As you may know, I have been very successfully self-publishing a couple of books over the past six years. I like to say that I put the “self” in self-publishing, as I literally build these books from soup to nuts. I not only write them, I also edit them, and I design the covers as well. And of course I oversee the process of getting them actually produced as hard copies.
Anyway, much as I love my usual printer, they do require that I buy hundreds of copies at a time in order to get a decent per copy price. So Alex Green at back pages books suggested that I try lightning source, as they will print 10 copies for about the same price per book as I would pay per book in an order of 300 or more for my regular printer. Cash flow being what it is these days, I decided to give it a look.
I was a dubious at first as I always am about any new vendor, but I have to say, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised.
In case you are curious, here’s what happened:
First, you have to go to their site and sign in, and actually apply to be a customer. I guess they don’t want seventh graders ordering books from them. It’s basically filling out a few pages that state you’re a serious business person.
Once that is done, the really big hump involved is preparing the files for them. I had to buy a copy of Adobe Acrobat 6.0 (they said I needed professional, but I bought a copy of standard by mistake and it was actually workable with a few workarounds since it was only for the black-and-white text.). I took the text of the book in Microsoft Word and printed it to an Adobe PDF.
Next, the cover. They have a very cool function on their web site, where you input what kind of cover you want (in my case, full color laminated perfect bound). The trick to making a book cover is, the cover includes the width of the spine, and that width is based on the number of pages. Their “cover template creator” does all those calculations for you, and gives you a PDF template that is the correct size and has markings for the trim and bleed areas, and even includes a barcode.
They also require that it be CMYK. This was a new concept for me, but I was able to handle it. There are fewer color choices in that mode, but this was not a problem for me.
So their web site instructions could benefit from a lookover by a usability expert, but overall, it’s fairly simple to do. You have to make sure all the fonts are embedded and other little things like that.
So I uploaded these files, fully expecting them to have some technical issue and be rejected, but amazingly, everything worked on the first pass. Even more amazing, I had a proof in hand in less than a week. And even more amazing, it looks really good. Really crisp printing on the cover, and the text looks really sharp. Not only that, they were running a special and I got an added discount on my order.
And I should mention, their acct reps and techies are VERY fast to respond, as in within the hour. that is really fab.
Now the only question mark is how long will it take for them to execute the full order and ship it from Tennessee. They tell me the best possible deal is eight business days. We shall see, but so far, they are living up to their name.
© Justin Locke
