Best/Most Affordable PoD Service?

Tried to use the took on Blurb, BookWright, to try to convert an all text book and that isn't going smoothly. Love the price, wish this was easier or I'd probably end up trying out Blurb.

D2D Print shows it's still on beta for me, but I'm on the waiting list.

What is the best quality and most affordable service for printing on demand? I'd like to slowly start going that direction and to have at least one print copy of my book for myself would be pretty cool.

 

I've heard Ingramspark was a lot harder to use. I could give a try, but not sure how well it will go along if it's not user friendly.

Ooh, I thought KDP Print went down, but maybe that was Createspace that was absorbed by KDP Print.

That's great you have a nice PoD where you're at =D

 

Amazon KDP is alive and well -- I just uploaded another book to KDP about a week ago, and it's currently available on Amazon. Affordable? How about "free"? There is NO cost for you to publish through KDP.

That said -- if you want your book to be available through other places than Amazon, it's better to buy your own ISBN, and that costs money. I publish through Amazon and I also publish through Barnes and Noble Print, which is also free. For a time, B&N had the advantage that in addition to paperback they can also do hard cover, but Amazon recently added hard cover to their offerings, so now I can do both formats through both services.

 

Big soft moose caught me - I misspoke (or mis-wrote). Amazon KDP and B&N Press are not free -- they charge a percentage when they sell your books. But EVERY venue charges royalties on sales. But IngramSpark charges up-front fees to set up your book, AND they charge royalties. Amazon KDP and B&N Press (and D2D, for that matter) do not charge any up-front fees. So, while not "free" when royalties are considered, they don't involve any out-of-pocket expenses other than buying an ISBN (optional), and registering your copyright (also optional).

 

I've heard KDP being a forefront of print on demand with many self-published authors. I created an account, but I'm having a bit of trouble with the cover creator. It's not as flexible as I would've hoped. It's been highly frustrating as it'll ask for a book cover that's 300 DPI, understandably for quality. I put in a picture that was 300DPI and what do I get? An error that says it's 260DPI and the preview looked blurry. I've put in pictures just to test it that were like 600DPI or more and yet I still get 260-280DPI, never the full 300DPI and I don't know what that's happening. Adding a barcode image just to see if I could as a test and I couldn't get that to work, either. When I added a teaser on the back through the cover creator it also looked blurry and that's just text so I'm a little hesitant to continue.

Also, I assume if I use Draft2Digital to distribute my e-books that I can still create a KDP account just for my print book, I'm not seeing any rule against that so far.

I loved the idea they could send a proof and then discounted author copies. That's a big bonus.

I already had ISBN's I bought a year or so ago now that I've been hanging onto so I'm all good there (definitely a thing I wanted because originally I had thought about doing KDP for my e-book and everything). I would like to get a barcode, though, when I can. I know it's not required for KDP, but for many brick and mortar stores it is so I'm not sure if I could do an ISBN and Amazon bar code for a time and then add it on later or add it on for books that may eventually be in brick and mortar stores. Not sure how I want to approach the bar code thing quite yet.

I saw something brief about Barnes & Noble print, but I don't think I got too in depth with it so I might look more into it later on.

 

I think I got what you meant in the first post. So many of these places are like, "Free set up!" which of course is nicer than having to fork over $300-$2,000 up front, but of course they take their share of the royalty, too. I see what you meant. Been doing a lot of research on these places to see what the offerings looked like.

 

I did what big soft moose told me not to, and designed my first book cover using Microsoft Paint. It came out well. Not award-winning, by any means, but it's clean and professional looking. I hired a cover designer from the Fiverr web site for my novelette, then I reverted to doing my own for the next books. Now I tend to use the Writer module in LibreOffice for doing book covers, for reasons too complicated to go into in this thread. I have never tried any of the cover design utilities offered by the print-on-demand services. My assumption (which may be far off base) is that the result will be mediocre and pedestrian.

With D2D you choose to whom they will distribute. I publish through KDP, B&N, and then D2D for every other outlet they offer.

Amazon charges for the printed proof, and it has a "NOT FOR SALE" stripe printed across the cover. But it's a good idea to see a physical proof before going "live." It's surprising how many little glitches you'll find that just didn't show up in any other checks.

There are Internet sites that will generate a bar code for you, that you can copy and paste into your cover.

 

Anyone done anything with BookBaby?

 

According to their web site, their least expensive package starts at $990. That's not my idea of affordable. And that's if you already have both the book interior and the cover formatted and ready to go. Your opening post suggested that you are having trouble "converting" your text [to what? You didn't say ...], so you are obviously NOT ready to go. BookBaby will do all the formatting and cover design for you -- at a la carte prices for each extra service you hire them to perform.

 

I am doing all the other stuff, including ISBN's, which I purchased a long time ago, and my first publisher tried to tell me were no longer valid, but just interested in POD.

https://www.bookbaby.com/print-on-demand

Unless there are some other fees associated with their POD service.

