Book Design Made Simple

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You are here: Home / Archives for book printing

Book Printing


Stack of printed books.Below you'll find links to all the information about book printing that’s available on our website, book, videos, and blog.

Get started with Part I of Book Design Made Simple, where you’ll learn how to lease and install Adobe InDesign, create a document, and import your manuscript from Word. Download Part I for free by subscribing to our blog—simply use the form below.

Excerpts from Book Design Made Simple

  • Book trim size: how to choose the right trim size
  • Ebooks vs print books: why not create both editions?
  • Book binding: many options beyond softcover and hardcover
  • Digital vs offset printing — which is better? what’s the difference?
  • List of book printers for indie authors

 

Blog posts

Below are all the blog posts in the Book Printing tag, starting with the most recent post.

POD Book Publishing

September 9, 2019 By Fiona Raven 61 Comments

POD publishing means print-on-demand and no more book shipping costs.Thinking of POD book publishing? So are we! When we published Book Design Made Simple, we got a good deal for printing both editions at Friesens in Canada. Offset printing cost us about 62% less than print on demand (POD) at Amazon. We also found a book distributor, which has housed our books and handled all of our orders ever since.

But now we’re running low on print books, and we need to decide what to do next. Should we do another offset print run, or switch to POD book publishing? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Amazon, book printing, ISBN

Our book sales: Three years in

September 10, 2018 By Glenna Collett 8 Comments

Book sales depicted by a stack of booksThree years ago this month, the first edition of Book Design Made Simple rolled off the press. We expected book sales to start strong and increase immediately, but that didn’t happen. In this article we share with you our successes and failures, how plans can go awry, and about winging it. We hope you can skip some of the book marketing mistakes we made and go straight to success with your book as a self-published author. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: book marketing, book printing

Calculate book page count using word count

January 8, 2018 By Fiona Raven 38 Comments

Calculate book page countWondering how many Word pages equal a book page? You can easily calculate book page count using the word count from your Word document. We’ll explain two easy methods to calculate book page count: 1) use one of our simple formulas as a book page count calculator, or 2) use our InDesign template to experiment with book trim size and type size to accurately determine a page count for books. Use whichever method is easiest for you. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book printing

Mixing colors for 2-color printing in InDesign and Photoshop

July 10, 2017 By Glenna Collett 15 Comments

two colors mixed in a patchwork design for 2-color printing

In my previous blog post, I mentioned mixing two colors to use for 2-color printing. So now I’m back to explain how to do that in InDesign, plus how to make a 2-color photo (duotone) in Photoshop. And I’ll let you in on the simple way to make a fake duotone right in InDesign, too.

So let’s start with what we can do in InDesign. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book printing, color, Photoshop

Is your image high enough resolution for printing?

August 26, 2015 By Fiona Raven 14 Comments

Is my image high-res enough for printing?How can you determine whether an image file is high enough resolution to use in your book? That’s a question I get asked all the time! Images should be at least 300 ppi (pixels per inch) at the size they’ll be printed at— and that’s where most people need help. How do you figure out the size of an image, and whether or not it’s suitable for printing? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book printing, images, Photoshop

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