Picking a printer for your small press book

So, it’s Wednesday, time for a little how-to. If we can all drag our eyes away from the trainwreck that is the last post, we can talk about…

Printers

Finding the right printer for your home-grown comic or manga is a bit like finding true love. Well, OK, it’s nothing like that, really. It’s more of an art than a science, but I have some thoughts on it so I’ll ramble for a bit if that’s OK.

Price

Of course you care about how much the whole thing is going to cost. There’s two options for printing books: digital or litho. If you’re looking for less than 1000 books, digital is probably the way to go. I print my books digitally, so that’s what I’ll mostly be talking about.

Digital book printing is sometimes called print-on-demand or POD, and there’s a couple of internet companies specialising in this kind of thing, including Lulu, and, in the US there’s Comixpress and Kablam, who specialise even further into POD specifically for comics. For a while, it made some sense for us in the UK to use Comixpress or Kablam, but the way the dollar/pound relationship’s been going, I don’t think that’s currently a good idea. Lulu are quite user-friendly and allow you to do it all yourself online. However, if you’re looking for more than say, 20 copies, you can probably get a better price elsewhere.

But where? I hear you ask. I don’t know of any other POD printers. That’s because, secretly, a lot of POD printers don’t advertise to you as such. They just think of themselves as commercial printers. If you Google “book printers” or “brochure printing” or some such, however, you will find lots of places that can do what you need, including local(ish) ones. You’ll probably have to ask them for a quote, and it’s worth asking a couple of them. I have found a great variety in how much printers charge for the same set of books.

The other way is to look in your local area for printing and copying places, or print and design places. Most cities have several. Again, they can vary wildly in how much they’ll charge, so go in beforehand, and ask them how much it will be. Generally, local places are good for floppies (10 – 30 pages) and for small quantities (20 – 50).

Speed and delivery

When you’re going around asking for quotes, you may also ask how long it would take them to deliver the books. When I need something printed right-now-this-week I generally go to my local print shop. They’re pricey, but they can deliver in a day or so. By contrast, some printers can take weeks and weeks, especially if it’s a bigger book they’re printing.

If you’re planning to sell the books at a particular event, or you want them before Christmas or your friend’s birthday, talk to your printer about your deadline, and mention it every time you have any contact with them. If you’re like me, you might think well, they said they’d deliver by this week, so it would be annoying if I bring it up again, but it seems you really need to err on the side of annoying if you want to see your books on time. That has certainly been my experience, and I hear the same from others.

Get them to agree to your deadline, and keep checking they’re on track. Those sad looking guys at the convention who had a table but no books? They’re not stupid. They just took their printer at their word. Try not to let it happen to you.

Service and hassle

You can’t really get the scoop on this beforehand, but it makes a huge difference to have a printer that actually cares about customer service. Sometimes, things don’t go quite right, or you have to make changes at the last minute, or you want more or fewer books than you thought. I’ve worked with one printer who treated me like a pain in the backside rather than a paying customer. Even though they delivered me really shiny, pretty books at a very good price, I stopped working with them because it just wasn’t worth the headache.

I’m not going to call them out on the blog, but you can e-mail me if you insist on finding out who they are. This is one of the reasons you should be making friends with other people doing the small press thing: so you can ask them about their experiences with printers. The service level is really important, and they won’t state that on their websites. Do keep in mind that any business makes mistakes, and it’s probably unfair to blacklist a printer because they didn’t do this that or the other. But the way they handled the mistake once it was pointed out to them is something you can judge them on.

Think of how you like to be treated in restaurants. Did they apologise for getting the order wrong and give you extra garlic bread on the house? Good people. Did they shrug and ask what it was you wanted again while looking distracted? Go eat somewhere else next time. It really matters, and if they mess up once, they’ll mess up again.

Quality and proofs

The quality of the prints is a big deal too, of course. Probably the most important thing. And again there’s great variety and many variables. What’s the quality of their paper, how black is their black, how do they handle colour, what’s the binding like, etc.

A printer should give you a proof: a single copy of the book for you to check it’s all going to be the way you want it. Many printers will also send you samples: a different book, similar to yours, so you can see what the paper, colour, binding, etc is like. Samples are good, they can help you make the right decision, so get them if the printers you’re looking at offer them.

A recommendation

Wow, that was a much longer post than I was planning. Well done for reading all this way. As a reward, I will now tell you who my secret dealers are.

For my latest couple of books, Leek and Sushi and Codename: Pepsi I went to Fallen Angel Media. Don’t be too surprised if you’ve never heard of them. They’re local and fairly new, but they do a good job at a good price. More importantly, their service is spotless. On time, completely unfazed by last minute changes or sudden rush orders, and friendly too.

So I feel perfectly confident in recommending them. That said, you should probably still do your own research and check all the things I talked about above. But if that seems too daunting for you, and you’re in the UK, you could just go with these guys. It’ll probably be OK.