Getting Books Made by Print Size Productions

by ToglefritzJun 3, 2019Business

For the past couple months, I’ve been working on a book that introduces kids to the world of computer-aided design, a subject that is covered quite extensively on this site. The book is titled 3D CAD for Babies. One of the challenges I faced while developing the book is getting prototype copies printed. Just like with any project from consumer goods, to artwork, to software, to books, I believe that prototyping should be done early and often. There is no substitute for testing a product in your own hands and in the hands of your users. Prototypes provide a rich and extremely valuable source of feedback that reveals issues that are very difficult to catch using just digital tools.

Another reason why prototyping is important is for raising the funds necessary to complete a project or to launch a new product. In this case, 3D CAD for Babies will be launched on Kickstarter. If you plan on Kickstarting your book, you will need a whole bunch of photos and also a video. While you could put the page design images on your campaign page, it is much more powerful to use real photographs of your book.

The problem with prototyping books is that most printing companies have large minimum order quantities. For example, PrintNinja, the company I plan to use for the first production run of the finished book, has a minimum order quantity of 500 books for board books. Getting just one book made is not as easy as you might expect.

However, I did find a company that produces custom board books at affordable prices, Print Size Productions. I decided to write a post about ordering books from Print Size Productions because it is a useful service for anybody writing a book, especially those looking to crowdfund the book.

1) Choose a Book Type

Print Size Productions offers a bunch of different book designs. Each is a different size and has a different number of pages. And of course, each different design has a different cost. The first step in getting your book printed is to choose the design that works best for your project. For making prototype copies of 3D CAD for Babies, I used the Designer Board Book Plus – 24 Pages design, so that is the one shown in this tutorial. However the process for designing your pages, uploading them, and placing your order is exactly the same regardless of which design you choose.

One item to note is the way pages are counted. So, if you open up the book, you will be looking at two pages. The cover does not count as a page. So, when you are choosing which design to use, keep in mind that if you are designing a book in which a single “page” spans both sides of the book, you will need to pick a design with twice the number of pages that you have designed.

This shows two pages of the book. The left and right have are each one page.

2) Download a Template

Once you’ve chosen a book design, the next step is to download a template for that design. Using templates is extremely common in the publishing industry; they ensure that your page design fits as expected with the manufacturing process used by the printer. After choosing a design from Print Size Productions, the detail page for that design will contain a link to download templates. Give that link a click.

The downloaded folder will contain templates in a variety of formats for use in several Adobe products: Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. For this tutorial I am using Adobe Photoshop because it is a tool for which I already have a subscription but you can use the tool with which you are most familiar. Illustrator, as a vector graphics program, is great for scaling your book to different sizes or for books involving illustrations. Adobe InDesign is made specifically for creating publications and has a number of tools specifically tailored for the publishing industry. For this tutorial, we just need to export our pages in PDF format. Any of Adobe’s software products have the ability to save PDFs.

3) Design your Pages

Next we will use the downloaded templates to design the pages for your book. This, of course, is a much longer process than it seems in this tutorial. It might take dozens or hundreds of hours to finished designing a book. Perhaps longer if you are using custom illustrations. At some point though, you will probably end up with a collection of elements that will make up each page in your book. You might have images, illustrations, text, or other assets.

When you open one of the Print Size Productions templates in your design software of choice, you will find a kind of frame showing where to place your various design elements.

In the template, you can see the center fold of the page along with the edges. To digitally assemble the book, you will arrange your graphical and text elements on the template. You will need to repeat this process for each page in your book. Note also that, depending upon the design of your book, you might have a single page that spans both sides of the book, or separate content on each side.

Once you’ve create the layout for each page in your book, there is one very important step you will need to complete before saving a PDF version of each page. You will need to hide the layer containing the Print Size Productions layout so that it does not appear in the PDF. Your finished pages should look something like the image below.

Save each page of your book as a PDF.

4) Create your Cover

The process for creating the cover for your book is similar to the process we just used for the interior pages. You might have already noticed that the package of templates we downloaded from Print Size Productions earlier also contains templates for the cover for various Adobe programs. Like we did with the pages, creating the cover for your book involves arranging various graphical elements and/or text on the template.

One major difference between the template for the interior pages and the template for the cover is the spine area on the cover template. This section contains the graphical elements that would appear on the edge of the book if it is sitting on a shelf.

So you simply need to arrange your design elements on the template to create your cover.

And then, just like before, the template layer needs to be hidden before you save the cover design as a PDF.

5) Upload your Designs

Once the designs for all your pages and the cover completed, we can begin the process of actually ordering the book. The first step is to head back over to the Print Size Productions website and upload your finished designs. First you need to return to the page for the book design you chose back when you downloaded the templates for your book. On the page, you will fin a button to “Upload Finished Spreads.”

You will then be taken to a kind of editor provided by Print Size Productions. The process is fairly simple to complete. Just upload the cover followed by each of your pages.

When you have your entire book uploaded to Print Size Productions, the rest of the process is a simple matter of completing your order as you would on any other website. Provide your shipping and billing details and your book will arrive a week or two later.

Results

It takes a little while for your book to be printed, shipped, and delivered. As a note though, you might have noticed an estimated shipping date when you completed your order on the Print Size Productions website. In my experience, PSP ships books much more quickly than the website estimates. Anyway, below are some photos of the most recent book I ordered from Print Size Productions. The book’s overall quality is great. The quality of the construction is excellent. Even after being “read” several times by my toddler daughter, the book is still in great shape. The bindings are not broken, the pages are not bent, and the printing itself is still clear.