communications with an old friend. Ron recognized the potential of the Internet very early as a powerful communications tool. In 1997 he started one of the first printer related websites, www.rjcom.com which caters to the professional print buyer. This evolved into www.BooksJustBooks.com and more recently Selfpublishing.com which target the print buying novice, primarily self-publishers. All three sites are still operating successfully and SelfPublishing.com was named as one of Writers Digest’s, 101 Best websites for writers for 2006. Educating the novice print buyer has been a top priority from day one. To help address this issue, Ron co-authored the popular title Publishing Basics- a Guide for the Small Press and Independent Self-Publisher, now in its Third Edition, as well as Publishing Basics for Children’s Books, in its Second Edition. He is the organizer of the monthly Publishing Basics Newsletter where he writes a sometimes controversial "Ask Ron" column which addresses various aspects of the publishing process. On the same note, he started the Publishing Basics Radio PodCast in 2005 and serves as the show’s host. A wide variety of topics are covered including a very popular series titled, The Truth Behind POD Publishing, where he conducts interviews with a select group of industry insiders. Since its inception, RJ Communications has helped thousands of customers print over 105 million books. Ron is married and has three children. His daughter, Stephanie, teaches second grade and recently self-published her first children’s book in the Oliver the Clownfish series. Matthew, his oldest son, owns a website design business and Erik, the youngest, is enjoying high school.

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Can I buy a single ISBN for my book rather than 10?

The short answer is yes. Am I excited about this new development? Yes, in that it may be just the punch needed to send the POD/Vanity Publishing industry down to the mat for a standing eight count. As something I think is important to my serious customers, absolutely not.
This whole ISBN issue is a subject I have written on in the past. Ten years ago or so, RR Bowker, the US ISBN agency, sold single ISBNs for $50. Within a fairly short period of time, they determined it was more trouble than it was worth so they switched to requiring a minimum of ten for $225 plus a handling fee. Whether they realized it or not, this decision gave a huge boost to the vanity publishing industry which was already picking up steam with the advent of Print on Demand technology. The deceptive trade practices of the majority of these POD publishers led authors to believe that they didn’t need to buy ten numbers but could be given or assigned a number, at no charge, by the vanity press. Faced with a choice of “free” vs. $225 plus handling, many authors jumped on the POD vanity press bandwagon. The reality, of course, is that “assigned” numbers belong to the publisher, not the author. In more or less the same time period, Ingram made the decision that small publishers would no longer be allowed to deal directly with them but had to either come through a distributor or through the printer that they owned. These same vanity publishing companies jumped right on this development as well and before long thousands of unsuspecting authors were falling into the black hole of the world of the “Vanity Press”.

Fast forward to 2006… Tens of thousands of titles are being published by dozens of vanity presses. For the most part, authors still think they own the ISBN assigned to their book as one of the “you own all the rights”, right. The price of ten ISBN’s from Bowker has risen to $240 plus $29.95 handling. Authors are further confused with companies claiming to be able to sell single ISBN’s but in reality are no different than the vanity presses… These companies buy blocks of 1000 or 10,000 ISBN’s for $3 to $12 each and resell them to the naive public for $55 and a huge profit. Bowker has supposedly initiated legal proceeding against these companies but the “bogus” ISBN’s remain on sale. Then came the single ISBN announcement.

It wasn’t a big announcement but a few months ago, Bowker decided to get back into the single ISBN business. To say is wasn’t a big announcement is an overstatement. You can’t find reference to single ISBN’s anywhere on Bowker’s site. I saw it first posted on one of the Yahoo group sites and thought it was just one of the scam sites selling bogus numbers. When I called to inquire about it, I was told that yes, single ISBN’s were available for $125 (talk about inflation) but there was no way to buy them online. Instead I had to print out a PDF application, fill it in and mail it to Bowker. The single ISBNs originate from the 0-615 prefix which has been around, but kept well under the radar since 1999.

I didn’t rush to tell my customers about this new development because, deep down in my mind if $124.95(difference between one number and ten) was going to be the difference between someone getting into the publishing business and not… they shouldn’t get into the business. It wasn’t until I saw a press release this past week from Lulu.com announcing that they were selling single ISBN’s plus registration in a couple databases for $149 that the “light bulb” went off in my head.

Lulu is a publishing services company similar to mine, except Lulu is primarily for the author who sells 10 books or less where I specialize in authors who sell 100 copies or more. The ISBN that they are selling is simply a Bowker ISBN other than Lulu is acting as the Bowker agent. Lulu’s primary audience is identical to that of the big POD vanity presses… some 50,000 strong and, according to their press release, adding 2000 more titles per week. You can find out more about them, if you are interested, by visiting their website. The difference between Lulu and the mainstream vanity presses is that, with this new single ISBN program, the author is not tied to Lulu or any of its services. An author can sign up for Lulu’s basic service to cover the onesy twosey sales and also come to a publishing service like, www.selfpublishing.com to print a digital or offset run, at a lower cost, “to make money”. They are truly empowering the author to be able to take complete control over his publishing project. It will be interesting to see how this develops and how the big vanity POD publishers react. The last thing the vanity publishers want is for authors to have a number which is portable. I guarantee it’s the top subject at more than one board of directors meetings this coming week. Only time will tell how serious Lulu really is about “empowering” these authors. Lulu still offers a vanity press option. I’ll keep my eye on their site and report on what I see. For now, it’s pretty encouraging

Meanwhile, I still believe that you need at least ten ISBN’s to get any sort of publishing venture started. Trust me, they go quickly. If you insist, and want to order one number you can download the application by clicking here and mail it in with $125 to RR Bowker and they will send you a number.

What would you do if you only had $500 to market your book?

First off, there is no magical way that your books are going to start selling, no matter how much you have to spend. There is no one place where you can send $500, $1000, $5000 or $25,000 where you can just write the check and sit back and watch the orders start rolling in.(Although there are plenty out there who would have you believe otherwise). Book marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to pace yourself if you are going to finish. You also need to have a solid foundation on which to build your marketing program.

In my opinion, the first thing that your book marketing dollars need to be spent on is setting up an effective website. Your website is the foundation on which all your marketing efforts will be built. You will get more mileage, for less money, than any other marketing idea you will try. According to John Kremmer, there are 1001 Ways to Market Your Book… maybe even more, but none is more important than developing a website. It doesn’t necessarily matter that the site is large as it needs to be well designed, information rich and search engine friendly. I am not going to try to cover everything you need to know about web marketing in one article but, hopefully, just enough to get you started.

First off, your web address. You want an address people can remember. You also want the address to be associated with your book. My first book was titled Publishing Basics, this newsletter is titled Publishing Basics and guess what web address these are all tied in to… www.PublishingBasics.com. Make sense? To check availability of web addresses, you simply go to http://e-moxie.com/domains.php and try different names until you find one that is not taken. Owning a web address is cheap… only $15/year, more or less. Once you find the name you like, buy it. You will use this web address in everything you do from this point forward. Put it on your letterhead, in your email signature, in all of your future advertising. When you get to the point when you are giving radio or TV interviews, work your web address into every interview, every newspaper article, every blog posting…. Everything.

