Print Production and Prepress
For Self-Publishing Authors
Okay, I heard you. Everybody wants Die Hard: The Ballet. I would write this for you—for us—except I think a ballet has no words and mostly or exclusively dances, and I only know about words and not about dances. If anyone out there knows anyone who knows how to write dances, I hope you will pass Die Hard: The Ballet on to them. Till then, Die Hard: The Ballet will have to live in our hearts and minds alongside all the other unwritten and unchoreographed ideas in search of an executor.
So: You’re doing a print edition.
You made a good choice. When you work hard at something and the end result is a physical object that you can hold in your hand, it is an amazing feeling. Having been a production editor for mumble mumble years now, I’ve produced thousands of books and journals and I have favorites on my personal bookshelf here at home going back to the beginning of my career. I have print copies of the first book and first journal issue I produced and the first magazine I ever worked on. I have kept physical books to remind me of the most challenging projects I’ve done and my favorite authors I’ve worked with.
This is the same reason I make crafty stuff in my spare time. I just really love creating physical objects.
This is not meant to be critical of ebooks, by the way, at all. There’s nothing wrong with publishing in electronic-only formats—it’s a smart business decision for many self-publishing authors to not do a print edition. They can be tougher to sell, for one thing, and making sure your print book comes out looking beautiful and professional requires skills that are not required to be a great writer, which means you either have to learn those skills or outsource the work to someone like me who produces publications for a living.
Or you can read today’s Shelf Life and pick up some tips for making sure your print edition, if you’re doing one, comes out looking like top-shelf material.
I’m going to assume that your decision to make a print book is already made one way or the other; I’m not going to try to convince anyone to print or not to print. Instead, I’ll focus on choosing a printer, preparing a print file, and performing a quality check of your print files to make sure the book that arrives in the mail looks exactly like you thought it would.
If you’re already self-publishing with Amazon as part of their KDP platform, the easiest way to make a print edition available is to let them do it. Amazon—and some others like Ingram Spark—will make your print edition available as a print on demand (POD) title, which means that no inventory exists. When someone orders your print edition, a printing press somewhere hums to life and pops out exactly one copy of your book, which is then packed and shipped to the buyer. In addition to being the easiest way to make a print edition of your book, this is also the cheapest and the least risky—because, again, no inventory.
There are multiple types of printing press but the important ones to know for today’s Shelf Life are the offset press (also called a web press) and the digital press (also called a sheet-fed press). The offset press is the traditional printing press that has existed for hundreds of years. It prints by stamping an image of a range of pages on a huge piece of paper that is then folded many times into a 64-page block called a signature. The signatures are stacked on top of one another to become the book block, bound into the cover, and then the whole thing is trimmed to its final size. Printing a book on the offset press is usually most efficient for doing a large print run (in the tens of thousands of units) because there’s a lot of setup required to get a title ready for the offset press (namely, preparing those 64-page image stamps, or plates).
The digital press was introduced in the last century and prints images digitally rather than stamping them with a plate. It uses sheets of paper rather than slicing pieces off a giant roll as it goes, which is why it’s called a sheet-fed press. Because it does not require plating, it’s more efficient for shorter unit runs than the offset press.
Digital printing is becoming more efficient all the time and closing the gap with offset printing even for larger runs, but that’s a story for another day. For now, know that all print-on-demand printing is done on the digital press. The offset press does not get out of bed in the morning for orders smaller than 2,000 copies. Whether you need just one unit or you need 500 units, they’re going to be made on the digital press.
Digital printing and print on demand are not interchangeable terms although I’ve known people to use them that way. All POD copies are printed digitally but not all digital printing is POD. The digital press can create a a run of units up front or it can produce copies one at a time as they’re ordered. All this is important because when a self-publishing author decides to make a print edition available, they will have to decide whether they want to order a print run—that is, have a certain number of copies produced up front and held in inventory till they’re sold—or whether they want to set their book up for print on demand and have copies produced as they’re sold.
The obvious upside of print on demand is that the author does not have to pay for printing up front and recoup the cost of printing later, as units sell. The downside is, the unit cost is higher. There are economies of scale in place for printing; the cost per unit when you run 500 units at once is less than the per-unit cost of printing one unit. But no one can see their future sales and so there is risk involved with buying stock up front that may or may not sell.
