After 30 years of printing, publishing, and copying, we’ve often encountered some common misconceptions among our customers. Here are the 5 most common myths about the printing process that we get at Zip, Print & Copy:
Myth #1: Printing is an easy process.
Far from it; it’s not as simple as just sending a file over and it will automatically be printed to the correct size and formatting. Printers read files in a very specific way, and can only read certain files. A file that’s formatted to be 8.5″ by 11″ won’t automatically be shrunken to fit a book printed at 6″ by 9″, it will cause a number of issues. When we get a file from a customer that’s formatted incorrectly, it can take days for us to get it set up in a format that’s available to print. For more information on how to format a file for printing, you can check out the guide that we wrote at https://zipprintcopy.com/ZipPrintBlog/book-publishing/10-tips-for-formatting-your-manuscript-for-publication/.
Myth #2: The price.
We’ve often found that customers tend to either overestimate or underestimate the price of printing their books. Printing can be an expensive process, but not prohibitively so. Unless your book has 800 color pages, it is not going to cost $35 to print one copy of your book. Similarly, unless you’re doing a quick black and white pamphlet, $2 is not enough to cover the costs of printing an entire book. For a standard 250 page novel, you are looking at roughly $5 to $6.5 dollars per book, give or take a few cents depending on a few factors.
But really, the price of printing books varies greatly by the book. The price can change by the amount of pages, if it’s in color or not (and how much), the kind of paper used, the kind of stock used for the cover, the size of the page, the kind of binding, and more. For more information about your chosen book, you can use our online book form and get a free quote here: https://zipprintcopy.com/BookPrintQuote.html.
Myth #3: You will be a bestselling author on your first try.
Many aspiring authors are very eager to publish their books, and as a result tend to get their hopes up a bit too much and are immediately dejected when their first book doesn’t sell very well.
Don’t take this as a sign to quit, though. Take it as a sign to keep trying! Very rarely is a person’s first book a bestseller, it often takes lots of practice, marketing, hard work, word of mouth, and attempts until an author puts out a book that’s successful. Maybe you need to change up your approach a bit, or invest some time in marketing your book. This goes the other way, too: Even the most successful and prolific authors will sometimes put out a dud that doesn’t sell well.
Myth #4: You have to print thousands of copies to get started as an author.
Not at all! In fact, orders of 1,000 or more are rather rare at Zip, Print & Copy. Most of our authors are comfortable ordering their books in sets of 25, 50 or 100 at a time, although we do print orders of 1,000, 10,000 or more (ordering larger amounts only if their books sell well). We actually recommend doing this if you are new to printing; it allows you to get familiar with how printing works without investing too much time or money, and is more financially responsible.
Myth #5: Color printing is prohibitively expensive.
Not necessarily! While it is definitely more expensive to print in color (around double what it is to print in black and white), it’s still manageable in terms of cost, and profitable depending on the book being sold and the price point that it’s being sold for. We don’t recommend color printing for traditional fiction books (or non-fiction books that are entirely text based), but books that are greatly improved by the addition of color (such as photography books or graphic novels), smaller books where it would be more affordable (such as children’s books), or college textbooks that are sold at a high cost to offset the price of color printing, are all excellent choices for printing in color.
We hope this clears a few things up with how the printing world works! If you still have any questions about how our business runs, feel free to email us at info@zipprintcopy.com, or call us at 614-485-0721.
Connor Mayhorn