The e-book part is inexpensive, but my audience is probably half kids about 10-20 and half older retired folks, who I assume would much prefer hard copy. I know that's weird audience profile, but that's the way it is!

 

From that link:

That sounds like you have to pay $99 up front, PLUS order a minimum of 25 books. If the books are going to cost you $10 each (just a rough guesstimate) that means you are into the project by $350 just to get your foot in their door. Is that your idea of "most affordable" when you can do Amazon KDP and Barnes & Noble Press for ZERO up-font cost?

If I want to do ONE copy of a book through BookBaby, at 200 pages, the price is $138. If I change that to 25 copies in order to qualify for their POD service, the upfront cost starts at $338.25. But that's with NO distribution. If I change that to include distribution to bookstores, it adds $99, bringing the price to $437.25. If I want "global" distribution, that's an extra $399, bringing the total cost to $737.25.

BUT ... none of those prices include formatting the book interior. From your opening post, I thought that's where you were having issues. If you want BookBaby to include formatting, that minimum (NO distribution) price of $338.25 jumps to $887.25.

AND ... that price is for if you supply the cover design. Don't have a cover? BookBaby will do a cover for you. That will add another $599, bringing the cost to $1,486.25.

Plus $65.79 for shipping.

You can get nice covers done by graphic artists on www.fiverr.com for $50 to $100. You can probably also find someone on fiverr to format the book interior, but that's really a task you can handle with whatever word processor you're using.

I just don't see how BookBaby makes any sense, based on your opening post.

 

True. Hiring a cover artist on Fiverr is certainly a roll of the dice. I tried Fiverr twice. The first time, I was extremely disappointed with the result, even after the artist made a second try. I attribute the issue to a language barrier -- English is not her first language, and may not even be her second language. The same artist has a number of excellent reviews. In the end, I paid for her cover and did my own.

The second time on Fiverr I used the other of the two I had selected as candidates the first time around. English was also not her first language, but she seemed to understand what I wanted, so I gave her the go-ahead. Within two days (or less, I don't remember) she had created a cover that I thought was perfect for the book. I requested a couple of minor tweaks (to the back cover, for the print edition), and that was that.

I look at it this way: BookBaby wants $599 to design a cover. At around $60 a pop, I can get FIVE covers done, by five different artists in Fiverr, for half the price of BookBaby, and then take my pick of them for the book.

Another route is pre-made covers. There are sites that sell pre-designed covers. You pick the cover you want, the artist customizes the text for your book, and you buy it. That cover design is then removed from the site, so (they claim) it will not be sold again for use on a different book.

 

BookBaby I have heard is great through what I'm seeing online, but I don't think I'll be able to try it because they have like a $400-$600 upfront cost. It's pretty hefty.

 

Finding it impossible to remove text, in order to cut down the number of pages in the book, since everything I write is "golden"! LOL!

So I was pondering other ways to cut down the number of pages.

I think I would need two versions of this sports biography - one an e-book with 100 photos, the other the paperback, same text but with maybe 25 photos. Then the paperback I could cut down from 400 pages to 300, by removing most of the photos and also changing the 8.5" x 5.5" page format to 6" x 9". It is 75% story and 25% quotes. And expanding the "quotes" paragraphs so these indented columns are "wider" horizontally. That will also cut down on the page count.

Also, the back cover of the paperback would have to have a space for an SKU number, and the e-book not necessary. But why bother to make two different back covers? The SKU on the e-book cover would just be extraneous information. Or does an e-book even need a back cover?

Now if I can just engineer this to come out right after the NCAA basketball tournaments are finished, I think people would be hungry for more B-Ball stories.

Next time I write a book, I will set the character/paragraph styles (fonts/spacing) before I start word-scribbling. Then I won't have to go through 400 pages and re-categorize every paragraph after I wrote the whole thing.

 

I don't know why you would want more photos in the e-book version(s) than in the print version. I also don't know why you would need 100 photos in a book that is a biography. It's not supposed to be a photo essay -- is it?

As big soft moose already noted, e-books only need a front cover. For the print book, not sure what you mean by "SKU." The bar code on the back of books is usually the ISBN -- and it may or may not include a code for the cover price. Depending on who you use for your publisher, they can insert the bar code for you -- you just need to leave a blank space for it. Are you going to provide the ISBN, or let the printer assign one of their ISBNs to it? The latter approach saves you the cost of the ISBN, but it means that the printing service (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Draft2Digital, etc.) is listed as the publisher, not you.

If you didn't set any character or paragraph style before you started, you are probably writing in the 'Normal" style (if you're using Word. If you're using Apple Pages, I can't help you.) Rather than manually resetting each paragraph, you can just edit the "Normal" style, and then every paragraph will be automatically updated to the new settings.

