Thursday 11 April 2013

Self Publishing

You wrote a book. You want to sell it. If you go to publishing companies, you will find that they charge you thousands of dollars to get the book published. Are you going to get your money back from selling of the book? You have to wait and see. It turns out most new authors' books are not best sellers.

What can you do if you don't want to spend that much money to start with? Publish the book yourself.

Self publishing is more an more popular recently, thanks to technology development and the availability of digital press. You may start with a few dozens of copies only. Each copy may cost only a few dollars. So with 2 or 3 hundreds of dollars, boom, you become a writer.

Here is the procedure of self publishing:

1. Write/compose a book. The reason I use "compose" is that people today write blogs. They may put all their blogs together to "compose" a book.

2. Get an ISBN, if you want to sell the book in a book store. Check the following website for details:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/isn/041011-1010-e.html

3. Bring the content of the book and the ISBN to a printer (such as PrintPagesOnline.com).

4. If you bring it to us, as a printer, we will
    a. edit the book pages, if it is not done yet.
    b. design a cover, if it is not done yet.
    c. convert the ISBN to barcode and apply it to the cover of the book
    d. print the book

5. You then bring the book to a good bookstore for sale.

Tuesday 8 January 2013

About Bleeding


Bleeding

Why we need bleeding?

Because you want us to print your picture all the way to the edge of the paper, such as this postcard:

and we simply cannot do it.

What we are able to do, is to print a larger image on a bigger piece of paper, then trim off the excessive parts (as shown below). These excessive parts are the bleeds.


Remember, the bleeds must be extensions of your image, rather than something else. I once asked a designer to add bleeds to his artwork, he just added white borders, like this:


With this file, it is not possible to make “clean cut” and you will see minor white edges here and there, which means “not clean” for you, and “bad product” for us.




Saturday 22 December 2012

Self publishing made easy. Starting from $200, you will have your books in a bookstore for sale in a few days.