How To Get Started With Your Book

Printing your own publication is easy.

1. Binding styles

   Perfect Binding	Saddle Stitched booklets	Color Plastic Coil Binding	Hard Cover or Case bound books

   Alta Graphics offers a wide range of book binding alternatives ensuring that regardless of your books size, we can provide a professionally bound finished product. The industry standard is Perfect Bound Soft Cover. For books with smaller page counts, saddle stitching is another popular option. We also offer color coil binding and hard cover "case binding" which has advantages for certain books.

2. Standard Sizes

   Square Sizes

   While we can produce other custom sizes, the standard sizes we offer are designed to minimize waste and cost per page by taking advantage of all of the paper.

3. Paper Choices

   Covers Are printed on 10 point C1S cover stock. Other papers are available for an additional charge.

   Uncoated Paper Is the standard sheet used for most books. We offer 60# white and cream colored "Natural White" as well as 70# White offset.

   Gloss Text This is the standard for books that feature a lot of color pages. We offer 80# and 100# gloss text. We also can provide other coated stocks on special requests.

   Laminated Books For Books that are subject to a lot of handling, we offer a fully laminated option. The Cover is laminated with thicker 30mil and inside pages are laminated at 16mil. The entire book is coil bound. This produces a extremely durable book suitable for harsh conditions like Menus or factory manuals.

   While we can print on most papers, there are several that are commonly used for book printing. The vast majority of books are printed on uncoated or non glossy paper. Coffee Table books or art books are usually printed on Glossy or Coated paper which makes the pictures look photographic. Depending on the nature of your book, you may want to consider using a coated paper if you have lots of photographs. We also offer “Dull” or Matt coated stock which has less glare but looks and feels better than traditional uncoated stocks.

   Color versus Black & White

   Black & White Pages	Color Pages

   While covers are almost always printed in full color on the outside, the inside pages can be done either as all color, all Black & White or some combination where a section may be in one or the other. If a book has an entire section that is different from the rest of the book (for example a color section in a black & white book) it can be priced based on the total number of color pages plus the total number of black & white pages using our pricing calculator. If however the pages are not together in a section but are interspersed throughout the book, it will probably need to be priced as all color. Contact customer service for assistance in seeing how we can handle your specific project if it has a mix of color pages throughout the book.

Designing Your Book

We can work with your book printing project regardless of whether it is in a final “ready for print” format or if you only have basic text in final format. We recommend that you provide us with final text that has been fully edited and spell checked. Making changes after we format your book will cause unnecessary expense in redoing your layout and producing extra proofs. We offer several basic design services based on your requirements for designing an inside layout as well as a professional book cover.

Is your book "File Ready"?

File Ready

Design Service Required

Self-Publishing

Here is a summary of the steps to self-publish your book:

1. Edit your manuscript so that it is completely checked for spelling, and grammatical errors. Consider using an outside editorial service to either do a basic Mechanical edit to catch technical problems with grammer and sentence construction or a more comprehensive or Substantive edit to get suggestions on structural changes that could improve readability.

2. Have the final book laid out using a page layout program to get proper margins, headers and footers and the proper choices of type styles. If you need to do this yourself in MS Word, you will need to create a PDF from the final file to “lock” the layout and prevent changes when moving to another computer.

3. Create a cover design that will help sell the book. This is one area where professional help from a graphic designer should be used. The overall cost is low relative to the total investment you will be making in your book and having a poorly designed cover will affect the success of the project.

   Remember “you can’t judge a book by its cover” but that’s the normal place to start.

4. Get an ISBN number for your book. This makes you the registered publisher of the book forever. The only US agent that distributes ISBN numbers is Bowkers.com. If you are offered an ISBN number for “free” by a printing or self publishing service, they will be the publisher of your book and orders for your book will go through them. Consider getting a package with additional ISBN numbers as each version of your book (an e-book version for example) requires its own number.

5. Place your initial order of books for enough copies to complete a successful launch. While we can produce as few as 10 books, the price goes down considerably as the quantity increases. Most people start with 100 – 200 copies but you can order and reorder as required. Because your book is being produced digitally, you can usually reorder in about 48 hours.

6. Develop a marketing plan for your book. This is a topic of additional blog articles and is a constantly evolving area. The techniques that are usually used include; a website and/or Facebook page for the book, Book Signing events, press releases, Podcasts and blogs with posts related to your books topics. Consider purchasing John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Book which as the title says, has many ideas.

Think you are done? Many successful authors do not stop with their first book. Having multiple titles gives additional credibility to you as an author and frequently an authors second or third title is the one that becomes successful.

Custom Quote Book Printing

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