Now that you have an address, you need to put something there. The days are over when you can post a few pictures and a little type and think anything worthwhile is going to happen. Writing your book and writing website copy is actually quite different. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Where your book may be guided by the Chicago Style Manual, your website copy is guided by what the search engine robots read and interpret as important. These robots which crawl the Internet are looking for content in the form of keywords and keyword phrases. Your content needs to not only to be informative and relevant to the reader but it needs to be keyword rich.

Keywords are the terms or phrases that a user enters into a search engine to yield appropriate results. Your “Home Page” copy needs to include your top keywords and keyword phrases within the main body text. Don’t forget misspellings. One of my primary keywords is self-publishing. While the correct way to spell it is as a hyphenated word, you will find it spelled not only non-hyphenated but joined as well on my websites. Not great English, but great for the search engines. In the old days you used to be able to repeat your keyword dozens of time on the page and the search engine would automatically list you number one. Today, that is the easiest way to be delisted. Remember, the search engines are always looking for the best site not the best tricks. Great content will always win.

Once you have written your copy, it’s time to bring in the pros. Website design can make a Fortune 500 company look like a mom and pop shop and vice versa. You don’t need to spend a fortune on design but this is probably not where you want to try out your do-it-yourself skills, either. I use a company called www.e-moxie.com. My son, Matt, happens to be one of the owners. He’s in his early 20’s, has lots of good ideas and is quite affordable. His basic websites start at only a few hundred dollars for a professionally designed website. He also understands how to optimize your site for search engines. Of course, you can use whomever you want, just don’t overspend. You don’t have to.

Most people use search engines to find information on the Internet. Google is the largest of these followed by Yahoo and MSN. Most of you came through one search engine or another to find me and this newsletter. There are two types of search engine listings. The first are natural listings which are the sites the search engines determine to be most relevant to a particular keyword or keyword phrase. These natural listings do not cost a nickel, just a lot of hard work in making your website as relevant as possible for the keywords that best fit you. The other type of listings is sponsored listings. This is where people pay to be listed at the top of the search engine page. Some years back a site named goto.com came up with the idea of selling listings where the advertiser would pay a set fee, every time a user clicked on the link, to be top listed under a certain keyword. This form of advertising is referred to as “Pay per Click” advertising. In the beginning, you could buy very good keywords for a couple pennies per click. Unfortunately, those days are over. Goto became Overture and Overture became Yahoo Marketing. During this time the per click prices have risen from a couple cents to many dollars per click. Great news for Yahoo and Google stockholders but not so great for the average website owner.

Try going to Google or Yahoo and entering the keyword phrase “Publishing Basics” and see what is returned. You will find my sites are eight out of the top ten listings. In Yahoo and MSN, the results are similar. All of these listings are in the natural results. If you’ll notice on all three, there are ads to the top and right of the natural listings. These paid listings are just that. There has been plenty written on paid vs. natural. Pretty much everyone agrees that natural listings are best. It’s debatable how much the paid results are worth. Generally, paying for visitors will not work in the case of selling books, other than in rare cases. Generally it takes hundreds of website visitors to net one paying customer. Do the math, even at ten cents per click it’s a losing proposition.
Remember up top I said there was no one place you could send money and sit back and watch the orders come in? This is no exception. Even with a good looking website, you will have to be an active participant in promoting your website and getting it known around the Internet or it’s not going to work. You should figure you are going to spend a half hour to an hour per day fine tuning and promoting your site. It’s a good idea to subscribe to a few web marketing newsletters. My favorite is http://www.sitepronews.com/, Site Pro News. You’ll pick up great tips monthly. If you put in the time, before you know it you’ll have a steady stream of traffic coming to your website. This steady stream of traffic will result in a steady stream of book sales.

Is this everything you need to know about websites? No. Is it a good start? I hope so

Are book fairs good places to sell books?

The 8th Annual Harlem Book Fair was held on July 22, 2006 on 135th Street in New York City. This was the third time I had exhibited at the fair but the first time as an exhibitor representing my main company, RJ Communications,(www.BooksJustBooks.com). Previous years I exhibited as The Junior Writers Foundation, a non-profit I helped found which helps school children learn about book publishing as well as publish the children’s stories in book format. This year I was going to devote solely to talking to self-publishers.

I arrived two hours prior to the opening of the fair to set up my booth. While I had my booth number and a pretty good idea where my booth was supposed to be located, it didn’t take long to realize that I was in the middle of shear chaos. There were no booth numbers marked on the ground. Other exhibitors, who had arrived earlier than me, had started “squatting” pretty much anywhere they pleased. Most of the volunteer staff walked around with clipboards, scratching their heads, utterly helpless when it came to making any sense of what was unfolding. As a bonus, there were several giant black clouds, overhead, looking like they were going to bust loose any moment. I had paid for a booth, a tent, two tables and four chairs.

Two hours later, at the time the show officially opened, I had nothing. I felt a little better when I met my friends Susan Driscoll and Diane Gedymin from IUniverse and they were “boothless” as well and had spent a whole lot more money than me to be a show sponsor, not just an exhibitor. About a half hour into the show, with the help of fair founder Max Rodriguez, I had a 10×10 spot of blacktop I could call my own. An author/publisher in the same predicament as me had a 10×10 empty space next to me. Keep in mind this was just empty space at this point, no tents, no tables, and no chairs. I promised my new neighbor that I would defend our new found real estate, while she got her books from her car, from the dozens of other exhibitors who were still wandering around looking for a place to call home, for the day. Soon one of the show helpers brought two tables, which, at least, helped stake out our claim. Then just as the skies started to bust, a single tent showed up on the scene. It took about two seconds to decide that either, my new neighbor and I were going to be closer neighbors than we had originally planned, or one of us was going to get awfully wet. We chose to share the booth. No sooner than we had moved the two tables and our books undercover, it started to pour. It rained and rained. Booksellers and buyers were huddled everywhere there was cover trying to stay as dry as possible. Then, after about a half an hour the rain stopped.
What happened next was truly a sight to behold. Within minutes of the last drop of rain, the streets were full and everyone was starting to sell books. Once things settled in at my booth, I took a walk around the fair. With the exception of a few large sponsors the exhibitors were mainly one and two book publishers. As I walked by each of these publishers, I was either given a bookmark, a postcard or “pitched” to buy their book. These people weren’t sitting around waiting… they were “selling”.