For most self-publishing authors, print-on-demand will be the way to go in order to mitigate risk and save money. Further, if you’re already self-publishing an ebook through Amazon, it’s supremely easy to add a print edition through their print-on-demand platform.
Next, you have to create a print file. Creating an ebook file is much easier than creating a print book file, because the end-user’s e-reader device (their Kindle, for example), does the formatting work on the fly. For an ebook, you need only format your text far enough for the e-reader to make sense of it. The device takes it from there.
In print, the file you set up and send to the printer is what you’re going to get back in the form of a printed book. You need to worry about things like font size, leading, margins, folios, drop folios, verso and recto pages, blind pages, and more. It’s a lot to worry about. You also need to create a cover file.
The first decision is whether you will:
Hire a designer or compositor to typeset your pages;
Use an online book-formatting tool to quickly format your pages at the cost of creative control; or
Compose the pages yourself.
A designer or compositor is expensive but the resulting print file should be impeccable since you’re working with (theoretically) a professional. A designer can work with you to make the pages look exactly the way you want, but the cost is steep. If you’re working with a designer, they may also create your cover for you (for a fee).
An online book-formatting tool, like the one available for KDP authors or the Reedsy Book Editor are quick, easy-to-use tools into which you can paste your manuscript and quickly style it for print. With these tools, you can adjust settings to get the right trim size (the overall final dimensions to which your book will be trimmed, its height and width) and the tool will format your book into a print file. The downside to this option is you will have very little creative control. You will not have many options for fonts, heading styles, folio placement, or any other specifics.
The third option is to format your own print file, which is not for the faint of heart. One day I think I’ll walk through how to do that in Shelf Life, but that topic would be a whole article or series of articles unto itself. Suffice to say, a print file can be created with Word but I do not recommend it. This is a good option for anyone who knows their way around a desktop publishing software option like Adobe InDesign, but not so much for anyone else.
Once you have your print file, it’s a really good idea to proofread it. Like, a really really good idea. I highly recommend printing off your print file at home or at a local copy shop and reading through it with a red pen nearby. I recommend this even if you already proofread your book, or had a proofreader do so, before your electronic edition published. For one thing, new, print-edition-only errors can creep in during typesetting—bad line breaks, word-spacing issues, wrong fonts, dropped characters, and so on. This is your big chance to find these. For another thing, sometimes typos or errors are just easier to see when you read your work in a new medium, in this case on paper instead of on a screen.
Now, you just need to deliver that print file to your chosen printer and it’s off to the races. However: Before shipping that file off to the printer it’s a good idea to give it a final quality check to make sure it doesn’t have any major flaws that will show up in the finished book. You’d think that any of these major flaws would have turned up in the proofread you just did but you’d be surprised. Whether you chose to proofread or not, it’s always a good idea to give your print file a final quality check before you submit it.
Here are the things I look for when quality checking a final print file.
All pages are present and in the right order (folios, or page numbers, are in the correct numerical order).
If verso (left-hand side, even-numbered) and recto (right-hand side, odd-numbered) pages are different, for instance if page numbers appear in the outer corner, check that all verso pages are formatted correctly as versos and same for all rectos.
Read the title everywhere it appears to make sure it is correct.
Read the author’s name everywhere it appears to make sure it is correct.
Read the copyright page to make sure all information is true and correct.
Check every running head (or running foot) for styling and typos. If verso/recto running heads are different (for instance, book title on versos and author name on rectos), make sure the correct running head is on each page.
Check that the page references on the table of contents are correct.
Ensure the ISBN on the back cover barcode is correct and matches the copyright page.
Check the spine for correctness and completeness. Now read it again. And maybe a third time.
Read your front cover, back cover, and title pages one last time—these are the most visible parts of the book and the most embarrassing place to have an error.
Once you’ve done all that—send the file to your chosen printer and put it out of your mind. Feel confident that you’ve done all you can to ensure a high-quality, error-free publication. Kick back, relax, and wait for your print book to arrive.
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