![]() I finally got it when I read Peter and Donna Thomas’s excellent Making Books by Hand. I found it hard to follow even the best of diagrams. To be honest, though, it took me a while to get the hang of “saddle-stitching” pages together. Toby Craig’s book assembling photojournal There are good explanations of the process here: 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).Longer books involve some unwieldy sewing.Once they’ve burned printing plates, it’s too late for you to be fussy. Make sure you get a proof from the printer and make any colour adjustments at that point. Your pretty proof from the designer might not match the final product. The colour of the cover might shift when it goes to press. We’ll only have to pay for the black and white guts of the book, and the binding. We printed extra covers and stashed them, so when our books sell out (!) and we need another 500, the covers are ready to go. Once it’s up and running, leaving it to print 1,000 covers instead of 500 is not that much of a difference. One of the largest parts of the printing cost is the set up of the colour press. They are crafty elves who understand the feeling and flavour of books. The moment I walked into Coach House to discuss the printing of Some Words Spoken, my nervousness dissolved. Their price was also the best I found - cheaper by $1,500 at the time than any print bureau.Ĭynthia pipes in: I second that recommendation wholeheartedly. Coach House Press is a sterling example of a traditional press who care about their work. Offset printing is a high-volume printing method that uses large machinery to transfer text and images from metal plates to rubber pads then finally to paper. Here’s a summary of each (with special emphasis on the ones I like!): Now, though, there are four main options available: There may have been other ways to do it, but having written a book about Y2K, I didn’t have the time to find out. A big folded-over photocopy sandwich didn’t appeal to me, but I really didn’t know how else one could make a book, so I laid out the pages and the cover, then paid Coach House Press to do the production work. When I self-published my first novel, doubleZero, in 1999, I wanted to create a book to sell in stores. Self-pub: Four times more options than in 2000. Generally, self-publishing involves an inverse relationship of work to money: The more work you’re willing to do, the more money you can save the more you want to just skip to an end product, the more it’ll cost you. I now produce my own books at home from start to finish, and in this article will explain what I’ve had to learn and acquire in order to do that. 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. It’s all good news for us independent publishers. Things have changed considerably since then, both in the technology available to individuals and in the services available in the marketplace. UPDATE:Hamish has started a DIY Book podcast!īack in 2000, I wrote an article for this website about how to produce your own book.
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