I met my old friend “Treasure Blue”, author of Harlem Girl Lost. He had recently signed a large contract with Random House that came with a nice advance. Instead of resting on his laurels, he was out “pitching” anyone who would listen. From his level of excitement, you would have thought he had just received initial copies of his first book and had to sell them all by the end of the day to pay the printer. I also met Relentless Aaron, another self publisher, who had recently signed a 14 title deal with St Martins Press. He had a double sized booth and was displaying books on one side and giving free back massages on the other. I don’t think he stopped hustling for a moment. And remember, these were two guys who could have been sitting back and spending their royalties but chose to be out hustling their books.
As I walked around, I found I knew many of the exhibitors because I had printed books for them through my company. As I stopped by to say hi, each had that same high energy level and look of confidence. If you didn’t buy one of their books, it certainly wasn’t for lack of their trying. As the day wore on, the streets continued to stay packed. Books were selling and ten dollar bills were flying around everywhere. This is what self-publishing is all about. Before the end of the day, another cloudburst dumped more rain on the fair. Did that chase people away or dampen anyone’s spirits? No way. Did everyone turn a big profit for the day? It’s hard to say. Will most people be back next year? It’s almost guaranteed. Who knows, maybe next year will be sunny and 70 degrees. Maybe everyone will even know where their booth is before the fair opens, although I doubt that. I believe that the chaos actually added to the overall excitement.
I strongly suggest that you participate in as many local book fairs as possible. If you can’t afford a full booth, arrange to share one. Booths this year at the Harlem Book Fair started at about $350. Figuring there were over 50,000 buyers who attended the fair that breaks down to $7 per thousand people for exposure to an ideal market. Show me another form of advertising where you can give your book that kind of exposure for that price. Obviously not all street fairs have 50,000 people attending but smaller shows have lower rates so they are all still pretty good investments.

One last item before you all start to Google “book fairs”. I can not emphasize enough that your success will be directly related to the enthusiasm for your book that you project to the potential book buyer. You can not simply rent a table, display your books and sit in a chair behind the table and expect people to swarm over to buy your books. It is not going to happen. Like everything else in self publishing, it takes preparation and a lot of hard work, but if you are willing to make the effort, you won’t be disappointed. See you at the next fair.

Is there ANY Print on Demand Publisher that you like or would recommend?

That’s a pretty tough question. Do I think there are POD publishers out there who are honestly trying to help authors fulfill their dreams of being published? The answer is yes with an *.

Let’s get the * out of the way first. The idea of an author doing all the work, paying for all the services yet only sharing in a portion of the profits rubs me the wrong way. This is what POD Publishing is all about. Would you dream of hiring a contractor to build an extension on your house and not only pay him for the services provided but also give him a percentage of the profits you make when you sell your house later on? I don’t think so but that is exactly what you are doing when you use a POD Publisher. Hiring a book packager or publishing service to help you get your book to market is one thing. Hiring a partner where you put up all of the time and money and your “Partner” shares in the profits, is quite another. But that is my opinion. For those of you who see nothing wrong with entering a partnership as described above, read on.

If you are convinced that POD Publishing is perfect for you, there is something you need to know. Not all POD Publishers are created equally. Mark Levine, who practiced corporate and entertainment law for 10 years and represented several authors in disputes with POD publishers, recently published a book titled The Fine Print of Self-Publishing – The Contracts and Services of 48 Major Self-Publishing Companies – Analyzed, Ranked & Exposed . Mark takes an interesting look at the whole self-publishing industry, not from a vanity press, traditional self publisher angle but from how author friendly is the publishers’ contract.

His criteria of what make a good publisher and what does not is based on the following seven points:
1. A good reputation among writers
2. An attractive, Easy-to-Navigate website
3. Fairly priced publishing fees
4. Generous royalties without any fuzzy math
5. Low printing costs and high Production Value
6. Favorable contract terms
7. Fairly priced additional services (such as marketing and copyright registration)
8. Ability to obtains an ISBN, LCCN and Barcode as part of any basic publishing package
9. Ability to register the author’s book with Bowker’s Books in Print, make it available through a book wholesaler like Baker & Taylor or Ingram and list it on Amazon.com, BN.com and other large scale sellers.

From here 48 major self-publishing companies are divided into the following groups based upon how well that fit they comply with the nine points above..
1. Outstanding Self-Publishing Companies
2. Some Pretty Good Self-Publishing Companies
3. Publishers Who Are Just OK
4. Publishers to Avoid

Not to give away the whole book, I thought it would be fun to take a little closer look at the handful of large companies you will most likely run into looking at full page ads in writers’ magazines or doing a Google search under the keyword, Self Publishing.

Outstanding Self-Publishing Companies –

Iuniverse (www.iuniverse.com ) – Levine writes, “When weighing your publishing options, Iuniverse is a company you need to consider. Although the royalties are low and the price an author pays for books is high, your book will be on a heavily trafficked website. And, if you have success in book sales, Iuniverse has the ability to get you to the next level”.
Ron’s Note: I have mentioned on previous occasions that Iuniverse is one of the very few publishers who have executives with heavy publishing experience. If you are set on POD publishing, I wouldn’t go anywhere else.

Lulu (www.lulu.com) – Levine says, “If you are looking for an easy, no frills way to sell your book without high upfront fees, this publisher is for you… The agreement is as author friendly as they come”
Ron’s Note: Lulu is both POD publisher and printer, depending on the service you purchase. They seem to be especially good for people who need no hand holding and print only a few books.

RJ Communications - (www.selfpublishing.com or www.BooksJustBooks.com) - Levine says, “Ron Pramschufer, owner of RJ Communications, is one of the good guys in self-publishing who stands by the idea that anything the author pays to have done remains the property of the author (such as book cover and layout designs). Pramschufer is all about the author and it shows in the pricing… RJ Communications is one of the few companies that are 100% in the author’s corner”.
Ron’s Note: I have a hard time arguing with Mark on that one. While not a POD Publisher, I believe I made the book because I represent the true alternative.

Some Pretty Good Self-Publishing Companies

Booksurge (www.Booksurge.com) – A while ago, this company was bought by Amazon. Since then it has become very popular on the Internet various message boards, both bad and good.
Levine had this to say, “Booksurge gets a 10 for its contract but a 2 for its upfront fees…Booksurge’s primary business model focuses on selling book publishing packages to authors rather than driving potential readers to its online bookstore…until Booksurge takes advantage of its relationship with Amazon.com… it remains just a pretty good publisher.”

Publishers Who are Just OK

Trafford ( www.trafford.com) – Mark says, “In many respects Trafford straddles the fence between Just OK and Publishers-to-Avoid categories. The sale price of the books are outrageous…its publishing fees are high for what you receive…The contract is the publishers one bright spot. Terms are open and the contract is easy to terminate. Unfortunately, this alone isn’t enough”
Ron’s note: I might add that they do have a nice dog as a mascot.

