Own Printing

[Moose.H]

How does one go about getting the machine that prints and binds. I googled it and I got tens of pages of Microsoft Publisher.

In short I may get an agent, probably not so I would like to go e-book with printing options for America and Europe. Unfortunately it won't suit South Africa so I want to be able to get copies for the South African Market.

25-100 books is $18.50 per copy printed here. Yeah right I want to make a $8 loss as I walk into the publishers. Heck I can buy any equivalent book and a beer and not have to write something myself..... I am not that interested in local markets but since I am in South Africa - well it is expected that I carry a few to sell and a couple for presents (evil lol). I am tired of scam artists lining up to take - take - take..... in South Africa but it is a good idea to have 30-100 books for local consumption - not particularly necessary to make much money but it will get people to buy ebooks.

[Bloggsworth]

Here in the UK there are several suppliers for letterpress printing, they may be able to help:

http://britishletterpress.co.uk/community/suppliers/

[Olly Buckle]

My mate used to work on chess books. Someone at a tournament would send him the details of the games, he would type it all up and then send a CD to the printer which directly fed into the print machine. They would supply the books within twelve hours so that he could forward them and they would be sold on the last day of the tournament when the prizes were being given out. So it is possible to go direct to a commercial printer and get a reasonable price, in the UK at least. $18.50 sounds really high, I was selling my book for £5 and making enough profit that every third one was free and I sent it to a public library, that was POD from Lulu, but some time ago.

[apocalypsegal]

You're probably looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars for such a machine. I don't have any solution for you. Have you looked at Ingram Spark for print books? Book stores use their catalog to order books. It might not be too bad on costs for you. And in India, I know people have to look to local printers, because Amazon won't ship print to that country.

[Bloggsworth]

I print with an inkjet on A5 paper and bind with a thermal binder, £25 off Ebay. I have to buy A4 binders and cut them down.

[Moose.H]

Thank you all for the info. I am reluctant to go over border but it seems a lot more logical

[Moose.H]

I print with an inkjet on A5 paper and bind with a thermal binder, £25 off Ebay. I have to buy A4 binders and cut them down.

Do you order your covers with your own pic on the front

[Bloggsworth]

Do you order your covers with your own pic on the front

No, clear covers come as standard, I just make the first page the cover.

[TKent]

I would suggest using IngramSpark. They are the more user-friendly arm of Lightning Source and they have print facilities in Australia, Europe, US, etc. I've included a link to the tools section where you can price printing and shipping to any market. They can push your book out to all of the online book stores and your book would be available to the trade through Ingram's IPAGE. That said, trade typically would not order your book unless it was discounted 55% through Ingram (as they turn around and discount it to around 40% to the bookstores & libraries via Ipage which is standard). But you'd also need it to be returnable which is a losing proposition if you don't have a distributor with a warehouse as it is significant cost to get books shipped back to you if they are returned. Returns from bookstores is anywhere from 15% to 30% of the books so you have to have a warehouse handling that kind of thing. But overall, Ingram is fairly easy to use. And you can easily order your books in quantity shipped to you, to customers, etc.

https://www.ingramspark.com/resources/tools