Book Printing Brisbane

OUR BOOK PRINTING PROCESS

Now that your book cover design and book format are complete, you are ready for the printing process. Depending on the size of the print run that you are wanting to produce, there are three types of printing that we employ.

The first type of printing is for very low quantities, and is known as Print On Demand (POD). With our POD system, we can print as few as one book at a time. It is a very low cost option for authors wanting to break into the market, and does come with some interesting pros and cons. For example, with the low cost entry, there are limitations on sizes and paper stocks that we can choose from. And the price is relatively set, meaning there are no economies of scale when printing larger quantities. There are however, lots of pros to this system as well. Consider if you have sales offshore, this system will allow you to print in the country of the order, and then ship the book as a local shipment, rather than having to ship it all the way from your door. This can save you lots on shipping!

From there, the next type of printing, is digital printing. This type of production is really the mainstay of our book printing facility, as most of our orders are produced in this fashion. We work from our book printing facility in Brisbane, Australia, where the whole process is managed locally. Digital production is highly economical for authors and clients looking to produce mid-range quantities of books. This would be in the range of 50 books up to 1000 books. There are only minor limitations to this process, especially when looking at producing hardcover books, and books that have lots of colour pages as well. The major pro with this type of book printing process, is the short lead time, as we are able to produce books within two to three weeks.

Lastly, offset book printing is the printing process we employ when looking to produce more than 1000 books, or books with lots of colour pages and even hardcover books. Offset book production is employed in what we call economies of scale. This means that the price per book unit drops dramatically when printing in large quantities. While we always strive to keep our book production within our local facility, our primary focus is to ensure you are making a return on your investment. As such, we have book printing partners in Malaysia, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong that we have worked with for many years.

To begin your book printing process, we will first produce a proof copy. This is called a galley proof, and is normally a loose-leaf copy of the book produced on the same paper and the same press for you to review before we proceed. At this stage, it is important to confirm that you are happy with the paper stocks, the colours, and of course the size of your book. We will work with you to make sure you are happy to approve and proceed, and oversee any changes that you might want to make at this stage. The proofing stage is very important as a last minute check of the book before we print, so be sure to check everything very thoroughly.

From there, and once you have approved the proof copy, we will press the big green print button! In terms of timeline, proof copies, regardless of which method they have been produced, take approximately 2 weeks to be printed, checked, and sent to you. Once approved, you can expect:

• 2 week turnaround for any books ordered through POD (plus delivery time);
• 2 week turnaround for any books produced digitally (plus delivery time); and 
• 8–10 week turnaround time for any offset print run, allowing time for the book printing and binding, delivery to port, shipping, customs clearance, delivery to our warehouse for checking, and then, finally, delivery to you.