Publishing an Art Book 2

I am planning on going ahead with the creation of a book.  I have been in contact with a printer and am working on compiling pages, etc.  It has been quite a process and I hope to share a bit of what I discovered.

Printing
For printing, I am going with a printing company that I can drive to (a fairly long drive, 1hr each way).  I chose them for several reasons, one being shipping.  The cost of shipping books is huge for me, if I can drive out and pick up the books myself, that is much better for me.  Also, I can talk to someone face-to-face and get samples and get a better idea of what I am doing.  I actually sent out quote requests to a few places in the same area and the representative from this printer was very very helpful, and so I decided to get it done with them.  We actually arranged a meeting in person and discussed my idea before I had even settled on doing it.  Plus I am supporting a local business which I feel is important.

I did research a lot of options when it came to printing.  My first choice was an online printer, like blurb.ca.  However, to get the shape I wanted (square) I needed to go up to a more expensive book, and then add shipping... it got pretty pricy.  At first the online short run printing looked really good, but after some pricing and searching, it just didn't fit.  If I was going to sell these books for any reasonable price, I would be loosing money.  I also looked at offset printing, which has several advantages, including low cost per book.  However, minimum run for offset printing is usually 750 books, no way did I think I was going to sell that many.  Plus, despite the low cost per book, the upfront investment is quite steep (like, $4,000+).  I looked at a China based company called printninja.com which would do offset runs as low as 250, but the prices still seemed too high (with shipping and exchange rates, etc).  One nice thing about them was an automatic quote generator.  It gave me a much better idea of what I was dealing with and let me see the cost effect of book size, paper, color vs b&w, etc.

Through this I discovered that short run is really for a particular audience.  People who are willing to pay extra for a custom book.  Either people doing photo books where they only print one or two, or companies printing promotional material, or things like yearbooks where people expect to pay a lot for them.  It really doesn't lend itself to printing a small-ish run of books and selling them to the public.  The cost-per-book is just too high.  However, offset printing requires a huge leap of faith and upfront investment.  This is where publishing companies come in, but I won't get into that.

My Process
This was quite the process for me because I like to know exactly what I am doing before I do it... but for this project there were just too many questions.  I just had to start working on it and watch it unfold.  My thoughts went something like this:  I need a quote to decide if I will do the project, I need a page count and book size for a quote, I need to decide on layout to decide on book size and need to lay out pages to get the page count, I need to scan pages to lay them out...  At any rate, I needed to start making the book before I could decide wether or not to make the book.  And so I did.

I started with rough scanning all the pages and printing them ~1/4 size then cutting them up.  I measured several books in my collection and decided 8"x8" was a good size.  Then I laid out my pages approximately to scale in an old partly used sketchbook.  This way I could tell how many pages I would have and also get a head start on the layout so I didn't have to decide how to lay things out on the computer.  It really helped me organize what gryphons I wanted on each page.

Then I met with the printer to nail down some final questions, like margins, scan quality, paper, size, timing, etc.  After that I started doing better quality scans and cleaning.  I scanned each drawing individually rather than scanning the whole page and I didn't let the scanner do any auto adjustment because I wanted to do it myself.  Then I worked to clean the scans to the best of my ability, making the paper white, trying to preserve pencil sketches, darkening ink, etc.  There might have been a better or faster way to do it, but that is how I did it.  I ended up with 235 individual scans.

Currently
Now I am working on compiling individual pages.  The printer told me that 8.5"x11" would be almost the same cost as 8"x8" because they had to cut them.  He said I could do 8.5"x8.5" and should leave 0.5" blank space on the inside of each page for the spine (I am going with perfect binding).  I setup right and left page templates in Gimp with guides for the inside edge and have been referring to my cut-and-paste layout to place the gryphons.

I hope to have them done for the summer so I can sell them locally.  I haven't put much thought into selling online yet because the idea of shipping scares me and it just complicates things at this point.  So, if the book gets made, and I sell some, I may consider shipping some.

Some of the details:
8.5"x8.5" perfect bound softcover
Black and white printing (most of the drawings are black and white)
100 copies for $1731 + tax CAD
~100 pages

There are a bunch more things bouncing around my head, but perhaps I will leave those for another journal entry.  Comments and questions welcome.