Thursday, July 28, 2011

How much does it cost to publish a book or a few online?

How much does it cost to publish a book or a few online?

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I agree with newuser33492305, but would like to point out that some author services are reputable and provide valuable services for a fair price. Please don't paint them all with the same brush as "vanity publishers." Source: Marathon Publications, How Much Does it Cost to Publish Book?




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Answer from newuser33492305

It could cost nothing to publish a book.


Self-publishing can be a smart choice for writers. It's cost-effective, relatively fast, pays much better than standard royalty contracts, and lets you maintain control over the publishing process. But there are drawbacks to consider.

Step 1Decide what your goal is. Some writers want to print out just enough copies of their prized project for colleagues and friends; others think they have a book that will sell to a larger audience.

Step 2Examine competing titles to make sure you're not covering the same ground. Find out what sales of those books have been to see if it's really worth your while to tackle a similar topic. Call book distributor Ingram at (615) 213-6803 and punch in the ISBN of the book you want to check on; you'll hear a voice message containing the number of copies sold in the last year.

Step 3Determine what format you'd like to publish in: hardcover, softcover, or ebook, which is essentially an electronic file and requires no paper printing.

Step 4Check out print-on-demand publishers. If all you want to do is get a book published, these vanity presses will do the job for a price. Some vanity houses will print just a few copies for a few hundred dollars. Print-on-demand is ideal for very short runs (25 to 500 copies). Instead of printing on traditional, ink-based offset printing equipment, pages are reproduced using a highend copier. A digital file from a page layout program links directly to a high-speed copier and then is machine-bound. Some shops offer perfect binding so it looks just like a printed book. Look at sources like Trafford.com, Xlibris.com and Iuniverse.com.

Step 5Print your book directly from your completed files with a directto- press printer. Instead of producing a different piece of film for each color of each page, the files are transferred directly to the printing plate. You'll eliminate all the film costs, and save time too.

Step 6Shop aggressively if you really want your book to sell. If you're an established writer considering self-publishing, look around. You can either choose to have a print-on-demand company, such as those mentioned above, handle all the layout, printing and production activities, or go to a local offset printer and oversee each of those steps in the process personally.

Step 7Ask potential suppliers to send you samples of their recently printed books. Don't be shocked: The quality will vary considerably with regard to paper quality, cover design, layout, and whether it was run on a sheet-fed press or a web press. Ask questions about how individual pieces were produced.

Step 8View competitors' books to determine what size and format you'd like your book to take. Find out if there are standard sizes you should stay with to reduce costs, or whether a different format will help your book stand out. Format sizes can affect which print-on-demand publisher you can work with.

Sources: http://www.ehow.com/how_107987_self-publish-book.html

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Answer from bookpublishers

Prices range for the type of publishing and level of marketing and publicity support required, but start for under a thousand dollars with Schiel & Denver which offers good value for money.


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Answer from newbie2268986

Self Publishing and Printing Your Own Book


It's tough to beat self-publishing as a business model, but it carries the same stigma in some people's eyes as Print On Demand. If you're worried about how people will perceive your books, don't use your family name as the publisher name or write under a pen name. That's literally the only difference between self-publishing and any other kind of publishing, at least as far as the public can tell. The advantages of self-publishing your own books in terms of author relations and minimizing out of pocket expenses (as opposed to paying authors) are so obvious that there's no point dwelling on them. However, you have to be honest with yourself about how hard you're willing to work to start a publishing business and you have to be realistic about the probable outcome. This article covers how to publish a book with an offset printer. A much better and lower cost option to offset printing a book for most authors and small publishers is to go with book-on-demand, for which I've posted a print on demand case study with Ingram's Lightning Source.

There are dozens of titles about how to publish a book which are replete with stories of rejected authors who strike it rich, but that type of success is incredibly rare and doesn't serve as a model you can follow. The average book published in the U.S. sells less than 2,000 copies in it's lifetime, and since bestsellers and heavily promoted trade published books pull up that average, you had better believe that the average self published book sells closer to 200 copies. Success in any type of publishing is dependent upon salesmanship, so if you aren't willing to invest at least as much time in selling your book as you invested in writing it, there's little reason to go into the publishing business.

If you despair of waiting or if you have the desire to go it alone, self-publishing can be both satisfying and profitable. Also, a successfully self-published book is often an easy sell to a "real" publisher, providing you're willing to gamble on earning much less per book and making it up in volume. In this article we demystify the process and cost to self publish your own book, but first a word of warning: Books don't sell themselves.

Quick and Dirty

Before going in depth into the self-publishing process, we will present some quick cost numbers to whet your appetite (or send you home screaming). A standard 288 page 5.5"x 8.5" paperback book (around 100,000 words) with a single color laminated cover printed by your local offset shop will cost around the following:

Quantity 100 300 500 1000 5000 10000
Price/Book $5.00 $4.50 $4.00 $3.00 $1.25 $1.00


At low quantities, page count has relatively little impact on the cost, whereas at high quantities, where you are basically buying "value added" paper, page count makes a big difference. Also, printers reserve the right to force you to buy overruns, (between 5% to 10% of the quantity ordered), adding hundereds or thousands of dollars to your cost.

I've rounded up and down some pennies to keep the numbers simple, but i

Sources: http://www.fonerbooks.com/paper.htm

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