Getting a published ebook to print

Hmm. If it was in the original plans, is a print edition in your publishing contract?

If they have the option, you need to get their agreement to do anything with the print rights. And it will probably be easier to just ask for the rights outright than involve them in some collaborative plan.

Yep. If you licensed the print rights to your publisher you can't go ahead and publish the print edition yourself; and they might not want to go ahead with it, either.

You really should be talking to them about this.

If they're happy to revert the print rights to you then the lowest-cost option for you would probably be to use CreateSpace or Lulu. Avoid companies which want to charge you money for their publishing packages: those are rarely worth using. And make sure you find a good typesetter, otherwise your print edition will look like a dog's dinner.

You need to check your contract to see what your rights are. It may be the case that the publisher has the print rights but must use them within a certain time after the start of the contract, or they revert to you and you are free to sell them elsewhere or exercise them yourself. If you don't quite understand what the contract is saying about that then get some independent advice.

Definitely talk to your publisher, but when my ebook went to print through my publisher I had to sign a separate contract giving them my print rights.

My new publisher does strictly ebooks, but like you I wanted my books in print, first I contacted my publisher and got the ok, then I asked what I needed to do because I wanted to use the same cover. She sold me the cover and allowed me to use the edited ebook version of the MS and because I am clueless when it comes to digitly formatting ebooks, she agreed to do it for me for a small fee. I already made the investment back in royalties, so for me it was worth it.

Things you need to consider :
You don't own the cover, and you don't own the content of the ebook .
You must either ask permission or buy the right to use either.

RuthS said:

For example, I know one person who got her book half funded by a traditional publisher and half crowdfunded, but I didn't know if this was something that other people had experience of.

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Can you tell us the name of the publisher involved?

A good trade publisher is extremely unlikely to do this. It is something I've seen vanity publishers work with, though: they claim to fund half of the costs but in reality the author has to fund everything, whether it is by direct payment or crowdfunding.

I've looked at my contract like some of you suggested and I see that the publisher has exclusive rights to print, so I guess that means the only way I could do this (whether crowdfunded or through something like Lulu) would be to get them to agree for the print rights to be reverted to me...

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You would definitely need to get those rights returned to you if you wanted to produce your own print edition. If the publisher currently owns those rights, though, they're unlikely to just revert them to you in order for you to potentially make money out of exploiting them: they will probably expect you to license those rights from them, as publishers do with foreign and subsidiary rights which they own. If they ask this, be realistic about your likely profits, because you might well find it's not financially viable to proceed.