HI, this is Dale Beaumont and welcome to Get Published TV, this is the only dedicated show on the internet to help office and aspiring office to write, publish and market that are best-selling book in 8 minutes a day or less. Now, I need to just apologize for a few of my videos cause I’m still kind of getting into the groove of things, few of the, all of that 8 minutes, I want to try and make sure that this video in under, I probably need to invest in a little egg time or something like that to put it over there, and why I’m going to make sure that I’d stick to my time, that fingers crossed for this video, here we go.
What we’re actually going to talk now about it is something that some of you might think is quite trivial and not that important, but I’m going to tell you it is really important and that is paper; paper, that’s right, so we’re going to talk about this subject of what type of paper that you should actually print your books on. Now let me tell you why this is being so important for me and my publishing career. This is the first book that I published, it was a book called The World at Your Feet, which is a personal development book for teen-agers; now I’m going to talk more about one of the lessons that I’ve learned from this book in future episodes, but here’s one of the important lessons that I’ve learned with this particular book. Now, it’s actually quant I use small book, it’s actually about 78 pages long, so not very big; now when we actually first printed this book, we went to a local printer and this local printer also printed business cards, brochures, etcetera, etcetera, and we said to them, “oh, can you print a book?”, and they scratched their head for 9 minutes, and said “ah, yeah we can actually print a book”; so these are important lessons that I’ll share with you and used to say, so we said “great, would a, can you print a hundred copies or can you print 500 copies?”. So we used them a couple of times and this is what they produced; so they produced this book here, and it was fine, it must have seen or served it’s certain purpose for what we had to do, but then we were ready to do a bigger print one, that actually were ready to jump to 5,000; and someone said, “look, you should probably get a couple of different quotes and shop around to get the best possible products”. So what we did is we found a few specialized book printers and that’s the key words: specialize book printers, meaning that that’s all they do, they just print books, and we said to them, we’d like to get our book printed, we want 5,000 copies and it was actually a lot cheaper to go with the specialized book printer as opposed to just a local printer because these guys do this all day everyday, and they’ve even invested in most cases, millions and millions of dollars in machinery to produce books quickly and efficiently, and therefore you get to save quite a bit of money; but the other thing is because they’re professionals at this, they actually know a number of things with which a local printers don’t know. Now, for example, one of those is in the area of paper or sometimes we call it paper stock, what’s stock here, actually printing on stock mean, what quality of paper and how thick would that paper is. Now we can get really technical here, we can start to get into things like GSM, and other stuff, and big words, but I’m going to take all that jargon out, and basically say that this book here, we just printed on, cause I’m just a local printer, what would be equivalent to kind of like just A-4, sort of photocopy papers, the best way to actually think about and describe this is basically photocopy paper,, and they printed the book on that. Whereas, when we went through a specialized book printer, their advice is to go with the different types of paper stock, which is called bulky paperback; bulky paperback and you can kind of figure out by the word “bulky”, that the paper is actually a little bit thicker, actually a little bit fatter. Now the reason why that is so important and I thought, what’s the big deal, paper’s paper, right? Wrong, okay, it’s a big deal because, I don’t know if you can get this, but I’m going to try and show you this point; I’m going to turn them around, and here we have the first print run that we did, and this was I think the second or the third print run, nut if you can see that closely right now, this second book is almost, not quite, but it’s almost double; double the actual width of this book right here, yet it’s got exactly the same amount of pages, it’s got 78 pages, we didn’t add anything to it, we just printed the book on a different paper stock; and most people that are first time office, they don’t know this, they just go to a local printer4. So the reason why this is so important, is that most of the times when you, if you can, you know see that there, you can say that it is quite a big difference, and of course, this is only a very tiny book, like if we would do a, you know, another one that happen to get an exact example, but it can again, make as much as double the actual thickness; and the reason why that’s so important is, let’s take this example; say that they were the same book, they’re not the least you say they are, how much text can you actually fit here, or what about the size of the font, because when someone’s actually in a book shop, this is all I get to see. If you’re lucky, they can maybe face the book out, but normally, because of space reasons, there are office aren’t that lucky, so this is all people are saying, they’re looking down their ray in the spine; and if you got a fee cap book, then it makes it much easier to actually see, and if they see it, then they may say, “oh, that looks interesting”, and actually pick it up off the shelf as opposed to this one where they just kind of go aside there because it’s our theme, okay, and again, it’s the same with these examples, so one of the things instead that makes the book a lot more thicker, and I’m sorry, makes it even more spine width to actually play with. The other thing is it can increase the average dole of sale of the book, because the being this small like kind of feels quite flimsy, you know the spine is very small, so maybe that book can only be priced to let’s just say 14.95, so no lock, but this book here, because it’s thicker, this can actually be 19.95, and it’s actually in the 19.95, so you’re getting an extra $5, but the book is exactly the same because when it comes to putting a price on the book, one of the things that they look for is what’s called the, you know , the thump value, so, you know when they drop the book, how, what type of sound does it make? Does it make a loud sound or a soft sound that one kind of sounded a lot louder because I dropped it on, on its spine, but the thicker the book is, then the more money that you can actually sell it for.
