ThePublishedWord.com

“McDougal & Associates”

Questions About the Printing Process

  1. What’s New in the Printing Process?
  2. What Is POD or Print-on-Demand?
  3. What Are the Costs Involved in On-Demand Publishing?
  4. What is Lighting Source International?
  5. What Is the LSI Setup Process?
  6. How Does the POD System Work?
  7. What Are the Advantages of the POD System?
  8. How Can the LSI Help with Distribution?
  9. How Much Does McDougal & Associates Earn from Each Book?
  10. What About e-Books?
  11. Does LSI Offer Any Volume Discounts?
  12. Does LSI Do Offset?
  13. How Quickly Can You Get Your Books?
  14. How Do You Order and Pay for More Books?

1. What’s New in the Book Printing Process?

The printing process has changed dramatically in recent years. We are now using a state-of-the-art process that produces and ships a high-quality book within 48 hours of receiving the order. In this process, there is no plate and no negatives. It’s all digital. This means cheaper printing, faster printing, and the ability to make changes needed in a book at any point in time.

It also means being able to order smaller quantities at one time and to reorder as many times as necessary. We call this process POD or Print-on-Demand.

2. What is POD, or Print-on-Demand?

What do we mean by on-demand printing? It’s simple. Today’s technology allows us to order any number of your books at one time — even a single book, if that’s all you need at the moment. The amazing thing about all of this is:

  1. The cost is not prohibitive, as it was before.
  2. The quality is excellent, rivaling books done on any printing system.

This is why we call this new technology revolutionary! It’s one of the true marvels of the twenty-first century, and now we can use it for the Gospel and for getting YOUR message out.

3. What Are the Costs Involved in Doing On-Demand Publishing?

The costs are surprisingly small:

  • Printer Setup Fee: There is a one-time printer setup fee of $100.00 and an annual Marketing Access Fee of $12. This marketing fee is to maintain your title in the LSI system and make it available to wholesalers and retailers. 
  • Proof Fee: If you require a physical proof, there is a fee of $30 (this includes overnight shipping). If no physical proof is required, we review the proof online and then approve the title for production. 
  • Printing Cost Per Copy: After that, your charges will be the printing cost per copy for the number of books you order, plus actual shipping and any related state and county taxes. The print cost per copy can vary from $1.54 and up, depending on the size of your book, plus actual shipping costs. Email us for specific quotes.

If you can use 1,500 or more copies of your book, we can get excellent offset press quotes with much better prices, and for quantities of 2,500 and more the digital prices are better than the offset prices and shipping costs improve, as well. Let us give you a quote today. As noted, our POD partner is Lighting Source International (LSI), with printing facilities in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.

4. What Is Lightning Source?

Our printing partner is LSI, Lightning Source International. Some years ago now, the very large Ingram Books bought out Spring Arbor, the largest Christian book distribution in the world at the time, making Ingram the largest. It was Ingram that began this new service called Lightning Source International, or LSI for short. LSI uses a new type of digital press (operating in the US [near Nashville, in eastern Pennsylvania and in Bakersfield, California], in the UK [near London] and in Australia) to print, bind and ship a book within 48 hours of it being ordered. In this way, these books can be shipped out to anywhere in the world.

At first, this service was utilized for out-of-print titles, making them available again to the general public. Then some publishers began using LSI’s digital short-run services for trial runs or test marketing of their new books. This proved to be very successful. Eventually small publishers like us discovered LSI.  Use of this phenomenal service has literally gone through the roof in recent years.

The quality of LSI books is absolutely wonderful, unlike early digitally printed editions. Since they also have digital presses in the UK and Australia, books can be quickly printed and shipped to customers anywhere in the world. To our way of thinking, LSI is God’s gift to the Christian ministry. 

5. What Is the LSI Setup Process?

Before LSI can print our books or make them available to bookstores, distributors, or online retailers, we first have to set up each title in their system. This involves identifying the title and/or subtitle, author, ISBN, major themes, retail price (in dollars for the U.S., in British Pounds for the U.K., in Euros for the rest of Europe, and in Australian dollars for Australia), the allowable discounts (we usually go with 40% as most bookstores the world over need that much to exist) and the return policy (we accept no returns because. We don’t have the staff to handle them, and it becomes very expensive).

