Learning about self-publishing: Color vs. black & white.

It seems like this is the sort of situation where querying some printing companies directly for price quotes would be more useful than using their online rate calculators, since it's sort of a special case.

Because the answer is ... it probably depends on what their equipment is set up to handle! It might be cheaper, or it might not be.

(Caveat: I worked in newspaper prepress for 15 years, so what I know about it is mostly geared towards one kind of printing. I haven't worked with offset presses for printing books or with POD equipment at all.)

So, what I do know is that there are two main ways your book can be printed: either in a large press run on an offset printing press, or in small batches on a print-on-depend (POD) digital printer. I'm guessing most of the online rate quotes you've been looking at are for POD, because with most offset printers you have to contact the company directly for a quote (because there are so many variables that affect pricing). If you're getting quotes for books in relatively small quantities -- 25, 50, 200 -- you're probably getting quotes for POD. Offset printing doesn't really become economical until you're dealing in thousands of copies.

For offset printing, the press setup is more complicated and expensive for color, but most presses have a lot of flexibility in where they put color, and which colors they use -- and it is (usually) less complicated and cheaper to have color on some pages rather than all pages. (Which is why so many newspapers don't have color on every page, because cost is terribly important in a mass-produced, disposable product like that.) So for an offset press, the answer is, probably, that it'd be more expensive than black and white all the way through, but less expensive than color on every page (you would, however, be limited in exactly WHICH pages can have color on them). However, it depends on what their press can be configured to handle. So you would need to ask them.

POD, on the other hand ... now here I haven't worked with the equipment, but my general understanding is that the POD relies on all-in-one machines that do all the collating/bundling/binding of the book as well as printing it. (I may be wrong about this; someone correct me?) They're basically big laser printers with binding capabilities. Color books are printed on a color POD machine; black-and-white ones on a black-and-white machine, which, like getting black-and-white copies made, is much cheaper. Whereas an offset press can be configured for a mix of color and black-and-white, POD books pretty much have to be printed on either the color machine or the black-and-white machine, or else you'd have a lot of hand labor inserting pages from different printers into the same book. You certainly can print black and white on a color laser printer, but they'd probably still charge for color because it's using the color machine.

... but I really don't know -- it's entirely possible that some POD places regularly handle a mix of color and b&w in the same book, and have a workflow set up to deal with it. And maybe some (most?) places use the same machines for black and white or color, in which case mixing color with black-and-white pages would be a snap!

So yeah, in either case, I'd say different printers are probably going to have different capabilities, and contacting them directly is your best bet! If the first one says "no, it'd be the same price as full color" go ahead and try some more, because they might be quite different depending on what their equipment can do.

Which was a long and wordy way of giving you a simple answer, I guess.

110pages said:

I'm new to the idea of self-publishing and trying to learn the ins-and-outs. I've visited many websites of self-publishing companies and have seen their basic price quotes.

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Those "self-publishing companies" tend to be vanity presses, and will cost you a lot more than you need to pay. Be very careful.

Question about color vs. black & white: If my book is a travel memoir but I wanted a color picture just on the first page of each chapter, does that deem the entire book "color" as far as price quotes?

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If you're using a POD printer then yep, I think it would.

I estimate 15-20 chapters in my book so I didn't know if those 15-20 pages with a color picture would make a difference. It's amazing the difference between the price quote of color vs. black & white and I'm just trying to figure out whether color will be worth it or not.

Thanks...Mike

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Any colour inside a book adds hugely to its printing costs (I used to work on highly-illustrated books, and the difference is staggering).

Might you be able to include mono line drawings instead of your colour illustrations? It would reduce the cost of the printing by a large degree which is important because the cost per unit of a POD book is always high, and adding colour to the mix is very likely to drive the cost of each copy so high that no one will buy it.

Also, I'm sure I don't need to say this but do make sure you own the appropriate rights to use any illustrations that you use, otherwise your costs might well become scary.

In my latest book I did what you say you want to do. Here's my experience.

It helped that twenty years or so ago I helped two women to start up a printing design firm by giving them free advice and sometimes still do so. (I'm an aerospace software and systems engineer.) They are now quite successful and they gave me professional advice. You might want to get such advice yourself.

I realized early that color was out of the question. So I did some research into converting color to black and white. One of several possibilities is to use software that coverts your pictures and lets you adjust various aspects of it, such as intensifying greens or whatever. Here is an article on that which I found very helpful.

http://www.howtogeek.com/162781/how-to-convert-your-color-photos-to-stunning-black-and-white-prints/

I used Photoshop Elements, a $60 consumer version of Photoshop, to do the conversion, but you can also use other software to do this such as GIMP or Picasa, both free. Look at the following web page to see four before-and-after images.

http://shapechangertales.com/ebooks/ebooks-9/

After I'd done that I submitted the book to Amazon's CreateSpace. The results look pretty good to me, but I found that CS's POD printers work best on certain kinds of photos. Those have few dark patches and fairly simple details, not complex images with subtle gradations of contrast. Too, you must increase the contrast on the images you submit because POD printers (maybe all printers) reduce contrast.

Another way to enhance your images for printing, which I rejected eventually, is to convert your B&W images to halftone (tiny dots) or hatching (tiny lines).