How we independently, without publishing, have published a book

About how we came to the idea of ​​publishing a book, I told in a previous post. And then I will try to tell you about the relationship with publishers and why, as a result, we ourselves acted as a publisher; about how you were looking for, where to print a book, and a few curious moments from it; about the preparation of book layouts; about the relationship with the printing house and, finally, how the book itself was printed directly.

Here are the main stages of the book - from concept to publication:

1. Author
   
   • book idea and concept;
   • writing a book.
   
   
2. Publisher
   
   • design (layout, photos, drawings, graphics);
   • cover;
   • proofreading text;
   • preparation of layouts for printing;
   • money to print a book.
   
   
3. Typography
   
   • control layouts before printing;
   • book printing;
   • packaging (if required).
   
   
4. Distributor
   
   • When all stages are successfully completed, the book, as usual, is transported to bookstores. And these things involved someone like a distributor. But it happens that in large publishing houses this division is integrated into the company and, therefore, the publishing house comes into play again. And small publishers give this function to the side.
   
   
5. Book stores
   
   • Then the books appear on the shelves of bookstores. As a rule, this happens simultaneously in all bookstores, as distributors have already concluded contracts with a large number of stores (surely with the main ones).

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And only after all this, the reader can get the book in his hands and, if he likes it, buy it, and if the hands reach, there will be time and the stars will converge, start reading, and, perhaps, read to the end. Apart from the last stage, all this will take from six months or more. We managed for the minimum time.

Now that you have a better idea of ​​the big picture, I can get down to the story.

Stage # 1: Author

The idea to write a book came to me in the late spring of 2013. The concept was described in the evening for tea. After that, I asked Masha, my companion, to make a rough sketch of the book. She coped with the task in two days. After that, Ksyusha made the first test mock-up of one of the spreads of the book. This I, of course, described everything in general terms, but something like this it was. Then I brought the text into proper form, Anatoly checked it for errors and all that. Everything, with this one could already go to the publishers.

Stage 2: Publisher

And we went: sent their "manuscripts" to all known publishing houses and waited. Day waiting. We are waiting for a week. Three are waiting. Tired of waiting.

Then my first doubts crept in - is it the right way to go? Can't all this happen with every book that is on the shelf?!

And here just come the answers from two publishers:
First: “So be it, we will publish your book, we will pay you 6% after sales.”
The second: "A good book, ready to print and give you 300 books for it."

It turns out that the authors are offered from 5 to 10 percent of sales. And with which price they don’t say it, but when you start figuring out, it turns out that from the wholesale price. And the wholesale price is less than a third of the retail price. For example: a book on a shelf costs 500 rubles, its wholesale price is about 150 rubles, which means that the author is entitled to a maximum of 15 rubles. Usually 5,000 copies are printed, multiply by 15 rubles, we get 75,000 rubles. This is a good deal! Usually it turns out less. When exactly the author gets the money in his hands is also a dark topic, I think it all depends on the availability of the book and on the attitude of the publisher to this.

So the market is arranged. Good or bad, but it is so formed and it works. But we obviously did not sympathize with these options and had to find our own way. And we found it: print the book yourself and come what may!

I’ll run a little ahead and say that, as a result, we were made suggestions by all the top Russian publishers without exception after we raised money for printing through crowdfunding. By the way, about how we collected money, you can read everything in the same last post.

If there is no publisher in the scheme now, this does not mean that no one will have to do its functions. Let me remind them: the layout, design, layout, photos, drawings, cover, preparation for printing, the relationship with the printing house and ... money for printing. It is necessary, it means, it is necessary.

Before putting the book into print, we printed a test sample, which we made based on the outline, but we didn’t like it at all. One thing is to look at a book through a computer screen, another thing is to hold it in your hands. Here is what this instance looked like:


After that we decided to redo everything completely. Layout and drawings made Ksyusha under my small guidance. Photos for the internal content I did myself. The layout for the printing house Ksyusha did on her own and now she is in this guru. The cover ... it was not clear how to do it, we did as best we could: we went with our son to a familiar photographer (thanks a lot to Dima for gratuitous help!), Took a pair of robes and a box with props for the experiments. It was about 10 pm, Mark had to go to school the next day, but, he had to give him his due, he worked quietly and in an adult that evening. It was made about 300 photos. What we just did not get up on them!


As a result, only one was selected (or rather, two, on the back cover, too).



Of course, we did many things in parallel, you do not think that we acted on some kind of clear algorithm. Therefore, a lot of unnecessary gestures were made, but, looking back, I can say - they were not in vain. Now publish a dozen or two books, we just spit. Before talking about printing, I will tell you how we determined the format of the book. Thoughts, of course, were, but I wanted to know how others are doing. Therefore, to begin with, we bought children's books of the most different directions. It turned out the following:

• hardcover is most often used;
• The most common publication format is from A4 to A5;
• circulation, on average, up to 5 thousand copies (more often - less, very rarely more);
• price range from 200 rubles to a thousand or more (hard cover - from 500 rubles);
• DVD with the book we have not met.

In the end, after a long search for its format, we stopped here on this:

• matt coated paper, 160 g / m, Germany, 80 pages, 4 + 4;
• lamination on the cover;
• the cover is cardboard Surazhsky obozhechny 1050920 tol.2.5mm.

