It’s Complicated was my first game. I printed through Guild of Blades. It cost me $2.10 a book for a 40-page partial-color saddle-stitched book. I sold copies for $16. My profit was $13.90 a book. Put another way: one preorder paid for a little over seven copies of my book. I paid for my entire print run with pre-orders.

I looked into doing that book on Lulu. There’s no such thing as partial color to Lulu: everything’s either printed color or printed black and white. It would have cost $11.50 a book, reducing my profit to $4.50 a book. There was no reason on God’s green earth to flush that $9.40 (nearly $1000 total for the whole print run) down the drain.

Lulu is surprisingly competitive right now, but it’s still not the most competitive option. I’m okay with setting half my budget aside for a print run, because that will earn me more profit in the long run. As I mentioned, the individual cost per book (without printing ANY in advance, as you say– that means no bulk discount) is $14.50 a book. In comparison to the $6.75 of my lowest quote, or even the $11.28 of the most highly-recommended printing house, that’s still leaving hundreds of dollars of profit on the table. I know that I am in a place where I can sell 100 books in a reasonable amount of time. I’ve got a marketing plan and I’m willing to play the crap out of my game until people see how awesome it is. I brought It’s Complicated to GenCon almost by accident, and sold out of my print run there.

I guess it is just a numbers thing. 100 isn’t a lot of books, but 300-500 is a lot of bucks.

I’ll talk to my Lightning Source rep about this, thanks Paul/Fred. I went through the rigamarole of signing up with them just so that I could get my eyes on their price list a while back.

They did such an awesome job for me, customer-service-wise, that I recommended them to a friend who had a perfect-bound, full-color landscape book. His print run showed up, mangled, halfway through GenCon. They did a great job with IC, minus the smudges, but considering how close in spec my game is to the game I saw completely messed up? I just can’t afford to risk it.

Awesome to know about 360, though. I’d probably still order a proof, just to be sure.

Part of the reason comes from understanding what a lot of POD hardware prints on: those big 11″ tall, 17″ wide tabloids. So 8×10 fits on there just fine, since two pages side by side are 16″ wide, 10″ tall. 10×8 as your format means you’re going for a 20″ wide side-by-side thing, which requires paper sizes in excess of that 17″ wide limitation. With this as a factor (assuming I’m at all right — see below) you’ll find that most places limit their printings to 8-8.5″ wide per page.

This knowledge is something I picked up quite some time ago, so it may be outdated — after all, Lulu’s 9″x7″ format is 1″ wider than I’m anticipating, so I may have the dimensions wrong anyway.

Not sure if they do 8×10 landscape, but you could contact them and ask.

On the other hand, the color cover came out pretty nice, with snappy colors, and they even managed to keep the red leather texture looking realistic.

Anyway, Lightning Source. I like ‘em, but I’m not clear if you still need to have an ISBN in order to publish through them. IPR may have individual ISBNs it can sell to you, but you’d have to talk to Brennan about that. LS also has twitchy results when a book has bleeds, so I tend to go away from LS if I’m doing any kind of bleed in my layout.

Trim size of 9″ wide x 7″ tall is a sticky bit as well with many a printer. LS is no different here, offering full color in a limited set of trim sizes: 5.5×8.5, 8.5×8.5, 7×10, 8×10, 8.5×11. The first is “small paperback”, the second is “medium”, and the last three rate as “large”. Since 9×7 seems to slot into the large category, even though they don’t offer it, I’ll calculate out a large full color paperback based on your criteria of 50 pages, 100 copies. At 100 copies, you hit their second tier of bulk pricing, 10% off.

Setup: $37.50 for interior. $37.50 for cover. Total: $75.

Perfect bind, 50 pp: $1.50 per unit + $0.10 per page = $6.50 per unit.

$6.50 x 100 copies = $650. Knock 10% off. $585.

This doesn’t include shipping, of course, but for the moment I’m assuming the other guys aren’t giving you that either.

$585 + $75 setup = $660

You’ll probably want to get a proof after you’ve provided all this, which is usually handled with a $30 flat fee, so $690.

If you’re willing to adopt a format that fits the limited set of trim options, with no bleeds, and go through the account sign-up process with LS, and add in any costs of getting an ISBN to go with your book, I think you’d still be looking at a pricepoint here that would beat your PG quote, potentially coming in at under $8/book even when shipping gets into the mix.

I won’t say their online tools are as easy or as good as Lulu’s. They aren’t. But when LS is the right fit for the job (or when I’m willing to make my job a right fit for LS), their pricing tends to be very competitive, and they are very, very fast at printing up the books.