Day 5, Bill Ruesch recession-recovery diary

Dear Reader,

Some may wonder if I’ve been sitting on my hands the last two years. My previous blogs could lead you to that conclusion, but you’d be wrong. For a quarter century (doesn’t that sound painfully long?) I semi-specialized in direct mail printing. Most of my customers were either DM agencies or in-house marketing departments of companies communicating with their customers through the mail.

We all know what happened when the recession hit and companies en masse pulled back on direct mail. We could see it coming. The Internet was making promises of delivering tons of new business at a fraction of the CPM. The post office, thinking in government logic, decided to bump up their rates to solve their cash flow problems. This awful triad of recession-fear–the Internet rainbow–and postage costs all but killed direct mail.

I said we could see it coming and we could, but no one thought it would happen so fast. It was literally almost overnight. One day DM was thriving, the next, BOOM the bottom dropped out.

In an effort to prepare my business for the coming crash, I had already been looking in new directions. I asked myself what I love, and determined that I love books. Wouldn’t it be nice to help authors print books and get samples for my personal library in the bargain? Yes, but moving into new markets takes time. It requires making new connections, and building trust.

To shorten the time I decided to begin blogging. I reasoned that the Internet would provide me with a minimal cost platform. It does, but the competition for attention is overwhelming.  I read somewhere that 17 thousand new blogs are started every day–e v e r y day.  That’s over 6 million a year!

There are many, many Internet “gurus” that for a fee, promise to show you how to drive readers to your site and earn you more money than God while you are sleeping peacefully on your yacht. I don’t know about you, but I shy away from these kinds of promises. I may be old-fashioned, but I truly believe that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

The problem still remains, how do you make an impact on the Internet when the odds are so staggeringly against you? The answer for me is to keep chopping at the tree. No one knows how many cuts it will take before it topples, but for certain it will never come down if you don’t wield the ax.

There's nothing like a book.

Did you ever go into a library, especially an old library, and breathe in the smells? When I was growing up we lived near such a library. Close enough that I became a a frequent visitor,  and without parental supervision. They issued me my first library card at five. I couldn’t read, but I knew that words meant something. I checked out books and took them home for my mother or father to read them to me. I couldn’t wait until I began  school and learned to read for myself.

I heard somewhere that the sense of smell is the one most strongly connected to memory. If you can remember the smell you can transport yourself back in time and recapture the sights, sounds, and feelings. Old libraries have that effect on me. There is a sense of wonder roaming the shelves. Rows and rows of books often stacked to the ceiling filled with knowledge, information, and entertainment. It’s real. It’s tangible.

Maybe I’m just an old fogy but how can bits and bytes under computer glass replace it? Computers have their place, I’m using one right now as a matter of fact, but you can’t cozy up with one before a warm fire in your slippers and red plaid robe, your faithful furry companion by your feet, now can you? Computers have the ability to take you anywhere, but no matter how much information the computer provides along with beautiful photographs, and 3-D maps, to experience the majesty of the Grand Canyon you just have to go there. You have to stand near the edge and look all way down to the green sliver of the Colorado River far, far below. The only thing remotely resembling the experience itself is your imagination.

I hear from my fellow printing professionals that printing is a declining industry. I don’t think that it is really declining as fast as some would lead you to believe, but printing, once the darling of mass communication is giving way to more efficient means. Again, what I’m doing right now in writing this blog is making my own attempt at mass communication and skipping the printed word. If someone downloads, and prints this out for office distribution then it will be printed, but not under my direction. Maybe this blog will really strike a chord, go viral, and be picked up by news magazines. That is a pipe dream of course. I know it, but I still keep clacking my keys in a vain hope that it could happen.

The bottom line? Changes are coming. Changes are here. But I believe it will be a long time, if ever, before we are willing to give up the feel, and smell of a book, or for that matter magazines. There is something about them that can’t be experienced through a monitor. Oh you can find electronic books and magazines on the net. And maybe the information found there is more in-depth because of magical things that the computer can do like animations, sounds, videos, and various other whiz-bangs, but can it really compete with the quiet imaginings that form in the mind from plain black type on white paper?

I’ve dedicated many of my blogs to self-publishing authors for a couple of reasons, first, I too am about to publish two books that I’ve written, a good brush up is always warranted, and second, I find myself working with authors more and more recently. As I listen to them I try to anticipate their needs. The miracle of the Internet has opened many more pathways for authors to get their work into the hands of their audiences, and self-publishing is a good way to go. In traditional publishing the authors were shielded from printing. It was the authors job to write and the publisher’s to handle all the other details.  Authors didn’t have to know anything about that other stuff, but if one goes the self-publishing route, you better have at least a cursory knowledge of what I’ve called in a previous blog printerese.

what you have to know

Suppose you were searching for a printer what do you want to know first? Right, how much is this going to cost? To determine the cost, the printer will  ask you some questions:

1. How many books do you want to print?
2. What kind of binding, hardcover or soft?
3. What is the page size of the book?
4. How many pages?
5. If it is hardcover, what kind of material do you want for the wrapper, leather, cloth, or paper?
6. If leather or cloth do you want foil stamping on the spine and cover?
7. What kind of paper do you want for the text?
8. Will it be half or full bound? This refers to using a different wrapper material on the covers than is used on the spine.
9. Will there be photographs, and if so, will they be color or black & white?
10. Will the pages bleed? (Remember this from a previous blog?)
11. Do you want the pages sewn or burst bound?
12. Do you want a dust jacket, if so will it print?
13. If the dust jacket prints is it four color, two color, or one?
14. Do you want a protective coating on the jacket like UV or film lamination?
15. Will there be any special processes such as foil stamps, or  foil embosses on the jacket?
16. Will the edges of the text be deckled or  smooth?
17. Will there be any other special requirements such as gilting?
18. Do you want a bookmark ribbon bound in?
19. Do you want endpapers (recommended), if so, will they print?
20. Do you want flyleaves?
21. How about headbands?
22. Are there any special boxing or packaging requirements?
23. If the books are to be shipped what is the address, how do you want them shipped, and do we use your account?

got lost after No.4

I’m sure there are other questions that must be addressed, but this is a pretty comprehensive list–don’t you agree? While each of these questions is important to pricing the project, unless you are in the business, you probably got lost somewhere after question number 4. What do you do? Well, you can run back to the safety net of traditional publishing, if you can find a publisher to handle your book, that is. Or you could decide to persist and learn what you can. Good resources would include, the web, the library, book designers, graphic designers, printers, or print brokers like myself.

knowledge saves

Whatever learning path you decide to take, concentrate on the 23 questions above and make sure you can answer them completely. Then and only then, are you ready to seek printing bids on your own. Otherwise you are a sheep just waiting to be sheared and trust me there are plenty of people who will gladly take your money while you are all starry eyed and dreaming of being a best selling author. In one case a woman spent over forty-thousand dollars before even one book was printed. Now that’s sad.