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In today’s episode, we share our thoughts on the Best Way to Print a Book.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Let’s dive into this week’s question
SHANE: Today’s question comes from Melissa Hall and she says:
“Where is a good place to get a physical book published or printed. I want to get my e-book into a spiral bound book that people can easily turn pages like a recipe or a binder, and do you ship them yourself or is it automated? How does that work?”
JOCELYN: This is the first time we’ve gotten this question so thanks for asking. We have actually started printing some digital products physically, I started printing elementary books in the library because a lot of people who were buying my product were asking for it to be printed and I actually looked at several different options before I decided what to do.
I did look at some print-on-demand websites and there are definitely some of those out there but the price was looking really expensive and I ended up going right down the street there’s a printing company and worked something out with them. The book printing is going to be expensive depending on what kind of book you have. Mine is a pretty lengthy book – about 400 ish pages – and it also has dividers in it, has a nice cover and is spiral bound, so I think the cost of printing my book is somewhere around $30. So it can get very costly, but you do pass that cost on to your buyer.
I actually have a friend and I mentioned her in some of the last Q&A podcast, her name is Shelly Hits and she has a website called TrainingAuthors.com. She’s actually self-published over 30 books. She prints them through Amazon and they fulfill them for her. So if that’s something you’d be interested in then I definitely recommend Shelly’s work and we’ll put a link to her page on the shownotes for this podcast on FlippedLifestyle.com/QA15. You were asking where to get them fulfilled and maybe Shane can talk about that a little.
SHANE: You can use print-on-demand by Amazon. I have a buddy who wrote a book and published it completely through Amazon. I’m not sure how exactly that works but you can get print-on-demand services from Amazon and you can find other companies to do that where they will actually do the shipping for you.
What Jocelyn and I did was that we got some local friends of ours, she was a stay-at-home mom and she needed some extra ways to make money and we actually now pay them to pick up the books from the local printing company and she takes them home and ships them out for us. Like Jocelyn said earlier it costs $30 to print the big book and we pay them something like $10 per book to box them and ship them out but we would charge $50-100 more for that product. If it is a lengthy product you would pass all that on to the consumer and you would take the profit on whatever was on top of that.
We chose local because we love to do local business and we would rather keep the money in our local community rather than pay someone for shipping, but if that is not an option for you then you can use Amazon’s program on Shelly’s website. She teaches you how to do that or you could find another drop shipping company online.
All right, this is the end of today’s podcast. If you’d like to get your question answered on the Q&A with S&J, all you have to do is go over to our Facebook page on Sunday evenings at 8 o clock and we’ll post our topic there for discussion and you can leave your question there. Until next time, we’ll catch you on the flipside.
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If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Robert Longley says
Hi Shane and Jocelyn,
I’ve done several books through Amazon’s Createspace. You can publish directly to Amazon, or you can use it for fulfillment and sell them yourselves. A 200 page book will typically go for between $8-15 dollars on amazon, $1-8 as a kindle version, or about $2.75 a copy if you use them just for fulfillment. ISBN numbers are included, but you can also use your own if you want to be listed as the publisher instead of Createspace.
Are you going to AOC again this year? I’m speaking in St Louis on monday following so I’m still debating.
Hope you are enjoying your summer.
Rob
Shane Sams says
Thanks for the info Robert! We appreciate all our user comments! You rock!