Marathon Press works with many types of book projects from smaller to mid size independent publishers and other organizations for a wide range of subject matter. While we are a book printer ( not a publisher), we often get asked many questions from first time self publishers relating to the topic of book publishing.
To help answer many of these common questions for our current customers and anyone interested in working with us, I will be posting a series called Self Publishing with Marathon Press.
To kick off the series, I will start this week’s post with this Introduction.
Determining the Motivation for Your Book Project
We love getting the opportunity to speak to artists, illustrators, photographers and other creative types who have a book project in mind. We work with a wide variety of these projects. If we get to talk early enough in the process, we will try as best as we can to help them determine their motivation for wanting their book project to see the light of day. As simple as that sounds, many of us are unfamiliar with the various ways you can get published or self publish a book these days. It’s to be expected as even with recent disruptive world developments, the whole industry of book publishing through book selling is changing all the time.
While no two projects are ever exactly the same, they may fall into a few categories with different solutions. Some of the motivations could be:
* Establishing yourself as an authority or accomplished artist or photographer
* You have seen some books of similar topics and feel yours would be better
* You want to use this book as a tool for self promotion/notoriety
* You want the project to create an additional revenue stream
* Your book project covers a historic event that has not been published before
* You are doing this pro-bono to fund raise for a charitable cause
Marathon Press specializes in short run length digital book printing for hardcover and softcover children’s editions, art & photography editions, family history books, corporate editions, cookbooks, calendars, textbooks, and more “Short run length” to us means somewhere between 50 to 1500 copies in most cases. Because we are heavily focused in serving professional photographers and artists, we do not specialize in books that are primarily just black and white text. Our level of print quality and options are sought after by professional photographers and artists. But in certain cases, we may not be the right source for a particular project depending on certain details and we will be quick to let you know.
There are many paths to publish a book, from Print on Demand sources (POD for short), on up to working with a traditional publisher. It can be a lot of information to absorb all at once. There are many sources of information to read about these other options for publishing on the internet. This series won’t debate or get into that whole topic too deeply, as we are just going to focus on what you need to know when working with us on a book project, primarily using Adobe InDesign. In upcoming editions of this series we will touch on topics such as: Design/Layout/ Editing/Proofreading/Choosing Book Format/ copyright issues/ ISBN #’s /File preparation/ printing/binding/ marketing and distribution.
If you want to schedule a free phone or Zoom consultation meeting in advance of your publishing journey, I welcome the opportunity to speak to you! My contact information is below. I will be happy to talk with you at length about your project and determine if Marathon Press will be a good source for printing your book.
Cheers!
Martin
Martin Pugh
Book Publishing Manager
martinp@marathonpress.net
(402)-371-5040 ext 289
Free Consultation for Individuals & organizations!
With over 30 years of Book Publishing experience, Marathon Press has helped thousands of clients self-publish anywhere from 20 to 50,000 copies of their book titles. Marathon has worked with several of the top names and organizations in the photography and photobook industry.
Twin Loop, Mechanical Binding
Some of the style variations we offer are: *Soft cover Wire-O, *Hard cover Wire-O and *Concealed Wire-O (both hard cover and soft cover) * Twin Loop with Calendar Hanger
Sizes from 8 x 8 up to 14 x 19" !
Marathon’s Layflat Albums are produced with German Pro Photo paper which has a matte finish and a neutral white point with a slight shimmer. Water resistant so you can easily clean off a spill. Acid free and chlorine free.