Xlibris (www.xlibris.com) – Mark says, “The contract itself is author-friendly enough. What kills Xlibris are the publishing fees, the retail prices of the books, and the author price for copies… Yes, this company mails one of the biggest, glossiest, high-quality brochures to Writer’s Digest subscribers and other magazines. It’s also partially owned by Random House. But if your priority is to sell books without paying an arm and a leg, forgo the glitz, save money, and move on to the next publisher.”
Ron’s Note: Another item that I see often complained about is the fact that virtually all of Xlibris’s operations are overseas making it, sometimes, hard to communicate.

Publishers to Avoid –

About the category, Mark says “If you choose to publish with any of the companies listed here, picture me whispering in your ear, “I told you so.” It is harder to make the Publishers-to-Avoid list than it is to make the Outstanding list because I am not in the business of ruining people’s livelihoods.

Author House – (www.authorhouse.com) - One of my perennial favorites. Mark says, “The precursor to this contract was horrible, and this dressed-up version shows little improvement. A few terms, such as the author’s termination rights, have become more author-friendly, but others, such as remedies against the publisher, have worsened…. The drafter of this contract seemed to anticipate author lawsuits and to prevent the types of suits and claims authors were making… Further, any disagreement with Author House is a lost cause. Its contract makes it difficult to complain and see results. Even if you had a legitimate cause of action, it still might be impossible to win based on how the contract is written. There is nothing favorable to the author. This company is for those authors who are willing to spend a ton of money to say their book is published. You’d be better off finding another publisher and taking your money and putting it towards marketing.”
Ron’s Note: For all you Author House fans out there, you really need to read the entire write-up. It’s much worse than the excerpt above.

Publish America – (www.PublishAmerica.com – This is one that has slipped under my radar until recently.
Mark says, “Publish America claims to operate like a traditional publisher, but it operates like a traditional publisher only in theory… The contract terms are so outrageous that except for not charging an up-front publishing fee, Publish America and traditional publishers have nothing in common…. If the world of self-publishing has an Evil Empire, Publish America occupies that role. One author who contacted me hired a lawyer and spent thousands of dollars to get out of her contract. She was more than willing to provide a copy of the contract and valuable information about the way Publish America treats its authors. Shocking, disgusting, and despicable are just a few of the adjectives to describe this publisher’s practices.

How many books should I print on my first printing?

This is probably the number one question I get from the first time publisher. There is no easy answer, although the answer is certainly not “none”, as espoused by the POD publishing industry. If you are publishing a book, you need books… period. It’s just a matter of how many.

The POD publishing industry has done their best to convince authors they don’t need physical books to be successful. Demand driven, I believe is the catchy phrase they use. IE: Don’t print a book until you sell a book. Using that logic, why don’t they just extend that right on back to “don’t edit” or “don’t format and design” a book until you have sales. Or why even write the book until you have sold the book. Truth be told, I can guarantee you that the second your book is ready to be printed by any of these POD places, your little personal “Helper” is on the phone trying to get you to buy copies at their inflated price. But this is not going to be one of my POD rants. (Not today)

For today, I’ll assume that you have already gotten over the POD thing and are truly self-publishing your book. The answer to the question above actually comes from deep inside you.

I was on a panel this past weekend with an author who printed 100 copies initially and came back for a reprint for 300 copies the next day and a reprint for 20,000 the next week and within a few short years signed a contract for $300,000+ with a major publisher for a future book. I had one of my own authors who came into my office trying to buy 10,000 copies of his book and I talked him into only printing 3000 initially and use some of the extra money to help with the marketing. He promised he would be back in two weeks with a substantial reprint. Two weeks, to the day, he was back with a large order, followed by several additional large orders and he also went on to sign a contract with a traditional publisher for his next book for well over $100,0000.

Years back, a man and his wife came into the RJ Communications’ offices with a stack of pictures and a pile of copy and a fist full of rejection letters from traditional publishers. He printed a few thousand books to get started and reprinted, and reprinted and reprinted and reprinted until he eventually sold 2 million books (non returnable) and was on the New York Times best seller list for 30 plus weeks.

On the other hand, I have done hundreds of books where the first printing was 100 copies, followed by another hundred, followed by another hundred, followed by another hundred. I have had other who started with 100 copies and I have never seen them again.

My advice to all is to take a good look in the mirror and have an honest talk with the person in the mirror. Be realistic with yourself. If your main goal in publishing is to simply be published, and you don’t want to put a lot of effort into selling books, buy a hundred or two. You’ll have plenty for your friends and family. For slightly under $70 you can even be listed on all the large websites, like Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com.

Before going further let me talk briefly about the unit cost of printing your book. A standard 256 page book costs about $6/book at 100 copies and is printed digitally. 500 copies of the same book costs about $5.50/book and is printed on an offset printing press, the standard of the publishing industry (see related article). From here is where the pricing starts to get interesting. At 750 copies the price drops to $3.91/book, at 1,000 copies to $3.15/book, at 1,500 copies to $2.38/book and at 2000 copies to $2.00/book. The industry average of 3,000 copies would be $1.39/book, 5000 would be $1.27/book and at 10,000 copies the price would drop to $1.05/book. It might be noted, on the industry average of 3,000 books, virtually every wholesale discount plan works just fine using a standard $14.95 retail price.
With that said, lets look at your book. If you only print a couple hundred at a time, you will not be able to sell through most wholesale channels and make any money. In Dan Poynter’s, “New Book Model”, he suggests 500 – 750 copies to start if you are serious about selling books.. Looking at the costs above you can see why. Anything lower than that either forces you to raise the retail price well above the market price, which rarely works or forget the bookstore market completely.

If your book is non-fiction and you are an authority in the subject, and teach or participate in seminars on the subject, I would not be afraid of buying the higher quantity. If you feel you can sell 500, I would have no problem recommending you buy 1000 at the lower unit cost. It’s only 13% more cash out of your pocket for double the amount of books. The same thing goes if you look into that mirror and know that the person you see will go the extra mile to sell books. Here in New York, I have local authors selling thousands upon thousands of books in the streets and on the subways. Two of these are mentioned in the beginning of this article.
If you are not 100% sure of yourself, there is no problem printing a hundred copies, with the knowledge that it is just a test and the only way you are going to make any real money is to print higher quantities. Most poetry books as well as all novels should start this way. It’s easy enough to reprint. This also gives you a chance to make changes, if needed.

Rarely would I suggest that anyone print over 3,000 copies on their first printing. As you can see above, the unit cost is fine at 3000. If the book is going to be successful, you are going to come back and reprint 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000 later anyhow. Buying 10,000 books and finding a typo on page one the day after the books are received from the printer can be a little unnerving, to say the least. The exception to the 3000 rule, of course, would be if you have managed to presell a large quantity of books. Over the thousands of titles and millions of books I have printed through either www.rjcom.com, www.BooksJustBooks.com or www.selfpublishing.com, the overall average for first timers is 2000 copies and a huge percentage of them come back and reprint so they must be doing something correctly.
One last thought which I pass on to nearly everyone that I talk to on this subject, “You will never sell them (copies of your book) faster than I can print them” so concentrate on sales. I’ll make sure that you never run out of books.

