9 Ways To Save Money On Your Book Printing And Binding

Bestselling authors earn millions of dollars with every single book they write; however, not everyone is a bestselling author, and they have to worry about cost-cutting at every step of the publishing process. A book’s print and distribution costs form a significant proportion of the publishing cost. Thus you must be very careful to avoid wasteful expenditure at these steps in the publishing process.

Once the manuscript is finally ready, the tedious search for a good printing company begins. They are big brick-and-mortar and online companies that provide excellent services. You can visit the websites of publishers like dazzleprinting.com for their online printing services.

Even though many writers are using digital formats like e-books to publish their books today, the charm of holding a paper-printed book in their hand and reading it is a totally different experience.

A lot of readers like this old form of books, and as per a report from Pew Research, 32% of adult readers in the United States read-only paper-printed books, whereas 7% of them read only e-books.

This shows that though books in the digital format are easy to publish if you want to reach the highest number of readers, you should print your book on paper. However, printing a book on paper is a costly affair, and therefore you must look for ways and means to save money on printing and binding the book.

Ways To Save Cost On Printing

Optimum Printing Order Size

As per the economies of scale, the larger the number of items you produce, the cost per unit of production; that is, the price per unit decreases proportionally. This holds true in all cases, even in the printing of books. So it would be a good plan to give a bulk order.

Moreover, publishing companies offer discounts if they get a large order. If you can avail of such deals, your total costs go down significantly.

However, if you are a budding author who does not enjoy a large fanbase, you will not be sure of selling all those copies, and they will end up lying in the warehouses. In such cases, your capital will get struck, and additionally, you will have to pay the rent of the warehouse.

So for budding authors, a smaller order size might be a good idea. In fact, you should decide on an optimum order size based on fair speculation of the possible number of copies that you will be able to sell.

Thus, you will have to carefully analyze whether bulk or smaller orders will serve your purpose better.

The Size Of The Book

As a printing press uses only some specific size of paper sheets or rolls, you can avoid the wastage of paper in the case of standard-size pages. Also, it is better not to purchase the paper from the market but directly from the printer, as they buy paper in bulk at a discounted price and can afford to pass on the part of that discount to you.

Organize Contents Optimally

You should also have your contents within a book optimally organized. For instance, do not keep a blank page between two chapters or leave space on a page after the completion of a chapter. If your book is a bulky novel, then you will be wasting lots of money on the extra paper that will be needed.

Get Multiple Quotations

It would be best if you get quotations from multiple companies. There might be quite a bit of difference in the price quoted. In fact, two printers may have different printing equipment, the efficiency of their staff may be other, etc., that reflects on their pricing. However, you must see that the quality is not compromised for a lower price.

Do Not Fret Over Fancy Illustration Or Papers

A children’s book may sell on the attractiveness of the books, like lots of colored pictures and glossy dazzling pages. Still, an adult reader is always interested in the content of the book and not in its physical attractiveness. So the fancy colors and illustrations only increase your cost without any benefit to you or the reader.

Go for Coated Paper

The cost of coated and offset paper is more or less the same, but the quality is quite different. It is best that you always go for the coated paper because images printed on them seem to be brighter in color. Also, use only black ink for publishing a book as printing in colored ink is costly and makes reading difficult.

Ways To Save Money In Binding

The binding of a book is a must to keep all the pages together in the correct order. It also makes it attractive and saves it from damage. Some tips for saving on the cost of binding are:

Have A Package Deal For Binding With The Printer

Many companies provide the service of binding as well as a package deal. In many cases, they have contracts with binders for binding items printed by them. It would be best if you went for such package deals that save time and money.

Cover Of The Book

There are mainly two types of covers for a book: the hardcover and the paper cover. To save cost, you should use paper covers. Most people like to read paperbacks because they can read them anywhere. Also, paper covers being light in weight reduces the cost of shipping.

Choose The Type Of Binding

Usually, spiral binding is cheaper; however, they are not usually used for books. However, if you want to save cost on the binding, you can choose to get the pages sewn through the center.

Conclusion

Printing and binding add high costs to the binding process. However, suppose you are cautious and are willing to spend a reasonable amount of time researching before you finalize the deal with a printer or a binder. In that case, you can save a lot of money on marketing and promoting your work.