Hi! I’m dale Beaumont from GetPublishedTV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help authors and aspiring authors to write, publish and market their own bestselling book in eight minutes a day. Now, in today’s episode, we’re actually going to look at answering a really important question and this is really important for many for self publishers but also if you're going through a major publisher as well, they maybe asking for your input, they're asking you for your opinion and so you kind of wondering -- know about how you can answer this question and what are the pros and cons that are going each way. And the question is this, how many books should I print in my first print run? Now, if you have never done this before, you're probably thinking why is that such an important decision? The reason why is because when it comes -- when you look at all of your expenses for writing and publishing your book, you’ve got to have expenses for maybe an editor, expenses for a proofreader, typesetting, graphic design, maybe if you're using a ghost writer, you'll have an expense for a ghost writer, maybe you’ve got some other postage cost, or travel cost and you put -- add all of those together. And then you’ve actually got the cost of actually -- and I might draw this on the board right now. You’ve got your cost of all that stuff, lets just call that “x” and then over here, you’ve got your printing expense and that’s “y.” And as you can se, it takes up a lot of space. So about probably 80% or 90% of your cost are going to be in printing and that’s why this is such a critical decision and you need to know which way to go.
Now, if you’ve done this process before, like I have then I normally just go straight to a sort of bigger numbers like, for most of my print runs, they're at least 5,000, if not 10,000, sometimes 15,000 or 20,000 depending on what I’m actually doing. So that’s a variety of different ways that I’ve gone with some of my more recent books. Now of course, that’s all relative to your country. Because in Australia, we’ve got a population of about 20 million so therefore, those are the numbers that kind of work. If you're in a country like the U.S. with -- close to 300 million people, then maybe you're starting print run, if you're an experienced author and that’s the key, could be, maybe, you know, 5,000 or it could be more like 20,000, 30,000 or 50,000. So it really depends. Or if you're in a country like Singapore with only 4 million people, then maybe you can start with 2,000 or 3,000. That’s if you're an experienced author. The reason why I say that is because, guarantee, okay believe me, guaranteed, no matter how many times you actually check your book, you may have gone through it a thousand times and you’ve checked every last element, when it comes time to actually get your book physically in your hand, right, when you get your book, there are going be mistakes. There are going to be things that you wish you would’ve done differently. And I’ve had this happen on a number of occasions but thankfully over time I’ve got better and better at this because I’ve made a lot of mistake and then every time I’ve made a mistake, I’ve actually documented them and put them on a system so before I sign off for my books to go to the printer, I actually go through that checklist and make sure that all those boxes can be ticked. And I keep adding to that list every time I make a new mistake. But I wish I could say I’ve never made mistakes but of course they continue to happen so I keep adding them on and maybe in the future episode, I’d actually go through that list with you and I’ll share with you what are all the things that I now check. There's about 15 or 20 different things that are very important and if you don’t what they are, you're going to make some mistake and you'll end up having a major decision on your hand to make.
Now, if there are any couples of small spelling mistakes or maybe -- something, isn’t it a --, you may say, “Ah, what the hell, not a big deal.” But if you have a mistake on your front cover or if the barcode is incorrect or if there is a photo in there that actually -- you don’t have the rights to actually use, then all those books could be rendered useless because -- and someone comes and send you a letter saying you can’t use that graphic, all those books must be withdrawn then you could be loosing tens of thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars if you're doing a big print run so therefore its important especially if you're doing this for the first time, please, please, my strongest recommendation is to start with small print run and then work your way up to bigger numbers okay because if you end up making small mistakes that won’t make that much difference but if you make a few big few big mistakes, its very easy if you're doing it for the first time then all your books could be useless. And you’ll going to -- actually every time you give to someone your book, you're going to say, “He’s my book but don’t open the book because I really didn’t like how it looks.” So you're going to be always apologizing for it a lot. I didn’t like that cover, photo of myself anymore or you're going to say, “Oh, you know, be careful for page number 166 because you know, it cuts off at the end or whatever is the issue that you actually have. And you'll never feel comfortable about it. And you didn’t even want to be like that. You want to promote your book with pride. You want to say, “He is my book.” It’s not going to be a hundred percent perfect but you know in your heart, you’ve done the best you possibly can and you're proud of your work. And you want to know that you’ve got -- if you’ve got 3 or 4,000 books in your garage that you can feel happy and comfortable with selling them over time and not sort of shattering every time you hand your book over.
So in order to prevent that from happening, start with smaller print runs first. Now, this is why this is so cool because right now, there are so many other options that weren’t available five years ago, and weren’t available ten years ago. And what I’m referring to is this phenomenon on publishing which is known as print-on-demand. Now what print-on-demand is, is that you can -- you actually have to sit up proper, let me just -- you know, do you have a printing press, just imagines these wheels and it had kind of all these ink on them and they stamp, you know, your books and there was this big production. And in order to make that economically viable, you cant just print one book, you probably have to print a minimum of maybe 3,000 to 5,000 books in order for that to become actually a worthwhile thing to do. But what's happening at recent times is that you now have the ability if you want to. If you want to print a book, you can now print one book, that’s it. If you only want one book, you can go to print-on-demand, print this now and they print them digitally. They aren’t using the traditional offset printer. They do them digitally. And you can print just one book. Now, I recommend that probably for your first print run, if you're a new author, then you probably print about a hundred, you print a hundred books to actually get started. That’s one, zero, zero.
Now, in our future episode, I’ll probably going to tell you what to do with those books because I haven’t really got the time to expand on them that too much right now. But you take these hundred books and just quickly I’ll go through the details later on but you may send a few to some publishers, a few to distributors, a few to media or people, you might send a few to magazines so they can review, to your friends and family, a few to international publishers, international distributors, etcetera. Now, I’ll explain to you why do that and how to do that later on. But I could probably do a hundred. Now that’s going to cost you a fair bit of money. And when you look at your numbers, you're going to be sort of saying, “Oh, you just got me so tempting to say I’ll just do a thousand or just do 3,000 or 5,000 because it comes so much cheaper.” Please, please, resist that temptation. Resist that temptation to do 5 or ten thousand if it’s your first time. Yes, it’s going to cost you more money but that’s okay. Now, -- Dean, how long have I been running this video for, I think I’m going overtime, sorry, Dean is just in the other room and he needs to get behind the camera right now and tell me, should I be wrapping up this video or can I continue. Thanks Dean. How are we going for time? I’m done, I’m done. Okay, let me just quickly wrap this up then.
So here is my advice, because I -- what I’m trying to keep all these video’s runabouts sort of eight units or so, now I’m going over but as I continue with this, I’m going to get better and better and try to get right on eight minutes. Maybe I need to get a timer or a clock or something but let me quickly summarize. Start with a small print run, maybe a hundred and then after you’ve done a hundred, don’t then jump straight away to 5,000. Probably there, go to maybe a thousand copies, its probably a really good measure and then after that, you can maybe then go to 3,000 or 5,000 or of course if you're in America or in U.K. and you want to do bigger numbers, you can. Obviously scale it up for what you actually are but I say start small and build your way up. That’s probably one of the most important piece of advices that I can give you. Sure, it’s going to cost you more at the beginning but its going to avoid mistakes that’s going to end up costing you ten times more in the long run. It’s a very important advice. We’ll talk more about this later on and I’ll come at it from a different angles but I want to put that across and trust your guts and value out of this video. Thanks for watching Get Published TV. See you again next time.
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