Ten years ago, I ran a community website for runners. As the site grew in popularity, folks started clamoring for t-shirts that they could wear to races to show their membership in our online clan.
Very cool, I thought. So I called around to a few t-shirt printers in the city and ordered up 1000 shirts. Suddenly, my tiny New York apartment was crowded with beefy tees and running singlets. I set up an online storefront to take orders. I got myself a UPS account. And then, for the next several months, a bewilderingly large chunk of my day was consumed by putting t-shirts into mailers, printing shipping labels and waiting around for the UPS guy to show up.
Oh, the humanity. I used to be a guy who coded new site features and participated in the community. Now I was just a guy who stuffed envelopes.
Fast-forward to today, and this kind of hassle is behind me. Outfits like CafePress offer on-demand t-shirt printing, obviating the need to order hundreds in advance; you can even order just one shirt with no price penalty. Ditto for books. Print-on-demand publishing companies like Lulu.com and Blurb print books as they’re ordered, so there’s no inventory required for self-publishers.
Along the way, design and production considerations became dead-easy, too. Used to be that color-printing meant dealing with spot colors or four-color separation. Digital presses like VistaPrint now make it cheap and easy to print your own good-quality, full-color business cards just by uploading a graphic and clicking “buy.” Similarly, publishing a book at Lulu.com is as simple as uploading the PDFs of your text and book cover. Bam, you’ve got a high-gloss paperback ready to wing its way to eager readers.
Even better, these companies handle all the commerce and fulfillment, too. You get all the pleasure of making stuff for others without the headache of figuring out how to deliver it to them.
It’s hard to overstate how giddy this kind of thing makes me. Here at the mighty Global Moxie headquarters, I’ve used these services for short-run production of business cards and Big Medium t-shirts and, starting this week, for publishing and distributing the Big Medium book.
As a one-man show, time and attention are premiums for me. These convenient printing and publishing services cut out the distraction that used to weigh down the production of marketing collateral.
My apartment remains blissfully free of boxes. I can put all of my energy into code, customer service, and making stuff that helps my customers. Best of all, I can say goodbye to my career as an envelope stuffer. Good riddance.
Comments
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Josh, I guess you're using Lulu to print your book. Have you any thoughts on the Amazon lawsuit? Amazon decided recently that POD publishers (which include not only vanity presses but university presses, etc.) lose their Buy buttons unless they use Amazon's own service for POD? There is streamlining, and then there is... streamlining.
At first blush, I can’t say that I’m a fan of Amazon’s requirement to have print-on-demand books be managed only through their own service. It seems both unnecessary and transparently monopolistic. However, I gather that Lulu’s “published by Lulu” service does still give you access to Amazon as well as other distributors.
In my case, I wasn’t looking to distribute through Amazon or other booksellers, so this issue didn’t touch my particular project. I was just looking for an easy way to print and distribute an attractive physical book, and Lulu came through nicely. I hope that Amazon’s machinations in this area don’t sink a promising field of companies.
Josh...
Did you use any of LULU's services, such as editing and book cover design?
No, I didn't use any of those add-ons. I created the cover design myself and did all of the editing. If you choose to do it on your own, though, they make the cover design pretty easy, giving you the exact dimensions. You create a single graphic file to those specs, upload a PDF version, and you're done.
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