How do books get printed anyway?

By Erin Chamberlain

The first time I saw a printing press, I was 13. I reckon you could say it was love at first sight. OK, it was also noisy and smelled a bit (ink, glue, paper, manufacturing) but I was fascinated.

In my second year of high school, I completed an independent project where I nominated the subject. I chose to find out ‘How a Book is Made’ and I was paired with a mentor, who wrote St. George Girls High School, 1916-1991, a book to commemorate the 75th anniversary of our school. It was 200 pages, illustrated and published by Hale & Iremonger. (And because it was lodged properly, I can still find a record of it and its ISBN in the National Library of Australia, even though I can’t find a listing anywhere else, apart from one on sale on eBay.)

I went home from my visit with a printed cover or two – uncut so I could see the CMYK and registration marks and a book block.

But by now, I’m speaking a foreign language to most of you so let me tell you what I know about book production, from my perspective as a book consultant and publishing mentor who has worked in trade publishing in many roles, including as a book production manager.

There are two ways that you can produce a book.

With one, you pay upfront costs and complete a print run.

With the other, you print on demand (POD) as orders are placed by consumers and books are printed singly or in small batches to fill demand.

Understandably, when authors are thinking about writing and publishing a book, their thoughts turn to the ‘hows’ and the costs of the process. Let me unpick them for you and show you some pros and cons.

How the trade publishers print books

It makes sense that authors think that making books is costly. Publishing houses have production teams (a production director, production managers, production executives, production assistants) and warehouses where they keep books. They buy paper and fix print costs and arranging shipping – and do all this in many different countries. They decide on cover treatments (aka gloss lamination, matte lamination, spot UV, foil, glitter), liaise on Pantone colours for endpapers, chose book bands to hide the glue on the tops and bottoms of spines of hardback books and, if they work in children’s publishing, even must arrange to source oinks and quacks and fire engine sounds for toddler books.

The first types of books I worked on in publishing were big, fully illustrated encyclopaedic titles that had a CD-ROM (yes, it was the early 2000s before the Internet was the behemoth that it is now) glued in and a carrycase with a handle (so you could carry the hefty tome). The carrycase was closed with Velcro dots that were glued on by hand by our printer in Hong Kong. But the dots weren’t staying in place on the book dummy (aka the prototype – all books will have a blank dummy for approval of paper stock and size before the print is booked in trade publishing). The solution? Each dot (four per book on a 40,000-book print run) was hammered by hand with a mallet to encourage the glue to stick.

So yes, book production is a whole job. It can be expensive and complex.

These types of books will be printed on an offset printer.

A publishing house delivers print-ready PDFs to the printer, along with a set of proofs that are the approved colour match, if you are printing an illustrated book, or, at the very least, a set of proofs so that the printer has a copy to refer to if necessary.

Offset printers use CMYK to print colour.

C stands for Cyan (aka blue).

M stands for Magenta (aka red).

Y stands for Yellow (aka…yellow).

K stands for Black (I know).

An offset printer can have five rollers and the black roller can be set up across two plates – one roller will print the black in illustrations and the other roller will print the text. This is how translated books are printed most cost-effectively, as a printer can switch out the language on the fifth roller and print, say Dutch and German with the UK-English and US-English edition. In fact, a printer can print two different Englishes this way too.

The final check before printing is on printer’s proofs. These are the final check (and have been known in the past as blues or ozalids – these days they’re likely to be a non-colour-matched run out. A production assistant is likely to check these over, checking size, that the pages run on, that the text runs on (we call it top and tailing), and then a book is approved to press.

Next comes the advance copy for final approval.

If it’s a big print run, box marks are created and approved, shipping manifests are arranged.

And the print run is shipped to your warehouse.

This can take up to 12 weeks (95% of books that I worked on were printed – for Europe, the US and the Southern Hemisphere – in the Far East, aka Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China). And yes, publishers print there because it’s cheapest. Paper is shipped there in BIG rolls.

I remember the first time I visited a printer as a publishing assistant. As I‘ve written, we created large-format illustrated books, with a CD-ROM and a carrycase and lots of moving pieces. Our schedule was already sped up by sending our publisher and production assistant to live in a hotel in Singapore for a couple of weeks so they could approve proofs from the repro house on site, rather than have to wait for the overnight courier from Singapore to Sydney.

