From author Gail Carriger:

Talk to me about trade paperbacks: why do people prefer them over mass market paperbacks? Why do you?

First, let me quickly explain that in the US trade-sized paperback books, formerly called quality paperbacks (TR/TP/QP/QPB), are the ones that are slightly smaller than the hardcover (HC/CL) or roughly half-way between the UK’s B format and C formats. These days young adult books, for example, are often brought out in HC first and then TR. I can’t be precise with the measurements because it has come over all non-standard.

Mass markets are those little ones, also called pocket sized (MM/PB/PPB) which in the UK would be A format (although A is slightly larger than the US’s MM for metric reasons). In the US these are 6 3/4 by 4 1/8 inches.

. . . .

[R]ecently rumor has it the market is shifting in preference (in the US) from MM to TR. This may have to do with publishers, or it may have to do with self publishing, or it may be that the MM readers are moving to ebooks.

. . . .

Trade paperback books (or B format) …

• are less awkward to hold one-handed

• sometimes (not always) have larger print and are easier to read

• will stay open better

• have lighter paper with a nicer feeling texture

• don’t smell funny

• have a nicer weight and size

• are perceived as higher quality

• have spines that don’t crack as easily

• better capable of handling thicker books comfortably (although one reader said the thicker the better in MM)

• have cleaner lines

• are more elegant

• hold up better after multiple reads

• fit better in larger hands

• are comfortable to read, yet still feel special

• look better and more book-like on the shelf
• have bigger/nicer art work on the cover

Link to the rest at Gail Carriger and thanks to Lynn for the tip.

From book designer Joel Friedlander:

While print on demand usually produces one book at a time, offset printing can produce thousands of books in a single print run. Depending on the number of books created, the cost per book is usually cheaper using offset printing. In most cases, offset printing produces a higher quality book (especially with color photos), and there are more options available for paper choices, trim sizes, and cover finishing.

. . . .

At the end of the day, offset printing sounds like a win-win: cheaper unit costs, higher quality, and more options. So why don’t more indie authors start out with offset printing? The simple answer is in order to take advantage of offset printing you need to be prepared to invest in a short print run order of your book. Many offset printers require a minimum order, which means you as the author could spend more than $2,000 printing hundreds of copies of your book before you start selling them. Print on demand allows authors to print books as they’re sold. Offset printing requires you pay for the print costs up front, and sell books out of a fulfillment warehouse, or your garage.

. . . .

Don’t print your book at a local commercial printer. Use a book printer, not a local commercial printer. Although your local printer may tell you they know how to print books, you’re going to get a better-quality book at a lower price from one of the excellent short-run book manufacturers in the U.S.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

From The Creative Penn:

There are a number of services you can use to publish your book – they all have different attractions and merits— but I’ve been using CreateSpace’s publishing tools a lot lately, both for myself and for authors I’ve been helping.

. . . .

(3) Pick a category

You will need to pick a category for your book to help people find it. Known as a BISAC or Book Industry Standards and Communications category, they’re used by the book-selling industry to help identify and group books by their subject matter. Picking this can have a strategic advantage, too, as some categories are over-saturated and it’s difficult to get books into the top 100, much less the top 10 (if that’s your goal, of course!).

If you’ve written a historical thriller romance, then putting it under “Romance/Historical” is likely to give you a better result than lumping it in with all the millions in “Thrillers” that are already out there. And “Thrillers” doesn’t have sub-categories like “Romance”, so this is probably a better fit. You may need to play around with it a bit to find the best category for your book.

. . . .

(7) Formatting needs to be within their guidelines

The next issue is formatting: this is critical to making your book look its best. And a word of warning, too, that a badly formatted book will turn people off as quickly as a badly edited one.

I could devote a whole article to formatting, but I’ll save that for another post. Any formatting issues will be flagged up once you’ve submitted your book for review, but the more you can anticipate these, the smoother the approval process will be. The three main things to remember are:

-       Don’t put any page elements outside the guides for content; whether page numbers or other header or footer info, it all needs to be within the content area.

-       Use print resolution images. If you don’t, the results can be blurry or worse, badly pixilated.

-       Check pagination before you submit anything – one missed page and your whole book needs redoing.

Link to the rest at The Creative Penn

Veteran book designer Joel Friedlander, whose posts have been regularly featured here, has released a series of professionally-designed interior book templates. The templates are designed to work with Microsoft Word and look (to PG’s eye), much better than those PG has developed for Mrs. PG’s books from CreateSpace’s interior templates.

Each template set includes both POD and ebook versions. Print templates are available now with ebook templates appearing in a few days.

Here’s a link to Joel’s Templates and a link to a Q and A about the templates.

Some indie authors worry that their books don’t look as good as those from major publishers. Joel may have an answer to that concern.

