- I just had a call with someone
asking me how many copies of her book
she had to order when her book launched
It made me realize that some folks
still don't know that we live
in the greatest time in publishing,
the time when your book is printed on demand.
Gone are the days of storing a thousand copies
in your garage, unless it's the right choice for your book.
Stick around and I'll explain the different between offset
and print on demand and when it's right for you to do what.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, I'm Julie The Book Broad,
founder of Book Launchers, your professional
self-publishing team that will help you write,
publish and promote a money-making,
impact-creating, non-fiction book.
We've helped some smart, cool authors
write, publish and promote their books
to achieve their goals and help their readers.
Here are just a few of the fantastic books
we've worked on recently.
Aren't they lovely, and, part of what we do
is help them make money from their books.
And in many cases that means creating a course
from their book material which is why
I am sporting this fantastic Thinkific hoodie,
because Thinkific takes fantastic care of our clients
when they wanna create a course,
it's a wonderful platform for building courses.
And recently they had a great event online, free,
you can check it out, just for authors
on how to turn their book into a course.
So I'll put a link to that below
so you can check it out.
Now, when we work with clients
we will help them create print books,
soft cover or hard cover and eBooks
and even audio books if they want it.
Pretty much every non-fiction author
needs to do a print book and an eBook.
Now as part of the process to create print books
we set our clients up with accounts at KDP
for amazon.com distribution
and IngramSpark for distribution everywhere else,
including bookstores, Amazon in other countries, and more.
You can actually see Ingram's global distribution options
in a link below at the ingramspark.com website.
What people may not realize is IngramSpark
and KDP are print-on-demand publishers.
Print on demand is exactly how it sounds.
Using a digital file of your manuscript and cover,
the book gets printed when it's ordered.
The benefits of this are fairly obvious,
but let me hit on my favorites.
Check mark, while retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
Chapters, Indigo, will likely keep a quantity
of your books on hand, if you're selling
a decent volume of copies, there's no warehouse required
to store your books while you wait for them to sell.
Another check, the speed of this process is so impressive,
in less than a week from finishing your book
you can be holding a copy in your hands.
And another check mark, less waste.
I've seen some sad social media posts
where distributors go out of business
and just chuck thousands of copies of books out.
That almost makes me cry, for the trees,
for the authors, and for the people
who could've read those books.
And, check, because it's on demand,
if you have to change your book for some reason,
the change can take effect fairly quickly.
One of our clients printed a bunch of books
with offset printing and changed his book jacket
after the fact because he had thousands of books
to begin with, the new book jacket won't be available
until he prints another run of books
and sells out those first few thousand.
Lucky for him he actually sold the few thousand
very fast, but that's not always the case.
Thousands of books can take authors years to sell
in some cases.
So now, what is offset printing.
Print on demand is digital and done with ink.
If's different than offset because offset uses plates
where inked images are transferred or offset
from a plate to a rubber blanket then onto paper.
The offset process is a lithographic process
which is based on the repulsion of oil and water.
There are some really great YouTube videos
of offset printers in action if you're really curious.
Bottom line, it's meant for mass quantities
and it's much cheaper if you're printing thousands
and thousands of books,
especially if you're printing in color.
To compare as an example,
let's take a typical 260 page non-fiction book.
Printed with print on demand it'll be probably roughly $4.
But if you print 10,000 copies with an offset printer
that copy might cost you under $2.
So you can enjoy a fairly significant savings
but where are you going to store
10,000 books until they sell.
Now, there's a slight, a slight little itty bitty tiny,
there's slight quality difference.
If you look closely at a print-on-demand book,
beside an offset printed book,
you can see the difference in the ink on the page.
The quality of print on demand has come so far though
that your readers will really not know the difference.
To me, print on demand through IngramSpark
makes so much sense for the majority of authors.
Retails will still buy from them,
the costs aren't that great,
and you can just order the books when you need them.
The only reason to me that you wouldn't do print on demand
is if you know you're gonna sell high volumes of books,
in the thousands, and profit-per-copy
is your most important factor.
Now tell me, have you done offset printing?
Tell us about it below and if you have a topic
you'd like me to cover, let me know that
below in the comments too.
And I just might shoot a video for you.
And when you comment the day a video is released,
you'll be entered to win some fabulous,
#noboringbooks, Booklaunchers swag.
And make sure you subscribe to the channel
and when you do that, and comment,
you will join the ranks with some fabulous folks
who've become my YouTube besties.
Folks like Gene Hobbs, David Wong, the Seamstress.
Melissa Wardley, and April Jones.
Thank you so much for your comments and support,
I appreciate you so much.
Have you seen this super cool video right here
about starting your own publishing company?
It's not very complicated and it makes your book
look so professional, or, this new video I just put out,
they're both great, so click on the one
you wanna watch the most and I'll see you there.
(upbeat music)