Self Publishing For Photographers

Part one - A lay of the land

Checking color on one of the print providers I tested.

Beyond individual prints or collections of prints, there's another paper medium that's relevant for photographers. That medium is books and magazines. The two are the same in most ways. Both typically contain more pages than are in a portfolio. I think the biggest difference is down to cover, papers used, binding, assembly methods, and special touches that suggest a higher quality with "books". There is a lot of overlap when self-publishing at a low volume.

Let's kick this series off with a few basic concepts as well as broad options for photographers. If you've not delved into working with printers before it can be daunting. It's hard to know where to start. There is a lot of terminology and tools that are unfamiliar. Where does one even start? The simple answer before getting wrapped up in anything technical or trying to climb the mountain of selecting a print shop is to define what you are publishing. Seriously, all of the other stuff in terms of how and who is easier to sort out once you have a broad idea of the set of photographs that are to be included. 

Understanding the basics will drive everything else. How many images are in your selection? Do they lend themselves to being displayed together on a page or facing pages, or are they better off alone? Does text along with the images make sense? Is it long text, prose, a story? Maybe just captions? Maybe quotes in large text sizes? Don't worry about having this completely sorted out in terms of the final product but have a general idea of the content and structure. From that idea, you can start estimating the number of pages or sides, as many services and printers use that term. Lesson one; Sides are what you think of as pages normally.

Before discussing formats, tools, and settings, let's discuss the giant divide in printing methods you'll encounter. I'll be discussing two but there are a bunch that aren't relevant for your first venture into the wilderness. The first is what we'll refer to as traditional offset printing. This is used in the vast majority of high-volume commercial books and magazines you encounter every day. The second is digital printing, sometimes called digital offset printing. The two are remarkably similar in a lot of ways. In 2021 the vast majority of print shops offer and use both methods. All of the consumer-level on-demand services you might have already encountered use digital offset printing. There's a good chance 99% of those use the same equipment, the HP Indigo.

Let's dispense with traditional offset printing quickly. For argument's sake if the number of copies you think you need is not approaching 1,000 then this is not for you. The huge disadvantage is setup cost. At low volumes such as a single copy, or even 10, or 100 the setup cost will cause the price per copy to be exorbitant. As your volume increases, this reverses. With very high volume the per-copy cost is half or less of digital press. Keep that in mind for down the road.

Digital offset is what you'll be using for anything from a single copy up to hundreds of copies. In itself, it's not inferior, in some ways it can deliver better quality than your run-of-the-mill traditional offset printing. Many of the things that dictate quality are the same.

• Cover and interior paper quality

• Color consistency and precision

• Bindings and special features (spot gloss, spot ink colors, foil, and metallics, etc)

• Pre-production and post-production service and support.

• Availability of proof copies at a reasonable price

Here's the good news, at a base level the formats and technical details of getting the content to either type of printing service are the same. Sure there are going to be specifics, with covers that will largely be driven by how complicated the process is used to produce the cover. The better news is that all of the complicated things are handled on the printer's end of things in 2021.

I'll cut to the chase and let you know the best way to send content to printing services right now, then I'll discuss things to look for and how to evaluate various "on-demand" printing services. The answer is... send CMYK PDF files. We'll delve into this deeper in the future but, in general, if you have software that can convert, preview, and proof to CMYK and then produce a PDF file, you can work with the vast majority of print services out there.

What's the difference between the proliferation of printing services that offer low-volume on-demand printing?

• How much help, assistance, pre-production intervention they provide

• How well they manage color consistency and calibration or if they do at all

• How many paper options, cover options, binding methods, and special printing features they offer

• The online self-service interface they provide.

• Pricing models

The first one is pretty important if this is your first go-around. Even if it's not and you're an old hand at magazine and book production, having competent people that can give you the proper information you need for them to produce a quality product is a big deal. Truth be told, once you cross a line of service and support combined with special features you are in the realm of custom printing which will drive the cost through the roof on low volume one-offs or small runs. The details vary but the difference between "on-demand" and "the sky's the limit" in many ways is all of the options and someone putting those together for you. 

Sure all those options like die-cutting, foil stamping, and all the cool things you can do with binding, assembly, paper, printing, etc might be done in-house but they are also outsourced by a large portion of printing services. The "on-demand" becomes a very gray area given you can get all of the options you want and interact online with a book printer in Italy, or Korea, or China, or the USA. For our purposes, we'll stick with a limited set of options, low-volume cost-effectiveness, and quality. The good news is that if you interact with any printing service and get used to dealing with CMYK PDF's the world is your oyster. Use any service you'd like be it local or across the world.

That brings us to the online self-service interface provided. To bottom line this, a huge degree of the difference in online services comes down to the target audience. Services like Blurb and Artifact Rising are two of many that requires absolutely no software or expertise on your end to produce a book (soft or hardcover). They both offer slightly different options in terms of sizes, covers, and paper. They both offer online page layout systems, you just bring your images and put them where you want in plenty of ready-made templates. This might be the best way to dip your toe into the waters. 

Blurb, Artifact Uprising, and other similar services offer reasonable quality and low volumes at a price that is not the least expensive, but reasonable. In other words, their pricing is pretty high per copy and there's not a ton of cost-effectiveness as your volume goes up modestly. You never get significantly lower pricing if you want more than one. Of course, you can upload a CMYK PDF with many of them (starting to see a theme here?). As time marches on the number of paper options, bindings, covers, and all of that are expanding. A lot of the lines between services continue to blur more and more.

In later episodes, we'll get down to brass tacks about tools, evaluations of widely available printing services, and other advice. I hope this overview reinforces the importance of the first thing I mentioned. Getting a broad understanding of the basics first will allow you to evaluate your options, costs, and products.

Stay tuned, much more to come.

Share your experiences with self-publishing or feel free to let me know specific things you'd like me to cover as I flesh out this series.