From The Huffington Post:

Print-on-demand (POD) books could soon be everywhere, according to a major announcement made today.

On Demand, the makers of the POD Espresso Book Machine currently installed in fewer than a hundred bookstores nationwide, have announced new partnerships with Eastman Kodak and ReaderLink Distribution Services.

Under the arrangement, the company’s POD technology will be made available to retailers who have Kodak Picture Kiosks, currently installed in 105,000 locations according to Publishers Weekly, including drugstores and supermarkets.

. . . .

“You should be able to walk into a store, pick a title, [and then] pick it up after you’re done shopping,” he told The Huffington Post on the telephone from their New York headquarters. “We like to think of this as digital-to-print in retail locations.”

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post

From The Blood-Red Pencil:

If you’re thinking of self-publishing not only in electronic form, but also in print, a huge consideration is your goal.

Do you wish to be considered a publisher in your own right? 

If so, I recommend Lightning Source as your printer. If not, CreateSpace will work fine.

With Lightning Source as your printer, you’ll need to set up your own publishing company, which will establish you as a separate entity in the publishing world. This applies whether you’re having your own books published or if you’re widening the field as a small publisher and offering your services to others.

. . . .

When I published Killer Career through Lightning Source in August, 2009, I paid $75.00 for a setup fee, which was reasonable. To be competitive, Lightning Source also suggested a discount of at least 40% to bookstores. They also suggested accepting returns.

I wanted to play the game right, so I followed their suggestions about discounts and returns. I must admit regretting those choices and have since changed my specifications to a smaller discount and no returns.

One good thing about following their initial suggestions about discounts and returns was, after sending a letter, I got my book into the Barnes and Noble bookstores, mainly in my area. It also appeared in their catalog for ordering.

. . . .

I’ve focused a lot here on Lightning Source. CreateSpace is also good in its own right. If you’re publishing your own books and don’t care for the hassle of setting up your own publishing company, you can publish your books free through CreateSpace. For $25 more, you can pay for their expanded distribution as well, which will get you to libraries, Barnes and Noble and other online venues. For free, CreateSpace will supply you an ISBN through Amazon.

Link to the rest at The Blood-Red Pencil

PG thinks Ms. Mandel, the proprietor of The Blood-Red Pencil, may be working from outdated information. You can absolutely set up your own publisher, buy your own ISBN numbers, and publish through CreateSpace. In PG’s experience with POD books, whatever entity you use to purchase ISBN numbers is the one that shows up as the publisher when you use those ISBN numbers.

PG compared the listing for the POD version of Ms. Mandel’s book, Killer Career, with Mrs. PG’s latest, The Taming of Lady Kate (which is printed by CreateSpace) and each shows a publisher.

As many of you know, with expanded distribution on CreateSpace, you need to price your POD books high enough to pay for the costs of the distribution system. Even then, your royalties on books sold through expanded distribution are substantially lower than those sold on Amazon.

PG ended up turning off expanded distribution for Mrs. PG’s books when he discovered several bookstores purchasing books through CreateSpace’s expanded distribution system were undercutting Mrs. PG’s list price on Amazon. If Mrs. PG’s price was $9.99, some of the bookstores were selling for $8.99 or $8.49 or less. If you look at the listing for Ms. Mandel’s book, you’ll discover the Amazon price is $13.99 and new books are available from third party sellers for as low as $9.56.

Many customers would, for perfectly understandable reasons, purchase the books from the third-party bookstores and Mrs. PG would receive a substantially lower royalty because the sale was through the expanded distribution system.

After turning off expanded distribution, we generally dropped the prices for POD books to $7.99 so readers got a better deal and Mrs. PG received a nice royalty on each book sold through Amazon. For us, at least, the additional cost of the expanded distribution system on CreateSpace was not offset by significantly increased sales. It appeared to us that most of the expanded distribution sales were still going through Amazon.

Not the business, just the good part, the newspaper itself.

From Newspaper Club:

How Newspaper Club works

We work with existing newspaper printers to make it as easy as possible to access their presses.

To print a newspaper with us you can either make one online or upload a PDF that you’ve designed yourself. You can print a digital newspaper for 1-300 copies, or a traditional one for 300 copies or more.

We print twice a week: on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2pm UK time (9am Eastern Time).

We gather up all the orders, check them through, and send them to press. If we spot a problem with a newspaper we get in touch before printing and help you resolve it.

We ship internationally from the UK, with fast delivery to mainland Europe, the USA and Australia, and accept payment in Sterling, Euros and US Dollars.

Link to the rest at Newspaper Club and here are digital versions of some newspapers.

Adria Giattino for Digital Journal:

A report by The Wall Street Journal claims that the publishing industry experienced growth during 2011; however, not all sectors within the industry grew at the same rate.

. . .

