Do you know any good book printers? I have been publishing this newsletter for over five years and have written on many different subjects effecting self-publishers. I tend to downplay my main role in this industry because I don’t want everything to look like an advertisement, which is probably one of the main reasons our monthly circulation is up over 40,000 subscribers. Maybe sometimes I down play it too much. In answer to your question… a definite YES.

If you happen to be a production manager from Random House or Simon & Schuster, you can skip to the next article. You already have the purchasing power I am about to talk about. If you are a publisher with 50 to 100 titles on their front list and another 300-400 on your backlist, you can move on to the next article as well. If you are an author or publisher working on their first or second, or even tenth or twentieth title, read on.

If you fall into that later group, the last thing you should be probably doing is trying to deal with a printer directly. Ever hear the little fish in the big pond analogy? Well you’re it. I laugh every time I read what the “experts” in the various online groups I belong to have to say to novice print buyers. It’s either, go to a POD printer until you really hit the big time and then go to some equally expensive digital printer or “See my list…. The long list, the short list… the “list”. Then send your specs to 15 or 20 of theses and “Voila”, you’re a print buyer. In some, even more absurd cases authors are directed to call another “list” of non-US printers and do the same thing. You’ll REALLY be a good print buyer if you do that. This is all nonsense and an insult to the many professional production managers and print buyers in the publishing world. If it were that easy, publishers would be hiring high school kids to run their production departments. Not that I have anything against high school kids… I have one of my own… but he’s certainly not capable of “purchasing” anything, other then maybe the latest video game or electronic gadget and only then with my money. So what is the novice to do?

In 1994 I started RJ Communications in New York City with the slogan, “The Print Buyers’ Alternative”. The original concept of the company was to assemble a group of complementing, independent printing companies whose combined equipment strength could rival the top 10 printers in the US. Printing is about trim sizes and quantities. If you have the right equipment for a particular trim size and the right geographical location, you’ll, most likely, have the right price. For five years we serviced primarily the mid-sized New York City publishing and commercial markets. During this time we started out first website at www.rjcom.com and developed a “Web Trim Size” guide where print buyers could enter a length, width and number of colors and the “Guide” would tell the user how compatible the size was with existing web equipment.

Shortly after this first website opened, the word “Web” had been hijacked by the Internet technos so people associated the word “Web” with the internet, not a particular type of printing press. The result was instead of getting inquiries for hundreds of thousands of catalogs and magazines, the bulk of the inquiries were dominated by “1000 copies of a 256 page, 6 X 9 book”. While I started my career in book printing twenty some years earlier, the only type of printer that we did not have in the RJ Group, at the time, was a book printer. At first I just ignored these inquiries. I learned over the years that you could never make money, especially as a salesperson, working with small customers running black and white books. Little did I realize that I was right at the forefront of the whole new self-publishing revolution. While I began to realize that the one book publishers might represent a substantial amount of new business, the trick was how to make it work.

Having been in the industry as long as I had, I knew the main objection that the printers had was not the actual printing of single titles but everything that went along with it…. mainly having to deal with the customer. Single title publishers took up too much of the sales and estimating departments’ time; didn’t know what they were doing; knew little, if anything about the printing process and didn’t pay their bills. In short, they were a losing proposition unless they could be charged an extremely high premium. Enter www.BooksJustBooks.com.

The concept is simple. I approached a group of book printers and asked them a simple question. “Would you rather have one customer with a thousand titles or a thousand customers with one title each?” It took about 2 seconds to get a reply. Of course they would prefer one customer. “Fine…then give me pricing discounted deep enough I can turnaround and resell it below your retail price.” That was 100+ million copies of thousands of different titles ago. The key to the success of www.BooksJustBooks.com and later www.selfpublishing.com is the online instant pricing. Within a few clicks, an author can obtain pricing on several different trim sizes in B&W as well as color on a variety of different text papers and binding styles and in quantities from 100-10,000. That price can then be turned into a purchase order with a few additional clicks. Authors can do dozens of quotes without having to talk to a single person. It doesn’t get any easier.

The “value added” of using a service like RJ Communications vs. trying to deal direct with another printer is not only an advantage in price but in experience. The customer service people at RJ average 25 years or printing and publishing experience. They are your advocate at the printer. They are also your buying power. Remember that little fish in the big pond thing? When you are grouped with hundreds of other author/publishers into a single purchasing unit, you have power. I have written at different times about this power which you may want to dig into the article archives to read more. For now lets just say that it is real.

Why not get those 20 prices from 30 printers? Your time would be better spent trying to figure out how to sell your books. Remember above when I stated the only way a traditional printer can make money on one title publishers was to charge a premium? That’s real, too. Back when I first introduced the online instant pricing to the book buying public, I would have bet you everything I owned that within five years, every printer would be doing the same thing. They haven’t. The reason for this… they want to size you up and get whatever the market will bear. Even if you happen to get a low price going in, by the time you’re done, your price will be up to the premium price. Not that they are necessarily bad guys. If they don’t do it, they end up in the bankruptcy court.

Over the years, RJ has grown into one of the very few (I would say only but maybe there is one other out there) true one-stop-shops for the small publisher. While printing remains at the core of the business, author/publishers can buy editorial services, design, POD, digital or offset printing, storage and fulfillment, all at the same place… and with no strings attached. If you haven’t been there in a while, please come and visit. Get a few estimates. If you think you have a lower estimate from somewhere else, let me know. A lower price usually means there is a difference in the specifications… one that you’ll surely pay for before you’re through. Leave the print buying to print buyers. You won’t regret it.

PS: Don’t forget to add me to your friends list on FaceBook. Marketing Platoons are forming up now.

Last 5 posts by Ron Pramschufer

• What do you think about Amazon’s announcement that small publishers need to print with their printer in order to be listed on Amazon? - April 17th, 2008
• What are the steps are involved in Self-Publishing a book? - March 24th, 2008
• What do you think of Facebook as a marketing tool for self-published books? - December 5th, 2007
• Did you change your mind about authors buying a single ISBN? - October 22nd, 2007
• What do you think about Author House buying IUniverse? - September 20th, 2007