Perfect Bound vs. Handmade Books
August 21st, 2007I’ve been investigating different printing options for me, and I’m probably gonna end up taking the print-on-demand route. This’ll actually make things a lot easier for me, and I can get like 100 copies done up for a reasonable price (versus a minimum order of 1,000 for $3000 from some big name printer). It’ll definately drive down costs for me, and maybe even allow me to sell them for cheaper than $10 a copy.
With this in mind, my handmade books may or may not have a future. If only because time (and the lack of it) is a big deal for me, and making handmade copies takes out a lot of time and effort that I could spend doing other things. However, I think a lot of buyers at the conventions I’ve sold books at were supremely impressed with the fact that I handmade them, many going so far as claiming that it was hardcore…. and I gotta admit, hearing people saying “that’s hardcore” is a narcotic, enough for me to keep making handmade copies.
I was thinking that I probably should sell both at conventions; the perfect bound version will probably be $8 while the handmade version will probably be $16. My question is… do you think it’ll be worth paying a premium for the handmade copy?
August 22nd, 2007 at 07:12
I’d love to help you bind books by hand — if you wanted help with that! I’ve been actually hoping to do some binding of my own chapbooks. I’ve even been thinking about trying to have a fully illustrated chapbook, too, which is probably way beyond me at the moment. Either way, I think it’s v.cool that you do stuff by hand – not a lot of people do that these days. Let’s talk at work sometime!
-m
August 26th, 2007 at 19:47
M: It’s OK, binding books by hand is not an problem for me to do, despite how much time it consumes. But to be honest, binding books by hand is far easier than I thought. I don’t think I can do hard cover just yet, but softcover is just a matter of stapling pages together and gluing a cover onto it. Easy peasy!