Now, when we’re talking about bulky paperback, you maybe thinking, well, how that actually works, you know, how can it be double the thickness, could the papers actually, basically the paper is fatter; now the easy downside to doing darn with the bulky paperback, you know, one would just point that up to you right now because for every advantage this whole side, disadvantage is gone, so that wind them up in picking which one is actually right for you.
Here I’d actually do it, to do this example in demonstration; I’ve got a A-4 piece of paper, that’s just normal paper that came out of our just printer, just started there in our office. Here, I’ve actually got some hand towel from our bathroom; now these paper’s obviously much fatter, much thicker, and this one here is obviously quite thin; so I want you to just imagine, this is bulky paperback and this is just normal paper. What I’m going to do is I’m going to put this pen on the paper for 5 seconds; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and I’m going to take it away; and you can see the sides of that dot right there, and in fact if you could just zoom in, Dana, and just in a few seconds time, when we have these 2 dots so we can just check it out, that would be great; and we’re doing another one here on this piece of paper; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and I’m going to take it away. Now in this dot here, is actually starting now to what’s called Bleed, so that ink is actually now starting to become bigger and fatter. Now, I could have get this on the back of the white board which is probably not the best example, we thought of actually do it on the back of another sheet of paper and we’ll do it again, the, it’s going to be much more dramatic, so let me just do this right now and try it again; try it as now we’ve actually got another piece of paper at the back of it and the more paper we have, the more dramatic this is going to be done. And again you can see that that dot is actually becoming bigger and bigger, and now if, I’m just doing with the pen, but if I have a drop of ink as well, you’d basically see it there. So these bulky paperback will actually make the ink, what’s called Bleed a lot more. So, therefore if you have a lot of graphics and if you have a lot of images, then going with this type of paper stock is probably not a good choice, because those photos won’t be a shot, they won’t be as clear because every little dot, every little pixel is now actually bleeding into the others, so it takes away the sharpness of that particular photo and image. So if, but if you just got text, then it doesn’t make a l of difference, you can still read it just as clearly and so therefore if you’ve only got text, my recommendation would be going with the bulky type paper because it makes your book appear thicker and fatter, and therefore you’ve got more spine width to play with and you can actually have a better position in bookstores and you can sell your book for more money because it’s perceived as being more valuable cause it’s bigger in size; whereas this paper right here is really good for, if you got a lot of photos or graphics that are in your book, and they’re all spread through out. If that’s the case, then what you probably want to do is start for this type of paper, it would be thinner and your book will be smaller but the images will be much sharper. The other alternative that you’ve got of course, is what a lot of, this is especially used in biographies, and in biographies what they basically do is they put in a 5 or 6 pages in the middle, where they have even better paper than this, it’s got more of a gloss and they’ve lot of those (--) images and then for the bulk of the book, it’s actually this bulky paperbacks that are actually, you know, put that two together in the one book. It’s a very kind of, again, it’s beginning to finite details here when we’re talking about what paper stock to use but it can actually make a big, big difference when it comes to the success of your book. And then we begin going overtime so I’m going to keep working to get that better listen and get the time down to be much shorter, but weigh it up, talk to your book printer and see which option is right for you. This is Dave Beaumont from Get Published TV, thanks for watching, see you next time.
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