What should an author know when publishing books?
							
When words are combined into sentences, real magic happens – a book is born, artistic or scientific, mass or highly specialized. And every author certainly wants to see the light of day. In the modern age of high technology, this is not at all difficult to do: a lot of online platforms allow you to post creations in electronic form and receive feedback and delight from readers.
But if that’s not enough, you can print your own work. A “living” paper book, even made in a single copy, evokes special emotions that cannot be compared with the electronic version. You can keep it as a keepsake, give it to family and friends, or even sell it. But before the new pages come to life, we need to figure out how to do it from a technical point of view. Let’s find out what you need to print books first.
8 Steps to Print
Printing a book is both easy and difficult at the same time. If you have all the necessary tools with which the whole process is carried out, difficulties should not arise. But still, it is worth remembering that transferring a work to paper is a laborious work of a whole team of specialists.
How to go from print book layout to the finished print run, which determines success, is described below. Here are the main points that you need to solve.
Self proofreading
The finished text, as a rule, contains a lot of typos and errors. Therefore, do not be too lazy to double-check it several times, or better, give it to an outsider to read. These can be both close people and specially trained proofreaders.
Mistakes can be both spelling and stylistic, logical. The text is the responsibility of the author, and before taking the manuscript to the printing house, you should carefully study it yourself and bring it to perfection.
Budget estimate
After the text is ready, it is sent to the printing house – most often by e-mail. Next comes an approximate miscalculation of the budget by the managers of the printing house.
It depends on many factors:

circulation;
printing method;
binding;
paper;
cover design;
the presence of illustrations.

Only the preliminary cost is discussed here, since the author has yet to choose most of the pricing items.
Text proofreading with typography proofreader
In order to guarantee that there is not a single flaw left in the book, the printing house once again double-checks the entire text for various errors and inconsistencies. Measure seven times – this is just about printing a book.
This step should not be neglected, because usually a third-party, unblurred look reveals several defects that the author and his “confidants” missed. There is nothing terrible in this, but it is still worth double-checking once again.
Defining the book’s main parameters
While the proofreader is proofreading the text, you can decide on the appearance, format, size and other book parameters. The manager of the printing house will help in this matter. The task of the author is to decide on the type and density of paper, choose soft or hard cover, product color palette, offset or digital printing, post-print finishing options, cover design.
In your desire to make the publication attractive in appearance, you should not forget that the book should be comfortable not only to hold, but also to read.
Ordering book codes
Each printed edition has two codes: UDC index and ISBN – international standard number. They are used to identify books in the library catalog. Different codes are used for different areas of knowledge. Understanding them on your own is not so easy.
Therefore, it is best to entrust the care of ordering book codes to a printing house. Specialists have extensive experience in carrying out this procedure and will do everything quickly and correctly.
Product layout
The how to lay out a book for printing is also taken care of by the printer. Layout is one of the most difficult and most important stages of printing a book, as a result of which a finished layout is born.
For readability and ease of perception, it is important to optimally combine text and images, choose fonts, adjust margins, and adjust the size of illustrations. Readers pay little attention to high-quality layout, but they easily notice its absence.
Cover design
The more interesting and brighter the cover, the more likely the book will be successful. In the design of the product, a variety of post-printing options are used – embossing, hot stamping, foiling, varnishing, lamination. The use of one or another method depends on the binding, thickness and material of the cover itself.
For information about what are the requirements for a book cover, you can ask the printing house specialists. With their help, it will turn out to create the most pleasant first impression from the printed edition, which is very important both for the promotion of the author and for personal admiration.
Printing and testing a pilot copy
When everything seems to be ready, the printing house launches a trial version for printing. And again taken for proofreading. This time, not only errors and typos in the text are checked, but also layout, design, color matching of illustrations, paper, postprint quality.
Any inaccuracies at this stage can still be corrected. All adjustments are made after agreement with the customer, the author. After the layout is fully approved, the entire circulation of books is launched for printing.