Why can’t I make money with a POD Publisher?

Why can’t I make money with a POD Publisher? I thought it was appropriate that I write the answer to this on April 1 because this industry represents one of the largest April fool’s joke on the Internet. As potentially successful as the POD publisher’s salesperson or website makes it appear, the numbers just don’t add up.

When you are published by a traditional publisher, you earn royalties and the publishers earn profits. When you self publish a book you earn both the royalty and the profit because you are paying all the expenses associated with publishing the book. When you pay a POD Publisher to publish your book, you are back to earning a royalty and the POD Publisher earns the profits. And here lies the problem.

When you are a traditionally published author you work for a royalty. Everyone knows this. If you are lucky you get a nice advance before the book is even published. The publisher, on the other hand works for a profit. Profits are what is left after paying all the costs associated with publishing, such as editing, layout & design, printing, storage and fulfillment, distributors fees as well as other sales and marketing expenses and, of course, royalties. The author’s royalty is not a particularly high percentage of the sale because the publisher is putting up all the money and taking most of the risks so they rightfully expect to make the lion’s share of the profits.

When a person decides to truly self publish their book they become the author and the publisher. As such, they earn the royalty and the profit. The royalty because they wrote the book and the profit because they are outlaying all the money and taking all the chances. High risk, high reward, low risk, low reward.

This is not the case when the author pays a POD Publisher or other subsidy or vanity publisher to publish their book. With the POD/Subsidy/Vanity Publisher, the author is back to working for a royalty as they would be if they were traditionally published. The difference, though, is that the author is also paying all the expenses associated with the publishing of the book but receives none of the profit. The profit is reserved for the POD/Subsidy/Vanity Publisher. Yes the royalties are higher than one would expect to earn from a traditional publisher but it hardly offsets the amount of money spent by the author getting their book to press through one of these publishers. Does that sound fair? Evidently it does to tens of thousands of authors who pay to be published by one of these publishers every year. Is that the truth or is it that they just don’t understand? I’d prefer to believe the latter.

What exactly do you get from a POD Publisher? I won’t choose any one publisher in particular because they all operate more or less the same way. You pay some sort of fee up front. This gets you the use of one of the publisher’s ISBN’s. You do not own this ISBN, no matter what you are led to believe and it is not transferable. It’s just like you putting my checking account number on your bank deposit slips. You will also get your text laid out in a book format ready for printing as well as a cover designed. With only one exception that I know of, you do not own this text layout or cover design, the publisher does. You think you have paid for it, but you haven’t, according to the publisher. So at this point of the game, you have put up a varying sum of money and own nothing.

Most POD Publishers have started to offer editing services. This, of course, is at an additional cost. Some even have excellent editorial services but this is a cost that would have been paid by the traditional publisher where you also earn a royalty.

Your book is now ready for press except it does not go to press. “Demand driven”, are the words they use. A traditional or self publisher prints books. If you are even slightly serious about publishing you need books. There us a good reason for this. Cost. The amazing new POD printing technology is expensive. At cost, a digitally printed 256 page book is going to cost $5/book and that price does not go down no matter how many copies are sold. A traditionally published or self published\ print run of 2000 books will cost $2/book and that unit cost continues to drop as more books are printed. This leaves a difference of $3/book and again, that’s at cost. The POD publisher is not going to let you buy books at cost. Remember, they make the profit, not you. You are more than likely looking at buying copies of that book at $9/book, $3/book higher than if you had printed them yourself as a self publisher.

Now here comes the real trick. Even the most industry naïve author has picked up on the talking point that the author has to sell their book. Success depends of how much the author gets out, creates buzz and markets his/her book. This is absolutely the truth. This is true whether the book is published traditionally, self published or published by one of the pay to be published publishers. I just recently read that Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes still spends six months of the year promoting books. The difference here though is who picks up the costs associated with this marketing. If you are traditionally published, the publisher picks up the costs associated with advertising, promoting and marketing the book. The author puts in tons of time but the publisher takes care of the monetary aspects. As a self publisher, you will put in the time as the author as well as the money as the publisher but remember, you are not only making the royalty, you are also making the profit.

With the POD Publisher the author will also pay for all the marketing and promotion, like the Self-Publisher but the money to do this comes out of your royalty, not the POD publishers profits. Not only does it not come out of their pocket, they make a substantial profit on each of these programs by selling them to you. Do you think any POD Publisher would sell an ad in the Sunday New York Times if their payment for this ad came from the sale of books sold? ABSOLUTLY NOT! They are getting it from both ends. They are earning the profit on the ad they sold you as well as the profit on the few, if any books sold as a result of the ad. Pretty good deal, huh? Why do you think there are so many POD Publishers out there now and more and more popping up every day?

As I wrote a few months back, you need to look at these publishers as printing services or publishing services, not publishers. If you need help publishing your book, hire a service like www.selfpublishing.com. Analyze pricing between the various services and make sure you are doing an apples to apples comparisons. Then make your choice based on facts. Watch out for “strings”. Whatever you do you want everything to be portable should you decide to move. If you are paying to publish your book, you should be earning profit as well as paying yourself a royalty.

One last item; don’t be fooled by the “We get you into 26,000 retailers and wholesalers”. This is the left hook of the POD Publishing industry. It sounds great and really makes it look like these publishers are doing something wonderful for you that you couldn’t do yourself as if it were some magical service. None of these places do anything other then enter your book in the Ingram database. Pretty much all the POD Publishers use Lightning Source, a digital printer in Tennessee. Lightning is owned by Ingram. Inclusion in the Ingram database makes your book available in many wholesale and retail outlets like Amazon and BN.com.. You can tell if a book has been printed by Lightning by the oddly placed barcode on the last page of the book. It’s a great little service but it’s not magic and it’s certainly not the self publishing Holy Grail. It is also not something you can’t accomplish yourself for a lot less money. If you don’t want to deal direct, you can always signup for about $50 through an online publishing service like SelfPublishing.com or you can deal directly with Lightning for a couple hundred dollars. Just keep in mind, while POD distribution might work OK as an entry level or supplemental distribution system, it is meant to be outgrown. Except in rare circumstances it should not be your sole means of distribution do to the cost issues mentioned above. Do the math.

How do I find a printer to print my book cost-effectively?

Finding a printer is easy. Finding a cost effective Book Printer who wants to deal with the small publisher is a bit harder. Most printers can print books. Few printers are book printers. Few book printers want to work with the first time publisher. But there is hope.

Aside from not falling for the “we can assign you an ISBN” myth of the POD/Vanity/Subsidy publishers, selecting the right printer to print your books is as important as any other decision you will make as a publisher. It seems pretty easy. A quick Google search under the keywords Book Printing yields 102 million listings. Ugh. There are only about 50,000 printers in the whole US and only a handful of them are book printers.