Once the book is set up in the LSI system, we then upload the corresponding text and cover files in their respective formats. At this point, a proof copy is presented by LSI. We can either opt to have them send us an actual printed copy ($30 including overnight shipping), or we can view an online proof. In either case, once the proof has been approved, the book is ready to release to the author, and also to Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and many other retailers.  

6. How Does the POD System Work?

Once the setup process is finished, your book files reside in the LSI system and can be ordered through any number of online retailers. When a book is sold, a report of that sale comes to us at the end of the month, and the payment for it comes in 90 days. We report sales and disburse monies to our authors quarterly.

An order of books for yourself must be submitted to us through email (or phone call), and then we submit it to LSI online, paying in advance. We, therefore, need your payment in advance. You can order any number of books, and they will be printed, bound, and shipped anywhere in the world within 48 hours.

PLEASE NOTE: To cover themselves, LSI advises us to allow 10 days for an order of books (5 days for printing and 5 days for UPS shipping). Our experience is that most orders take much less time. Only occasionally they get very busy and take the full ten days. For those who need books more quickly, there is an express service (for a 10% printing surcharge).

The cost of each book is from $1.54 up, depending on the size of the book and the number of pages. We pay LSI, and then we bill you the exact amount of their charges, plus a publisher’s surcharge of 10% to cover related expenses.

7. What Are the Advantages of the POD System?

There are many advantages with this system:

  • IT’S QUICK:  Your books can ship within 48 hours of us placing the order. 
  • THERE’S NO INVENTORY TO STORE: Now you order only what you need for the immediate future because you can order more at any time, and there’s therefore no need to keep more on hand than you can actually use.
  • IT’S LESS EXPENSIVE: Although on-demand copies of a book in small quantities typically cost about twice what you would pay if you were printing thousands of copies at one time, if you can’t use thousands of copies, then ordering more is just wasteful. In the end, therefore, this system come out costing you less.  
  • YOUR EXPENSES ARE SPACED OUT MORE: Because you order only what you can use in the immediate future and then order more when you need them, your total expenses are spread out over a much longer period of time.
  • YOU CAN AVOID PACKING AND SHIPPING: Instead of packing and shipping your books to a given location for some special event, let us order them directly from the printer and have them shipped to the location where they will be needed.  
  • YOU GET DISTRIBUTION: Once your book is in the POD system, it automatically becomes available on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and many other web sites for online ordering. It also becomes available to brick and mortar bookstores everywhere through Ingram Wholesale and Baker & Taylor. When anyone orders a book, it is billed, produced and shipped to them (without you doing anything at all). At the end of each month, all sales are reported to us, and at the end of 90 days, payment is received. We report sales and disperse earnings to our authors quarterly. The amount each author receives is the difference between the wholesale price of the book and the production cost for that particular copy, minus 10% for publisher’s expenses. This system cannot guarantee that your book will sell, but at the very least this gets it out there to the general public. (There is a $12 per year marketing access fee that makes this all possible, and as of January 1, 2015, there is a publisher’s surcharge of $3 per year to maintain your title in our system.)
  • YOUR BOOK CAN BE EASILY REVISED AND UPDATED: Because the process is all digital and there are no expensive negatives and printing plates involved, the files that are used to produce your book can be revised and/or updated at any time and as often as you would like. This is very important to some authors. * LSI charges a $40 fee for the placement of each revised file, and hourly rates ($35.00) may apply to text and cover changes and the reprocessing and uploading of the new files.  