It was a Saturday night and I was waiting at a bus stop to go to dinner with friends when my boss, Margaret, phoned me.

“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Nothing much,” I said.

“Can you go to Coogee and get a new CD-ROM and get on a plane to Hong Kong? The CD-ROM plant won’t press the disc – there’s an error showing. We’ve retested it and we’re pretty sure it’s a Windows 2000 error in the Chinese version and as we’ve not sold the rights in China. We need you to go and take this new disc and view the error message and tell them to press it anyway. There’s no time to wait for DHL to take the disc and to have the conversation again – we’ll lose our shipping slot.”

I was off to Hong Kong within 24 hours. Our printer sent a driver to pick me up from the airport and I was up the next morning to find this CD pressing plant. Now that’s another story altogether, which includes wandering around an indoor market until I found an internal staircase…

After that, the printer pushed the boat out. That driver became my chauffeur for the three days I was in Hong Kong. I was wined and dined and taken to tourist attractions. And I saw our book on the press and met with another repro house who pitched us for our business…

Printing books can be tight schedules and stressful for all manner of things – but it can also be fun.

Print on demand

While traditional book publishers will predominately invest in an upfront print run and all the costs involved, technology has changed rapidly in the past 30 years or so. When I started in publishing, we were working in Quark Xpress and my publisher mentioned that it was only five years ago (so 1995) when production used scissors and glue to create a sample book to guide the printer.

The self-publishing industry is really only in its infancy. Amazon launched CreateSpace in 2007. In 2018, CreateSpace and KPD became one service. Ingram Spark has been around since 2013.

Self-publishing is flourishing because digital printing has become cheaper and much more accessible. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked in an office but over the past 20 years, photocopiers and printers have become one and the same (and the space that a printer takes up in a home office is much smaller these days than in the past.) Essentially, print-on-demand technology is the same as photocopier technology. If you’ve ever wondered, Lightning Source, where both IngramSpark and KDP print their POD books in the UK, is essentially a big warehouse full of industrial-sized photocopiers.

The main difference between digital and offset printing is in the way that the images are transferred from text to paper. Digital printing (aka the technology used for print on demand) is a giant photocopier/printer with book-folding attachments – meaning that paper, ink and glue is all that is necessary to print a book.

An order goes in for a title, the book hits the queue, the book gets printed and shipped. Sometimes online bookshops might order some stock if a book is selling well but, in general, print on demand is exactly what it sounds like – books are printed in singles or in small runs as customers demand. This means that an author is not paying for a run of books in advance, nor do they have to store them or fulfil them. However, as the author does not buy the print run upfront, each book costs a certain amount to print, based on the number of pages, the size (trim size) of the book, whether it is paperback or hardback, whether it is being printed in colour or black and white. You can estimate how much printing costs are with the tools provided by IngramSpark or Amazon.

When setting your sales price as a self-publishing author, take into consideration the print cost, the discount you give to encourage bookstores to stock your book (usually between 45–55% depending on if you allow returns or set it as a firm sale title) and then you’ll arrive at your profit per book sold.

 

And let’s not forget e-books and audiobooks

Of course, you can now also publish a book without even needing to print a word. No need for paper, ink, glue or binding. All you need is your manuscript, a computer and the time to do a bit of research about the types of programmes and files needed to publish your book. It has never been easier to publish a book without a traditional publishing house.

The floodgates are well and truly open

With that, though, come some things to think through for the self-published author. Print on demand responds to demand. The latest estimate is that 4 million new titles are now published every year. This is only possible because of print-on-demand services. Self-publishing has risen 246% since 2010, just in the United States alone (see the stats here).

In 2013, 416,438 ISBNs were assigned in the USA to self-published titles. In 2018, 1,677,781 were assigned. And we can only assume that these figures will continue to rise.

I read the other day (on a Facebook group thread, so who knows if this stat is credible) that around 8,000 titles are uploaded to Amazon every day.

The upshot of it is that ANYONE can publish a book now. The traditional trade publishers are no longer the gatekeepers of the holy grail of authorship. Print on demand, means that anyone with access to a computer can try their hand at publishing a book.

