Online Community for Authors

Watch the following video to learn how the "Self-Publishing in a Box" program can help you accomplish your goals. After you watch the video, click here to find out more.

Watch the following video to learn the differences between perfect bound books, hardcover books, saddle-stitched books and coil bound books.This information is useful when pricing your book with printers.

A big decision self-publishing authors need to make is how many books to print. Unless an author has a solid sales history and/or sales plan, I recommend authors print 250 books to get started. I like this number because the price per book is reasonable and because authors need to have some inventory to promote their book. Going through 250 books is not hard as most authors find they need to give away a certain number of books in their promotional efforts. The following video shows a digital print operation (ZDocs) and a future video will show what an offset press is. The quality between the two types of printing is fairly equal with a slight edge still going to offset, but what drives the decision between digital and offset is the quantity of books you wish to print. If you know you will need 5 to 10 thousand books, then printing offset is the more cost-effective option.

The following video shows the production process to manufacture a hardbound book. In general, it takes about 30 days from start to finish to produce a large run of hardbound books. After seeing this video, you'll see why it takes so long . . .

This video shows how a book is perfect bound, the term used for softback books, the most common book for self-published authors. The standard turnaround time for a perfect bound book is 10 days, but for rush jobs there are smaller binders that produce professional perfect bound books as well as the monster machine you'll see in this video . . .

This is an archive video from December 2007 introducing Authors On The Net. We periodically update the introduction video on the home page, but as the older videos have some valuable information we store them here for associates to view.