The report asserts that the production of print books was fueled, largely, by the quickly growing self-publishing industry. In fact, the report reveals that, without this growth, the traditional print book business would have remained flat.

. . .

“What was once relegated to the outskirts of our industry—and even took on demeaning names like ‘vanity press’ is now not only a viable alternative but what is driving the title growth of our industry today. From that standpoint, self-publishing is a true legitimate power to be reckoned with. Coupled with the explosive growth of e-books and digital content—these two forces are moving the industry in dramatic ways.”

Link to the rest at Digital Journal

Guest post by Bridget McKenna

“and that is very bad.”

Over on Write it Forward:

“I have a fundamental problem with the idea of “business as usual”. Not in the sense that we have to run a business and it has to be done on a day-to-day business, but most business today are fluid and if you don’t keep up with the fluidity, well, for those of us living Rochester, NY it’s one word: Kodak. My father worked for Kodak way back in the day as a Regional Sales Rep for the Motion Picture Division and even then he said (mind you this is way back in the late 70’s) that if Kodak didn’t move with the times when it came to cameras they’d be a hurting company… Of course, Kodak was really a “film” company but you know there is this little thing called digital that seems to be turning many businesses upside down and inside out.

“Well, not my business.

“Bob and I have been in business together since December of 2009 (officially). Since then, we have changed or modified our business plan every 6 months. We just did it back in January and we’re doing it again this July (already making notes in Google docs for the Cool Gus Business meeting at Thrillerfest).  It’s exhausting and often times frustrating, but our industry is changing and we have to make adjustments or we’re going to go down with the Titanic (even though we got off a long time ago).

“Business as usual is a form of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Perhaps making a very slight adjustment like reducing print runs and deciding to remove DRM from eBooks. Well, I guess better late than never. Yes, I know, authors are screaming that I think smaller print runs are a good thing. How about lower advances? I once said that it wasn’t just publishers that had to change the way they think and do business, but that the author had to as well. Funny thing about change, most of us don’t like it. It took Bob a good year to wrap his brain around what we were doing. Not that I got there any sooner, but my perspective was different. I’d never been traditionally published and I read eBooks.”

Read the rest at Write It Forward.

–  Julia Barrett

From Borderlands Books:

A few weeks ago I posted something about in-store print-on-demand machines that got a fair amount of attention and interest (Print-On-Demand Not Coming to a Store Near You).  The problem was that the only hard figures I could find for that post were based on two rather old articles.

. . . .

First off, I was wrong.  There does seem to be a financially viable way for large and mid-sized stores to have an Espresso Book Machine on site.

. . . .

I want to run down some of the basic costs associated with the Espresso Book Machine (henceforth “EBM”) based on current pricing and actual installed usage.

. . . .

Initial Purchase
Machine Cost:  $101,000
Software License Fee:  $15,000 for 5 years (note 1)
Set Up and Training Cost:  $3,500 (note 2)
Total:  $119,500

Operating Costs (per book – note 3)
Content Fee:  $0.70
Transaction Fee:  $1.00
Materials:  $1.74
Maintenance & Utilities:  $1.83
Total:  $5.27

Average retail price per book is $14.55 (note 3).

. . . .

At $14.55 retail minus $5.27 in materials fees leaves $9.28 profit per book.  Borderlands is open 8 hours per day, 362 days per year.  At the rate of one book per hour, the profit in a year is $26,847.88.  Based on the cost of the machine, I would pay off the machine and start making a profit in 4 years and 5 months.  At the rate of 3 books per hour, the machine pays off in a year and a half.

. . . .

Books that can be printed on the EBM fall into four categories.  Academic titles, which are uncommon and quite expensive, public domain titles which are essentially free and provided by Google’s huge database of titles, books from publishers, and “self-published” titles.

. . . .

The only one of the big six publishers whose books are available for the EBM is Harper Collins and, even in that case, the only titles are their back-list (i.e. titles older than about six months) trade paperbacks (not their hardcovers or mass market paperbacks).  All of the independent press titles printed by Lightning Source, which is the largest on-demand publisher, are also available.

. . . .

So, what books actually sell and how many of them?

Based on the current installed base of machines, stores sell between 7000 and 14,000 books per year.  For Borderlands that would work out to between 2.4 and 5 books per hour, which is damn good.

But here’s the surprise — most of the books sold are neither public domain titles via Google nor are they in-print titles from publishers.  In the first year, 90% of the books printed by the current crop of in-store POD machines are self-published by customersof the bookstore.  In other words, someone comes into the store with an electronic file of their book, gives it to the store, and then the store prints it for them on the EBM.

The good news here is that there is an additional income stream from such self-published books.  Marketing materials from On-Demand Books suggest that most stores charge a set-up fee of around $150 per title to set up the file to print.

Link to the rest at Borderlands Books