This can make it hard to stand out in a crowded market. There are many low content books being uploaded, as well as many books that are uploaded and then the author takes to the internet to complain that they’ve published their book, but no one has bought it yet. Just because print-on-demand technology exists, doesn’t mean book are the best way to try to get rich. Traditional publishing houses make most of their money from their backlist titles (aka books that haven’t been published in the last 12 months that consistently sell without publicity) and if anything came out of the Penguin/Random House antitrust case in the US (read the New York Times article for a good overview), it’s that bestsellers are unpredictable and “In 2021, fewer than one percent of the 3.2 million titles that BookScan tracked sold more than 5,000 copies.”

Pros and cons of a print run versus print on demand for a self-published author

What’s an aspiring author to do? The cost of creating a good book (which goes beyond how you print it – there’s copyediting, layout/typesetting and cover design and proofreading to factor in as well) is often the big reason that brings author dreams falling to the ground.

There are pros to self-publishing. Yes, you do have to find some money if you want to publish a book that is the same standard as a traditionally published title, but you don’t have to find the money upfront for print, due to print-on-demand technology. Other massive pros include your book always being available and environmental sustainability – you’re only using the paper you need, rather than printing an entire print run in advance of sales. Other pros include that you control the price of your book and you have full creative control.

 There are, of course, some cons. While digital printing is always improving, the glossy cookbooks, embellished covers, access to specialist papers, boards for board books – even colour matching – are unavailable or unattainable. Printing larger copies via print on demand can have inconsistent results. Print on demand does not mean that you can go into a bookshop and take a look around and decide that you want to print a series of books in a gift box that is shrink-wrapped. It’s just not currently possible for print on demand to deliver all the things a specialist printer can. Even putting a ribbon bookmark or printing coloured endpapers is a step too far for the technology.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t do both. An author client of mine printed a limited edition colour print run of her book that she fulfilled herself and she has a black and white edition available on print on demand. It’s a smaller investment to print, say, 200 copies of your book – and it’s still via digital printing – but it gives a good result. It does mean that you need to find space to store your books and get to the post office to send them out, but that might not be a concern for you.

A final thought

Many authors who chase that traditional publishing deal do so because they think their book will be in a warehouse, stocked in bookshops. They don’t understand the lifecycle of a book. A new title is printed and delivered to a publisher’s warehouse. The author might be asked to do some publicity; there might be a marketing budget. (There might not – the more the author hustles, the better this is for both the author and the publishing house.) The books go out to bookshops. Bookshops take books on a sale or return basis. Publishing houses send the book to the shop, charging a 45% discount from the sales price. The bookshop marks the book up to the sales price and makes 55% per book sold. However, books are only on the shelf for three to six months. If a book hasn’t sold after that time, they are picked off the shelf and returned to the publisher’s warehouse. If a book doesn’t sell well in its first six months, its eventual journey is to be remaindered, sold off cheaply and be out of print (and unlikely ever to return to print). The book’s life has passed.

Now, if you publish via print on demand – your book stays in print and available to readers for as long as you like, until you remove it from sale. You, the author, can market it, seek publicity, put it on price promotion. You have so much more control.

Print on demand or print in advance?

It’s a nuanced decision for an author to make, whether they self-publish or seek a traditional publishing deal, and an understanding of the printing and sales process can help an author decide either way.

Technology has come a long way in the last 20 years. And the marketplace is crowded. If you do publish your own book, the journey isn’t over when you have that book in your hands – it changes to selling and marketing your book instead.

It’s a great thing to write and publish a book and become an author. Despite what the print-on-demand industry or the mega coaches online are spouting, writing a book is not a licence to print money. You get to just print your book. And I wish you all the best with selling it once you’ve decided on your printing pathway.

About Erin Chamberlain

Erin is a book mentor, editor and publishing consultant who has worked for traditional trade publishers for nearly 20 years. Bad books hurt her soul. She started out selling books in a bookshop and has worked across most areas of publishing including editorial, commissioning, production and sales. She is passionate about bringing ideas into the world and supporting authors to create books that will have an impact and change lives. She is the founder of the Write Now Experiment, writing accountability spaces where she writes with you and is on hand to answer your writing and publishing questions.

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