The problem that novice print buyers run into is the fact that most printers can print books but most printers are not book printers. What does this mean? Most printers can print the pages of a book and the cover. The press doesn’t know what it’s printing. It’s only putting ink on paper. The bindery equipment used to bind a book while not found in most printers binderies, is a service that can easily be bought at a trade bindery. The finished product of the average printer out there and a printer who specializes in books will be pretty much identical. So what’s the big deal?

When I was coming up in the industry, the printers’ main pitch was “Price, Service, Quality… Pick two”. I can deliver a good product at a good price but you are going to wait forever for me to get around to doing it. Or, I can do it quickly and give you a great product but you are going to pay a premium for it. Or, I’ll print it quickly and cheaply but you will get a nasty looking product. This catchy saying held true until about ten years ago (although there are still some overpriced printers using it). With the advances in technology, the Quality aspect of printing, especially book printing, has become a non issue. Everyone produces good quality or they are already out of business. This leaves price and service and you can still pick two. It’s not quite tires off the rack but it’s getting there. With this in mind, the only way a printer can deliver that price and service is to specialize and be efficient.

You, the print buyer, figure heavily into how efficiently the printer can produce books. How, you ask? How’s the old saying go… time is money? Printers want to print. The profit margins in the printing industry are not that high to start with. If the presses aren’t running, the printer is not making money. A large part of this efficiency lies in producing as much printing for as few customers as possible. IE: It’s better to have one customer who can give you a thousand titles to print than a thousand customers who can give you one title each. Generally book printers fall into three categories.

The largest printers, like RR Donnelley and Quebecor are too busy printing Harry Potter
or the latest NY Times bestseller to bother with a small publisher. Sales people for these companies have huge quotas and work on very small commissions. Yes, they could technically print your book but they do not want you as a customer. Come back when you have a couple hundred titles in print and maybe they will show an interest in you. Until then, move on.

The second tier book printers like Edwards Brothers and McNaughton & Gunn aren’t much better. Their sales staffs also have large quotas. Like the Donnelley salespeople, these salespeople are instructed to concentrate on large quality publishers. Quality has nothing to do with how well your book is edited but how many titles you can send to be printed with the least amount of effort. You with your one title to print do not constitute a quality customer. As with the tier one printers, the second tier printers can certainly print your book but you are going to pay a premium because they don’t really want you and your one title. Come back when you have a whole list to quote on and maybe they will give you their B pricing. Their A pricing is still left for the “Big Fish”, not you.

Unfortunately, the reality is you are not much better with the third tier printers, for several reasons, although this is where most first timers end up. First, printers in this group do not generally have the latest most efficient equipment so even if they wanted to offer great pricing, they can’t. This group also work with commissioned salespeople but generally the commission rates are higher because these shops can’t support large sales quotas. This higher commission, of course, is passed on to the customer as higher prices. These printers usually say that they cater to the small publisher, mainly because they can’t compete with the large printers going after the large publishers.

The main problem, though, with all three groups is, with few exceptions, they want to charge whatever the market will bear. Your naivety and trusting nature will cost you money. If you are Random House or Simon & Schuster, you get consistent scale pricing based on volume. If you are Mr. & Mrs. Independent Publisher you are going to go back and forth on pricing similar to buying a used car on each and every project.

The only exceptions to this are the companies who have their pricing available on their websites for all to see. Unfortunately there aren’t many of these out there. I started online instant pricing about eight years ago. I would have figured that all printers would have online pricing by now but they don’t. The reason is not that there is any secret technology involved; it’s that they want to size you up and get every last nickel they can out of you. For those of you who haven’t seen an instant book printing quoting system before you should check it out at www.selfpublishing.com. It’s easy. Select from a few dropdowns and click a few buttons, and you have a price within seconds. The same specifications a week from now, yields the exact same price. You get the same price, if this is your first title or your twentieth.

How do you find a book printer to cost effectively print your first book? I would suggest you do your research. Look for the printers with the online instant pricing and buy from one of them. If the printer you are thinking about won’t put their pricing online, steer clear and save some money. If one of these printers come in with a high price but then lower it to match one of your online prices, chances are they will add charges to it along the way to get back to their original price. That’s what printers do. Help put the used car method of printing sales in the past. It’s pretty easy but it’s up to you.

What are the differences between publishing a trade book and a children’s illustrated picture book?

Modern digital printing technology has made it possible for an author to write a novel and print just a few copies of a pretty professional looking book for well under a thousand dollars. For another couple dollars this same author can have their book made available to 20,000 plus wholesale and retail outlets including Amazon and BN.com and for all practical purposes… they are “published”. This is certainly not to downplay those of you who have spent hundreds of hours perfecting your manuscript and hundreds if not thousands of dollars on editing and design and plan on truly self-publishing. Technology has just made it a easy for the overwhelming majority of the “minimally committed” writers to get into their names in print. This reality is the primary reason the virtual gaggle of Internet based POD publishers is so popular. For very little investment of time or resources, a writer can get something that looks like a book and feels like a book regardless of literary value. This is not the same with an illustrated children’s book

To many, an illustrated children’s book looks easy. They think that all you need to do is write a few hundred words, pick up a few clip art illustrations, put it all together in word or PowerPoint and call it an illustrated children’s book. This might be Ok for a little fun on a rainy Sunday but it’s not going to work in the real world. Neither is the product currently being produced by a few of the online “technology companies” masquerading as publishers. With the exception of printing a few test copies or personal copies digital printing will not work. It’s too expensive, often $10 or more for a 32 page plus cover paperback book.

Writing is a love, publishing is a business. The market place sets the retail price of virtually everything. Books are no exception. The marketplace sets the retail price of a paperback illustrated color children’s book at about $2.00 to $5.00. To think you are going to sell your book at a price higher than that is a fantasy. The public could care less what you paid for your book. You ask, how can publishers like Scholastic and Modern sell their books at such a low price? They buy quantity, that’s how. As a printing salesperson I used to sell millions of paperback color illustrated books to publishers. Remember the old saying, “the first book is real expensive and they are pretty cheap after that”. The large publishers are buying 25,000 to 50,000 books at a time. The 32 page book that you pay $10 for in digital quantities and not much lower than $3 or $4 in offset quantities of a few thousand costs the large publisher less than 50 cents per book in the large quantities they print. How can you compete with that? You can’t. Don’t waste your money unless your marketing plan lays out a way you that you can sell at least 5,000 to 10,000 books.