 

I thought my attempt at sarcasm would be plain. I do not view my word-slinging as "golden". I aspire to brass or even shiny aluminum, but it usually falls to pewter-level. I know how good I am, and how good I can be, because I can write and rewrite and rewrite many times, the same sentence, and each time it gets better, so the first pass is probably boring, mud-covered drivel. But have to balance time and quality.
However, there are writers/authors whom I greatly admire, and their writing, JMHO, is Au or at least Ag.

 

100 photos in a 400-page 8.5 x 5.5 paperback book would look sorta funny, be too thick and a printer told me that many photos would interfere with the print process. What's wrong with photos? I would add sound and animation if I could. I want to immerse the reader in the total sensuous experience.

I can understand why a 200 page paperback book is much less expensive to produce than a 500 page paperback book. But why wouldn't a long virtual book be only marginally more expensive than a shorter cyber edition? It is not consuming physical matter, only a wee bit more energy.

Whoops, I meant UPC. I see many books have both the UPC and the ISBN. Is "Bar Code" synonym for "UPC" ? I suppose if the printer is the publisher, they will get the barcode? Is the barcode necessary?

I already have the ISBN's, I bought them several years ago. But letting the printer assign one of his saves me money? The printer is going to charge me for that service, I suspect. And letting him be the "publisher" instead of me, doesn't sound like a good idea, if it gives him control over my work. What's the legal or financial advantage of letting Amazon, B&N, et al, be the publisher?

Using Libre. You're assuming I'm using the same font throughout the book? My 小 說 ("Small Words" ), for example, is a paragraph or two quote from an interview, in italics, in one font. Then a page or two of "regular text," in a second font. then another quote or two, following is a page and a half of story, then interrupted by another pertinent quote, etc. The next chapter may lead off with a newspaper story, in a 3rd font. And throughout, besides the protagonist and the antagonist, is a 3rd "spiritual" character putting in his two cents, his opinions are expressed in a comic sans font, sans quotation marks.

I'm trying to figure out how to update, let's say, the font style for the quotes, or for the regular text, while not affecting the other 3 font styles.

 

I suppose it's a matter of perspective. If I am reading a book, I am immersed in folloowing the story (whethe rit's fiction or non-fiction/history). A truckload of photos won't in any way help to immerse me in the narrative; if anything, they will break my focus and take me out of the narrative. When I read books that have a section of ten to twenty photo plates bound in the center, I generally skip those until I reach the end of the narrative -- or I look at the photos first. I woud find a biography with 100 photos to be rather off-putting. Perhaps that's just me -- maybe I'm not wired right.

E-book vendors charge a delivery charge based on the size of the digital file.

"Barcode" is synonymous with "barcode." A barcode is any series of numbers, reduced to a graphic depiction of vertical bars. A barcode may be a UPC (as on packaged food in the supermarkets), it may be an ISBN (with or without the cover price encoded) as on the back cover of a book, or it may be a postal address (as affixed to many pieces of mail by the United States Postal Service.

If you have them, use them. When uploading a manuscript for print-on-demand to Amazon KDP or Barnes and Noble Press, when the process gets to the ISBN part they offer you the opportunity to type in your ISBN, or to use one they provide. Using your own costs you money if you have to buy them (thank you, Captain Obvious), but they don't charge you to use your own ISBN. The advantage to using your own (one advantage, anyway) is that the ISBN is yours, so you can upload the same manuscript and the same cover to multiple venues and let them all sell it. (Just be sure not to submit to vendors or aggregators who will be cross-selling the same book.)

Allowing the POD printer be the publisher doesn't give them ownership of your copyright, but it does give them ownership of the ISBN. Say you publish through Amazon KDP and after six months you decide to jump ship and move over to B&N Press or IngramSpark. Well, you can't do that easily, because the ISBN associated with the title belongs to Amazon KDP, and Amazon KDP is the publisher. I believe there are Internet articles discussing the process of shifting a book from one POD service to another if the POD service owns the ISBN, but I've never done it. I buy my ISBNs from R.R. Bowker (the U.S. vendor of ISBNs).

I'm not assuming anything, but I didn't anticipate a single book with four distinct paragraph styles. Even so, it's not a daunting task. Whichever is the most prevalent paragraph style would be either "Normal" or "Body text" style in Word. LibreOffice Writer (which I also use) has a style they call "Text Body," so I would assign that style to the paragraph style you used most. (LibreOffice Writer opens a new blank document for me with something called "Default paragraph Style." If all your paragraphs are already tagged with that style -- go with it.)

LO Writer also has a style called "Quotations." Customize that style with the font, type size, and indents you want for your quotations, then as you go through the manuscript you just put the cursor in each paragraph (or highlight a contiguous block of paragraphs), select that style, and they all change. Maybe use "Text Body" style for the newspaper clippings, and leave the main body in "Text Body" style. You can define a custom style and name it "Ghost" for the spiritual advisor.

Here's a primer that may be of help to you: https://www.howtogeek.com/342603/how-to-use-custom-styles-in-libreoffice-writer/