Professional Reprographics

Professional Reprographics short run book printing takes a week to get your book off the shelf, in your hands, even in small quantities

Ever want to write a book? How about capturing your grandparent’s life stories in printed form? What about that amazing collection of family recipes or that really important e-book you wrote to help grow your business?

Photo by Stewart Butterfield via Wikimedia Commons

People are always surprised to find out how easy and inexpensive it is to publish a book these days — and I’m always surprised that they’re surprised! Today, anyone can publish a book that looks just like one you would buy in a store: printed, bound and wrapped with a good-looking cover. You don’t have to have a publisher and you don’t have to print a ton of books. Need 25 books? 50? 500? No problem!

Over the past 10 years or so, advances in digital printing technology have allowed full-service, all-digital printers like us at Professional Reprographics in Nashville to affordably do what’s called “short run book printing” — a limited run of 500 or fewer copies that’s great not just for poets and beginner novelists but anyone who wants a great marketing tool for trade meetings or a precious family keepsake.

You don’t have to be an experienced writer to get a book published and you don’t need to be in Nashville. Clients we work with on self-published book projects usually just email us their file in Microsoft Word, and we do the typesetting, design the cover and present them with a proof within days, often at a cost that surprises people.

But it doesn’t even have to be in a word processing program; it can be handwritten, too! We’ve done a few books written by family members about a beloved grandparent as a birthday gift. If you have an older family member with fascinating stories about serving in World War II or Korea, think about talking to them or getting them to write down their stories, then come talk to us about how we might be able to turn Grandpa’s great dining room table tales into a book the family can treasure for generations. That’s one of the great advantages of independent print shops like PR. We can work with you on whatever you want to bring to us. Once you sign off on the proof, we can have the full run done, boxed and ready to go in as little as a week.

And if you’re a fiction writer or poet, and you’ve collected a shoebox full of rejection slips over the years, self-publishing is a way to get your work noticed. It’s fast becoming the way for writers of all kinds to get books into print without trying to woo persnickety publishers (then watch as the publishers take most of the credit and the proceeds even if they’re successful; see this article from The Guardian newspaper in London about the rise of self-publishing).

We get all kinds at PR, though: school classes that want to compile student essays and sell them as fundraisers; or college professors in higher ed-happy Nashville who want to arrange a semester’s worth of handouts and reading assignments into a convenient package. Your price is going to vary, of course, depending on the kind of paper you choose, the kind of cover, whether you want graphics or color printing and how many pages your book has.

But it’s doable, and you shouldn’t be intimidated by the thought. It’s way easier than you think, and trust me, no matter what business you’re in, clients and colleagues look at you and your message with a little more respect when it’s between two covers. Interested? Get in touch! I’d be happy to talk with you about self-publishing your book.

Angie Scott
615-509-3192
angie@prnashville.com

Photo by Stewart Butterfield via Wikimedia Commons