Hardcover on the other hand is an area where the small publisher can compete with the large publishers. Large publishers do not print the huge quantities they do with paperback. They print fewer copies, therefore they pay a higher unit cost for their printing which results in a higher retail price. You as a small publisher can print a few thousand hardcover books and have a unit cost that will allow you to compete in the same marketplace. Note I said a few thousand books, not a few hundred books. That brings us back to the first line which points out the increased financial commitment to an Illustrated children’s book. 2000 copies of a jacketed 32 page hardcover book is going to cost you $7,000-$8,000. Unless you are better off than most, this represents a sizable investment. On top of this you are going to spend another $3000- $10,000, or more on editing and illustrations. This investment is before you have sold your first book. Also, keep in mind, that the couple of dollars you as a trade book author spend to get your title listed in the Ingram wholesale/retail database of 20,000+ stores, it not available to you as an illustrated children’s book publisher. You need to get your book placed with wholesalers and retailers the old fashioned way… through a distributor.

In short, if you want to publish an illustrated children’s book you need to go into it with your eyes open. Education and preparation are the key ingredients of success. To help get you started down the right path, my partner Dana and I have just recently released the 2nd edition of our popular book, Publishing Basics for Children’s Books. In the words of Kathy O’Hehir, the Editorial Vice President of Modern Publishing, a New York based children’s book publisher, “In this new edition of Publishing Basics for Children’s Books you have once again managed to offer self-publishers and small press owners an insightful, informative guide to the entire process of publishing a children’s book – ingeniously styled and made easy to answer all questions about editorial, art, design and manufacturing. I love that you show paper selection choices as well” If you would email me your name and address, I would be happy to send you a copy of this new book. It is the only book of its kind and will answer many of the questions that you will need the answers to succeed. I look forward to hearing form you.

Are there any Trade Customs that POD Publishers adhere to?

Unfortunately most of the POD publishing industry operates somewhere between, There’s a sucker born every minute and Ignorance is Bliss. The only rule is that there are no rules. It’s strictly Buyers Beware.


Dorrance, now Dorrance Publishing, the self proclaimed first vanity press in the United States, has been around since 1920. Vantage Press, another old time vanity press, lists the #1 requirement for authors to use their service as “Can you afford the fee?”. Vanity presses like these two now call themselves subsidy presses but they are not much different than when they began. They charge authors ridiculous amounts of money to see their names in print. However, the good news is that since there is so much money involved, the average (and dare I say starving-artist-type) author cannot afford to use them. That leaves just a few “rich folks” to have their pockets picked.

The same cannot be said for the current POD publishing craze as it affects thousands of authors from all walks of life and all social and economic backgrounds. The “seeing your name in print” business has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. This industry currently operates without guidelines of trade customs. The general rule is that there are no rules. With few exceptions, the POD publishing industry operates much like the wild west; a complete free for all where infinitely more effort is spent on selling authors to sign up for services than selling books for these authors Most of the larger publishers are being run by venture capitalists, not publishing people. Many of the companies are for sale. Who knows if any of them are really making any money, yet tens of thousands of new authors join the ranks of “published authors” each year. The result of all this is that the POD publishing industry finds itself in a state of turmoil.

Last week I attended a Book Summit, sponsored by Dan Poynter and Infinity Publishing in Valley Forge, PA. Guests included representatives of various POD publishers as well as other publishing professionals. While the theme was stated as Industry Leaders Discussing the Future of Publishing in a Flat World, it was really about the future of POD publishing in a very round world. Noticeably absent from the group was a single representative of a major book retailer. This tells a lot about the industry. The POD publishing industry may think they are about selling books, to people other than the authors, but this does not seem to be shared by booksellers.

One of the participants brought up the name Publish America. Nobody seemed too crazy about them because of their deceptive trade practices. At this point the microphone came over to me. I explained that while I was in the middle of investigating all the claims against Publish America, I felt that the problem was industry wide, not just with Publish America. I stated most POD publishers relied on deception to make sales and that the only way I could see POD Publishing moving beyond the vanity press level and for the rest of the publishing world to take them seriously was for the POD publishers to get together and agree on a “Code of Ethics” that they would all follow. While you could have heard a pin drop on the POD publishing side of the table, the rest of the publishing professionals at the table welcomed the idea as long overdue. I wasn’t able to stay to the end of the conference to see if there were any plans to move forward as a group but there was enough positive talk during private conversations with participants to convince me that the time is right for writers’ groups and other concerned publishing professionals to start the push. My contribution to the effort starts right here. Below is just a start. I would very much like to hear from any of you with anything you think should be added or subtracted. If you are in a writer’s group, talk it up.

I offer these points as a starting point towards a Code of Ethics,


Clearly explain the differences between self publishing; being a self publisher and being a published author. There is a big difference. You can’t be a self publisher without first being the publisher.
Clearly explain the ISBN ownership. Assigning an ISBN to an author is not a “$225 savings” as claimed by some. The ISBN is owned by the publisher and not the author. It is NOT transferable.
Clearly explain the printing file ownership situation. While it is made very clear that cover design and book layout is covered in the publisher’s setup fee it is rarely pointed out that the publisher, not the author, owns the file that the author paid for.
Clearly point out the odds of becoming successful. An average number of books sold would be a start. If the publishers do not think that is fair, then the average number of books sold by the top 25% of their titles in print and the middle 33%.
Clearly state the benefits and downside of any programs being offered. For example, offering a return policy option for retail stores is a benefit. Charging $700 for this option when the average number of books sold is 50 is a downside. So is a return policy where books can only be returned for store credit.
Offer an editorial evaluation process whereby authors can receive an honest evaluation of their writing skills prior to choosing any expensive additional publishing or marketing programs.
Honest disclosure of exactly what POD distribution consists of and what it doesn’t


The above points are just a start. If POD publishing is going to move from vanity publishing to a true “farm system”, as some claim, for traditional publishing, something needs to be done. I believe that every reputable “pay to be published” publisher has the same ultimate goal of allowing anyone who wants to be published the opportunity to be published. If this industry is going to survive, it is going to be because the authors, who chose to publish in this manner, trust the system. A unified code of ethics is a start.

Is there a difference in appearance between a digitally produced book and one produced by standard offset printing?

Every time I listen to the Reader’s Radio interview with Dan Poynter on “The New Book Model.” I have to chuckle. Dan, of course, is the head guru of the small press publishing world. There aren’t many small publishers who have not heard of his name or been to one of his seminars. While I agree with most of the things he says about publishing and marketing, I take exception when it comes to his opinion on the difference between digital and traditional offset printing. Dan states with authority, when referring to digitally produced books, that, “They look just like any other book… I challenge you to even tell the difference.”

If you believe that the full color printing in USA Today is equal to the color printing in GQ Magazine (as many consumers do), you will probably not notice any difference between a book produced in a digital plant and one that was printed at an offset book manufacturer. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that digital printing is bad. I am saying that it is different.