Since we also wanted to add a DVD to each copy of the book, we had to deal with the replication of the disks. But this matter, as it turned out, is more understandable. We went to the Internet, typed in the search bar "replication discs" and found everything that was needed. Discs cost us 43250 rubles for 5000 pcs. This is printed on the disc and plastic bags for each.



But with the search for typography everything was completely different. First, we began to interview friends and received contacts of supposedly inexpensive printing houses. They assured us that they give the lowest prices, which were from 500,000 rubles for 5,000 copies, plus packaging, disk insertion, and other “unforeseen” expenses. A search on the Internet did not give any sensible results, because there is no more or less specific data about printing books (prices, terms, features, etc.). And it would be very imprudent to give a book to print anywhere, because the sum for us is not at all small. And then quite by chance the answer was found by itself. By that time, we had already decided to collect money for printing a book through crowdfunding and I studied successful projects in that area. As an example, he took a project that recently raised money for a children's book. We got acquainted with the author of the project, and he gave a tip to the place where he printed the book. It was the Pareto-Print Printing House from Tver. In that printing house we were immediately given a price of 350,000 rubles for 5,000 copies, and for another 40,000 rubles we agreed to pack each book and put a disc in it.

We collected money for the printing of the book through crowdfunding , but I already wrote about this more than once in Habré.

All, we have performed all the functions of the publisher! But anxiety in the soul was until the last moment, until I picked up a copy of the finished book. She turned out to be "real", alive, wonderful! Even better than the book that was in my head.

For completeness, you need to describe a couple of moments, without which the book would not be a book. In order to publish the book "by all the rules", you should contact the Russian Book Chamber, where you need to get several registration numbers. In the PSC, people work surprisingly adequate and nimble. The phone is always available, they answer all questions calmly and intelligibly, registration numbers are issued almost the next day after confirmation of receipt of money by the accounting department on their part. Anatoly dealt with these issues and this is what he said after completion: “To be honest, I doubted more than once that I was dealing with Russian officials. Well, a very pleasant surprise. ”

Initially, you write a request in the form that you send to the mail (or which can be downloaded on the website of the PSC). After a few hours, they send you an invoice and a contract in pdf (which you can fill in by hand, put a stamp and send a scan to them). Bring the original when you arrive to receive numbers. For everything about everything - 2-3 working days.
So what do you need? First of all - UDC / BBK and ISBN.
Requests for these numbers differ in form, but almost identical in content, they reflect all the data of the legal entity that will publish the book. Yes, to publish a book, you need a legal entity. Keep this in mind! Fortunately, we thought about this much earlier, and we already had this “face”.

Please note that UDC and BBK are needed once per series. That is, for example, we have four volumes planned in the framework of the “Simple Science” series; it is enough for us to receive UDC / BBC once. Actually, in our case in the Book Chamber they said that it is enough to receive only UDC. But the international book number (International Standard Book Number) is needed for each edition.

Naturally, their receipt is not free, but quite democratic. UDC costs 1,534 rubles, and ISBN costs 1,652 rubles. As a result, we all paid and received these numbers.

Stage 3: Typography

Now about the relationship with the printing house and about the printing of the book itself. As I said, we were printed in Pareto-Print Publishing and Printing Complex LLC. Do not count for advertising, but it is rightfully one of the best IPK in Russia. And considering how close they are to Moscow and having an office in Moscow, they have few competitors. If there is any.

And now about one minus. Signing a contract with this company is not at all troublesome, but it takes some time because of the large number of approvals from their side. Nothing to do, just wait. The guys obviously save on the number of managers who do not have time to process the requests of all clients. This is our purely personal opinion, which is dictated by the huge number of attempts to contact our manager to promptly clarify a particular issue. Efficiency took 1-2-5 days, instead of a simple answer to a question on the phone (which was not raised or called back) or an answer to an e-mail. To the aid of managers always comes (in our case) the sales director in Moscow. His phone is always available, will answer, find out, call back.

When we completed all the layouts for their requirements and received the necessary approvals, the waiting period for the print queue began. The actual production cycle for printing a book takes 2-3 days, and printing on a machine takes only a few hours. However, after the receipt of files on the ftp of the printing house, it takes 2-3 weeks to issue a circulation. Usually still two. I was present during the process of printing our book and saw with my own eyes how scrupulous they are about each edition. I believe that those two weeks before typing, they also took it for a reason.

The printing house is open to communication, even allowed to look at the process itself. I was able to shoot a small video of how the book “Simple Science” was printed:



As a result, the book was transferred to third-party logistics the day to day, as indicated in the agreement. That's cool! The delivery itself was not without incident, but this does not apply to the process of printing a book, so I will not tell.

Selling books

The book is printed and is in our stock. Now it's about selling. And this is a separate story, which has just begun, but I feel that it will be no less fascinating. So if anyone has any idea how and where to implement the book, I will be very grateful. Especially if it will be contacts of specific intelligent people or companies. And, by the way, it seems to me that we have no choice, otherwise how to go in some crooked and roundabout way, because we plan to publish four books from the series “Simple Science”.

You can buy a book for children only on our website. But the truth is, some guys from Minsk are already distributing a book on Belarus. Here are their contacts .

In January, the second book of the Simple Science series comes out, in March - the third, and in July - the fourth.


By the way, I almost forgot! I am currently driving in the direction of the Large Hadron Collider, namely at CERN in Geneva, where they promised to make a good tour and show a lot of interesting things. If anyone has any ideas that you can find out something interesting there, or some question has long been tormented about the collider - write. I will try to find out everything and even take photos and videos.