Self-Publishing in Print
- Queenie Li
- Jun 13, 2024
- 7 min read
Distributing an already digital document in a digital format is pretty easy, so the thought of publishing an e-book may not seem so daunting. What if you wanted to have your book in print via paperback or hardcover? This can be a more difficult landscape to navigate.
Types of Printing Presses
There are two main forms of ways to print a physical book. You can use a traditional printing press or a Print on Demand (POD) service. Let's look at how each works.
A traditional printing press prints to specifications and can mix paper types. This can be useful if you want regular paper for text but photo paper for images. They are typically designed for mass production and are only cost-effective if books are ordered in bulk. This tends to be a fairly expensive option, requiring hundreds or even thousands of copies to be printed at once for the cost-per-book to be low enough for you to sell at a reasonable price.
Major publishing houses can use this method as they have the resources and intention to distribute books to stores all over the country. For an individual self-publishing, this may not be feasible. Unless you can be sure to have hundreds of orders for your book, you may lose a lot of money going this route.
Print on Demand services tend to have cheaper setups and only print a single book when it is ordered. As the publisher, you pay nothing upfront. Rather, the printing cost gets deducted from the sale and you receive whatever is left over. These types of prints are lower quality and less flexible. They generally can only do a single paper type throughout the entire book. Still, the existence of these services gives independent authors a viable way to get their books in print.
Which POD Service Should I Choose?
There are many options out there and various factors to consider when making your decision. I'll try my best to cover some of them.
Cost
Quality
Distribution
Ease of Use
For this, I'm only covering the following services: Amazon KDP, Barnes & Noble Press, IngramSpark, and Lulu.
Cost
Depending on the service, cost may be calculated a bit differently. Some services, such as Amazon, calculate on a strict per-page basis. Other services may use a page range. Because of this, it may be possible that the cheapest service in my example may not be the least expensive for you, depending on how the ranges fall. The type of print (Black and White vs Color) is also a factor in price. Note that you cannot mix these. If you pick color, the entire book will be treated as a full-color print, even if most of the content is black and white. There unfortunately is no way to keep costs down by selectively printing specific pages in color at the time of this article.
The following table compares the four services in an example book that is 188 pages long in 5.5x8.5 sizing:
Service | B&W | Standard Color | Premium Color |
Amazon | $3.23 | $6.02 | $13.09 |
Barnes & Noble | $4.43 | $6.68 | $16.44 |
IngramSpark | $3.87 | $6.40 | $14.04 |
Lulu | $6.09 | $9.36 | $25.49 |
"Premium Color" is said to be ideal for full-page color images, however the cost to print this way requires a sale price of a book that may be too high for most unestablished authors. I also didn't find the difference between "Premium" and "Standard" color to be enough to justify it being nearly twice as expensive.
Quality
Okay, so now you're probably wondering if the more expensive services are worth the cost. Is there a noticeable bump in quality? Will going with Amazon look cheap or unprofessional be comparison?
The short answer is: no.
Though I've heard people swear by Lulu as the highest quality printer you could go with as a self-published author, I found the results to be nearly indistinguishable from the rest. It's certainly not enough higher quality to be worth the higher cost, in my view.
On the left, we have a print from IngramSpark, and on the right, a print from Amazon. There isn't a significant difference between them, though the colors in the Amazon version are a little more vibrant. This may be due to Amazon using RGB color and Ingram using CYMK.
All the books had proper binding and nothing seemed like it was damaged or falling apart. Internally, the printing looked similar. Here are a few shots of the same page in different versions:
I unfortunately do not have any images of the Lulu print, but it's not much different. Even the full-color images came out the same. Quality is not likely to be a concern from these sources and if that's your only concern, you're fine going with the cheapest service.
Distribution
Barnes & Noble, being a bookstore itself, is limited to its own network for distribution. This means that if you publish through B&N Press, your book will only be available to order on their website. It is not even set up to be sent to their physical stores.
Amazon publishing also defaults to only being available on their website. This is not as bad of a deal since Amazon is the largest retailer of books in the world. It's never going to end up on store shelves, but you have a very accessible online outlet through them. There is also an Extended Distribution option available that will push it to other online stores for you, but your book has to meet strict qualifications and it might mean dropping your royalty down form 70% to 35%.
IngramSpark has the largest reach. It pushes to several online retailers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This is also the only source that will likely see your books in physical stores. It still takes some work to achieve this, but IngramSpark has a system where stores can order books. In most cases, the store requires a discount for bulk ordering and may want the ability to return unsold copies. Enable this at your own risk. If the store returns the book, you are responsible for paying the refund and if you have it shipped back to you, you have to pay an extra shipping cost (the alternative is Ingram destroying the book).
Lulu is perhaps the worst option in terms of reach. They have their own distribution channel, but it's unclear how people even find your book through them. Unless you order a bunch of author copies and sell them manually, you may not sell any paperbacks through Lulu.
Ease of Use
Of all these services, I found B&N Press and Lulu the easiest to use. Both are very straightforward and offer cover designer tools so you can create a book cover to their specifications without needing a lot of technical knowledge. Amazon offers this as well but is more likely to reject your manuscript for potential errors, and it sometimes can be difficult to get everything right.
If you choose to upload your own cover, Amazon is a bit more picky and will reject any potential errors it finds or anything that might result in a bad print. B&N/Lulu don't seem to care as much and if it comes out poorly, it's on you.
That said, Amazon's error feedback is very informative. It often will tell you specific pages that have issues and provide a detailed explanation of what is wrong.
IngramSpark was easily the most challenging service to use. While it does have a cover designer like the other services, you only have one chance to go this route. If you don't use their designer from the beginning, you are forever locked out of it. I tried uploading the cover I used on Amazon and when it kept getting rejected, I thought I'd go back and use their editor to make sure it was to their specifications. Little did I realize that this would not be an option.
After about three rejections with unhelpful error messages, I contacted support. To my disappointment, the agent was no help. They could only read from a script that told them what the error meant but had no capacity to assess what I was asking and respond to it with intelligence. A more meaningful conversation could be had with an AI.
After beating my head into a wall for weeks, I finally managed to get a cover that it accepted (no thanks to support). Unfortunately, even though it passed all checks, I still wasn't allowed to publish the book. Why? The generic error message only said, "All books need to have ISBNs." Well, I did have one. In fact, Ingram itself provided me with it. Your luck may be better than mine, but I wasted a lot of time to never be able to release the book and with the worst customer support I've ever witnessed, I didn't feel like I'd ever get around that issue.
How Much Should I Charge for My Book?
So you've chosen your POD service and gotten everything uploaded and approved. Now how much do you sell it for? This can be hard, but here is my rough guide to start. I assume you've already determined an eBook price. How much profit do you make off each sale at the price you set? Aim to make roughly the same amount from your print book.
Let's say you're selling an eBook for $4. The service you're using gives you $2.80 in royalties for every sale. Maybe the print cost for the same book ends up being $5.52. If you're getting a 70% split of the profit after deducting the print cost, you'll find that $11.88 will give you that same $2.80. You can even try bumping it to $11.99 to look more like a standard store price or $12 if you like to be nice and neat.
Obviously, pricing is trial and error. You may find yourself adjusting the price to see what gives you the best results. This should at least provide you with a starting point, though.
Hopefully, this article helps you find the printing service that's right for you. I'm sure you see now why I made this topic its own separate discussion.
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