The modern digital color cover presses are very good. I threw away my “loop” (magnifying glass used for checking registration and dot structure) years ago. Taking this into consideration and the fact that my eyes aren’t what they were thirty years ago when I got into the business, you can hardly tell the difference between a process color cover printed on a digital press and one printed on an offset press, as long as there is a film lamination on top of the printing. Without the lamination, it is still pretty easy to tell the difference but no publisher in their right mind would sell a book without a laminated cover. The main area that still needs improvement in the color digital process is where solids or gradated screens are involved. It is still fairly easy to see banding and other inconsistencies in these areas. Still if I were to grade the overall cover appearance, I would give it a B+ vs. an A for the offset cover (still on the honor role).

The digital text printing has also come a long way. There are a couple of different processes in use but the most common is the Docutech, which is made by Xerox®. In short, a Xerox® by any other name is still a Xerox®. For straight type, it looks fine. It’s a much darker/denser black than offset because it’s toner and not ink. It is almost an unnatural look after so many years of seeing ink on paper, although it certainly passes the no loop, no glasses test.
The problem comes into play when you try to mix even the simplest graphics or halftones (images) into the text. There is no comparison between the appearance of the graphics and halftones done on a digital press and those printed on a traditional offset press. We publish a book titled, Publishing Basics – A Guide for the Small Press and Independent Self-Publisher where we have printed the book on five different paper stocks, using three different digital presses and two offset presses. The same images and graphics are reproduced in each of these sections and you can see the difference yourself between the different processes. (Yes, the baby pictures are me and my partner Dana, and the other pictures are my son and Dana’s dogs). You can order a free copy of this book by visiting www.booksjustbooks.com.

The Océ digital press does a better job of halftones because it fuses the toner into the paper instead of laying it on top of the sheet. The only problem that I have found with the Océ is that it is priced considerably higher than the Docutech. The other digital press that we show is one made by Scitex. It actually uses ink, which is good, especially for text, but the halftones are the nastiest looking of all. All in all, the three digital presses get a B+ for text and a C- for graphics compared to the A quality of offset. Up to this point of the process, the difference between offset and digital is the difference between an A and a B. Neither one a bad grade by most peoples standards. Now that we have talked about some of the more obvious differences between digital and offset, we’ll move onto some of the more subtle differences.

Have you ever unpacked a ream of copy paper, loaded it into a copier and run off 500 copies? Does the pile of “copies” have the same physical appearance of the pile of paper you loaded in the feeder tray? Ever try to put the 500 “copies” back into the same package that the 500 blank sheets of paper came from? Most digital processes utilize extreme temperatures to fuse the toner to the paper. This heat takes the moisture out of the paper which tends to make the “copies” fresh out of the copier, brittle. Natural humidity puts the moisture back into the paper but not necessarily to the same degree as when it came out of the pack. If you leave the pile of “copies” out for a while, the pile will start to flatten but never get back to where it started thus slightly changing the appearance of the paper. The offset presses that print single color books do not use any heat. The sheet that goes into the press is the same sheet that comes out of the press. If any of you have seen a digital printing line in operation you’ll remember that the “book block” comes out of the copier and goes right into the binder. Now try to picture this pile of sheets (book block), with all the moisture out of the sheet being sealed on the binding edge with adhesive to apply the cover. You now have a book block picking up moisture on three sides and not the fourth. You can get a curl to the whole book that will never flatten out. This problem by itself gives the overall finished book a C-C+ look bringing the whole product down to a C+, which is still “commercially acceptable” but bothersome to many customers.

Another typical problem lies in the strength of the binding. In perfect binding, signatures (groups of pages) are gathered to make a book block. The binding edge goes through a grinding unit which “roughs up” the edge so adhesive will adhere better when the cover is applied to the binding edge of the book. After the cover is applied and wrapped around the book, the book block gets trimmed on the outside, top and bottom by either a 3 knife trimmer or via a flat bed cutter making a finished book. A typical new perfect binding machine used by offset book manufacturers can cost over 2 million dollars. The perfect binders that are used in digital shops cost as little as $20,000 and rarely cost over $100,000. The difference between the two types is a lot more than markup. Most binders used by digital printer produce little more than a glorified pad. Ninety-five percent of the complaints that I have run into with the digital product revolve around the binding and seventy-five percent of them revolve around the pages falling out as the book as it is flattened out to read.

As long as I have mentioned the problem of pages falling out, I might as well talk about the main cause of this problem. Aside from the problem with the inefficient grinding units and the problem with the cheaper binders applying adhesives, the main culprit is actually the grain of the paper. Paper is made primarily of pulp and water (as well as chemicals to regulate brightness and opacity). As the papermaking process begins pulp is added to water to make a sort of pulp soup. As this solution moves through the papermaking machine, the pulp fibers line up next to each other in parallel rows. Moisture is removed until the mixture becomes paper. (Any paper people reading this, please excuse my simplistic description of this process.) The bottom line is the direction that these pulp fibers are facing is the “grain” of the paper. All paper has a grain. If you take a piece of 8 1/2 x 11” copy paper and fold it the 11” way, you get a nice smooth fold. Fold the same sheet the 8 1/2” way and you get a ragged irregular fold. The heavier the paper the more pronounced this effect. You always want the grain of the paper to run parallel to the binding edge of the book. Remember that smooth fold when you folded with the grain? This allows the pages of the book to open naturally. If the grain is going against the bind, the book does not lay open naturally. The reader has a tendency to “flatten” the book to keep it from “snapping” shut. As the book is flattened the spine ends up breaking. Once this happens, the pages start falling out of the book.

Most digital presses run an 8 1/2 x 11” sheet of paper. Unless specially ordered, the grain of the paper is 11”. That yields a wrong grain 5 1/2 X 8 1/2” book. Even if short grain is specially bought so the 5 1/2 X 8 1/2” product is correct, it yields a wrong grain 8 1/2 X 11” book. Judging from the sample books that I’ve received from various digital printers only a small minority seems to worry about using correct grain paper.

When all is said and done, I get back to my original statement. Digital books aren’t necessarily bad but they are different. Your best bet in buying digital printing is to find an old line book printer who made a move into digital printing rather one who has always been a digital printer. Chances are the old line printer is used to running books with correct grain paper and binding books that don’t fall apart. Chances are also good that he is running a real perfect binder, not the bargain basement version run by most digital shops. Most straight digital book printers lack the experience to know any better or the money to do anything about it. As a buyer you need to be clear in your mind as to what you are buying. The digital book printers used by www.BooksJustBook.com were all producing good books long before anyone ever heard the word POD (Print on Demand). If a printer is quoting you under about 750 copies, he is probably figuring to run on a digital press. Do yourself a favor when dealing with one of these printers and confirm that at least the paper grain is going to be correct. If he doesn’t know what you are talking about or tells you that it doesn’t matter, hang up the phone and try someone else.

Finally, no matter how much you want it to happen, you are not going to achieve A or even A- quality with digital printing. If that is what you need, you either need to raise your quantity to run at an offset printing plant or put your money back in your pocket for a few years or so and try again.