To Save time

Can you help me save time from reading all th posts?

Which POD or Vanity presses have we decided perform well as advertised?

I will be utilizing them the way they were meant to be used. I am only doing it for myself and for give-aways next year.

Since my company decided not to upgrade our POD dept. I am looking for good quality.

rt

I'll give my vote to Lulu and Cafe Press if you're only interested in POD printing. iUniverse offers editing and "distribution" but there's an upfront fee -- but you don't "pay" for the printing; you get a royalty.

Off the top of my head these are three up-and-up companies.

Thanks Ray.

I will need some editing but I would solicit someone on this board to do that for a fee instead of a nameless entity.

LULU looked pretty good but I forgot what y'all said.

Rti -

Depending on the quantity of your print run, Uncle Jim says it is often cheaper to just use a regular commercial printer instead of POD.

Hmmm, thanks,

it would be about 100. Does that qualify?

Not sure with a run that small. There are fixed costs for offset printing regardless of the size of the run. The larger the run, the more pieces those costs can be applied against.

If you give them the specs, the number of books, # of pages, etc., they'll give you a quote. My experince with printers has been that the estimates are usually quite accurate.

You can certainly do offset for a small run, like 100. If you know for sure how many copies (say 95, give or take) then you can do a run of 100. There is a high set up fee but if you look around, you might find a printer that does a 100 for $6 a pop... still would be cheaper than LuLu or iUniverse.

I've done a run of 200 in the past with an offset printer (that's a while ago, though) and the cost was very reasonable. The book had only about 30 pages, however.


But Lulu is kind of a no brainer. If your book is not that big (number of pages) -- the price can be pretty good. Turn-around time is not bad... about 5 business days. Now if you order in bulk (100 copies, for example), I believe Lulu gives you a discount.

I think you need to do a quote with an offset printer and compare the cost/effectiveness.

But if you really do want to go POD, I think Lulu is a good choice.

thanks guys. I'll do some research based on that info