On Demand Printing

NikonsandVstroms

I need to get a book printed and in my hands on May 15th by the latest so I was wondering if anyone has good experiences with print on demand publishers, and about what the turn around time was?

fredjclaus

What type of book do you need? Do you need a photo book or a novel type book? I've not used on-demand printers myself, but I have a friend who is an author and she self-published a book. She has had great luck with on demand printers, but you can't just get one. They charge you an arm and a leg and they print a few hundred.

If you are looking for a photo book, I'd take a look at Blurb.com You can create the book right on your computer using BookSmart, and upload it for printing. Don't know why you wouldn't get it from Blurb by May, but you may want to check them out.

CWSkopec

My Dad and I are using Lulu.com as the publisher for our book (see me sig for a link). They print on demand and generally it's about a week turn around from ordering to receiving. That means you shouldn't have any trouble getting it by the middle of May.

I've heard that they don't do the best photo books, so I'm looking into a couple other options to do my own photo book through. If you're looking for more of a novel or non-fiction book I highly recommend Lulu. My preview copy was clean and looked good. I just had to darken a couple of the photos we have in it for illustrative purposes and it was good to go!

NikonsandVstroms

fredjclaus wrote:

What type of book do you need? Do you need a photo book or a novel type book? I've not used on-demand printers myself, but I have a friend who is an author and she self-published a book. She has had great luck with on demand printers, but you can't just get one. They charge you an arm and a leg and they print a few hundred.

If you are looking for a photo book, I'd take a look at Blurb.com You can create the book right on your computer using BookSmart, and upload it for printing. Don't know why you wouldn't get it from Blurb by May, but you may want to check them out.

Its a photo book, but will have a good amount of text to go with it so I was wondering how much customization blurb's tools have (currently I am working on the format in indesign)

fredjclaus

the best thing I could tell you is to download the Blurb software and play with it. I've been playing with the software in order to put together a couple books. I also plan on using Blurb for my portfolio. Instead of printing a handful of 8x10's to put in an album, I'm making a Blurb 8x10 photo book for that purpose.

Check them out, it's free to try.

CWSkopec

NikonsandVstroms wrote:

Its a photo book, but will have a good amount of text to go with it so I was wondering how much customization blurb's tools have (currently I am working on the format in indesign)

I've just started playing around with the Blurb BookSmart program (planning on doing a book for my records of my 1st year with a camera) and I found it pretty limiting in comparision to a program like InDesign (or even Quark). I didn't stick with it too long because I just didn't like the interface and couldn't find text controls like I'm used to having. One big problem I ran into is that Blurb won't allow you to upload a PDF but I did find ways around it on their site.

Here's the page sizes (stated sizes are for cover only, inside pages are actually smaller).

And the how to on getting from InDesign to high quality images to upload to BookSmart.
It's a bit of a pain because you have to go through an extra step, but using InDesign's "Export as JPG" yielded low res jpgs that probably won't print well (Book Smart warned me of this, but by export to pdf then converting the pdf to jpg in photoshop I got quality images)

The recommended page sizes are a bit awkward. I like to use InDesign's bleed setting to give me an automatic bleed where I need it. If you follow Blurbs recommended page sizes above plus InDesign's bleeds, your pages will be too large. So if subtract .125 inches from the width (blurb doesn't use a bleed on the inside edge) and .25 inches from the height, then set InDesign's automatic bleed to .125 inches on the top, outside and bottom you'll be all set!