To summarize:

  • Amazingly Quick Service: Books can be printed and shipped in as little as 48 hours.
  • Only What Is Needed: We no long have to print thousands of books at a time. We can order 10 if that’s all that are needed right now. 
  • No More Costly Warehousing of Books: LSI will print and ship books anywhere for us.
  • Books Shipped to Any Location: We can order and have books shipped to any location where special meetings will be held (LSI advises us to allow 10 days, 5 days for printing and 5 days for UPS ground shipping).
  • Excellent Quality
  • Very Decent Prices
  • Distribution: This happens through the largest booksellers in the world and to bookstores everywhere through the major distributors

Here’s how LSI says it on their web site:

  • Quality Book Manufacturing
  • Multiple Order and Delivery Options
  • Access to the Largest Bookselling Channel in the Industry
  • Efficient Inventory Management
  • Lightning Print to Order
  • Wholesale Distribution
  • eBooks Delivered in the Most Popular Formats
  • Service in the US, the UK and Australia

And all of this is now at your service. 

8. How Can LSI Help with Distribution?

The production part of the LSI POD service is wonderful, but the distribution part is just as wonderful. Far too many authors have produced books, thousands of them, and then not been able to sell them, and they are still sitting in some closet or basement. Distribution is a hard job, with many important facets. We need access to the online booksellers, and we need access to Christian bookstores. LSI gives us both of these, and they take care of the details.

When a book goes on sale at LSI, it is automatically picked up by the online retailers and automatically becomes available to any brick and mortar bookstore through book distributors. When our authors Google their title, they are amazed at how many resellers list their book. Many of them pick up their feed from Amazon.

This, of course, does not guarantee that anyone will ask for your book either in a bookstore or online. That will require some promotion on your part. Those authors who get involved in promoting their own book or books do well with sales. Those who don’t can’t expect to sell books, for no one even knows their book exists. That said, getting your title out into the public eye is worth the small cost involved. (LSI charges $12 a year and McDougal & Associates $3 a year to maintain this distribution service for each title).

When anyone orders a book through a reseller, that reseller takes care of billing and collecting the payment. They pass the order to LSI, and the book is printed, bound, and shipped. At the end of each month, we receive a report of how many books have sold (though not who has sold them), and the payment is received in 90 days.

What LSI pays is the difference between the wholesale price of the book and the cost of producing it. The wholesale is typically 60% of retail. For example, if you had a $20 book and the cost of printing it was $3.50 per copy, LSI would pay $12 – $3.50 or $8.50 for each book sold. To my way of thinking, this is a GREAT deal. As of January 1, 2015, McDougal & Associates began charging 10% over printer cost to cover our expenses. 
According to the latest LSI data, the following are their distribution partners:
 
In the United States:
Ingram Distributors, Amazon.com, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, NACSCORP and Expresso Book Machine.

In Europe:
Adlibris, Agapea, Amazon.com, Aphrohead,  Bertrams, Blackwell, Book Depository Ltd., Books Express, Coutts Information Services Ltd., Designarta Books, Eden Interactive Ltd., Gardners, Trust Media Distribution (formerly STL), Mallory International, Paperback Shop Ltd., Superbookdeals, The Book Community Ltd., W&G Foyle Ltd., and Wrap Distribution.
 
In Australia and New Zealand:
 Rainbow Book Agencies, The Nile, ALS, Biblioquest, Booktopia, DA Information Services, Dennis Jones & Associates, Footprint Books, Garrat Publishing, Holistic Page, James Bennett, Koorong, Peter Pal, University Co-operative Bookshop, Westbooks and Wheelers NZ.

9. How Much Does McDougal & Associates Earn on Each Book?

For the first ten years of our existence in this POD system, unlike other publishers, we did not place any markup on printing costs. What LSI charged is what our authors paid, not a penny more. As of January 1, 2015, because of the increased work involved in managing so many titles, we began placing a surcharge of just 10% over printer costs to help us defray the expenses involved.

10. How Can LSI Help Us with eBooks?

LSI helps us with two types of eBooks. They are authorized aggregators for Apple iBooks, so we upload our iBook versions to them and they report sales to us monthly. They are also distributors of eBooks in the formerly most popular Adobe Reader (or Adobe Digital Editions) version. We register these titles with them, upload the Adobe version to their site (where they are released to a large number of online retailers of eBooks, and they report sales to us monthly. In another section, I have a list of resellers currently served by LSI under the heading “Who Distributes eBooks.
Since eBooks is now a subject unto itself, please see my notes elsewhere on digital editions.

11. Does LSI Do Offset Printing?

For orders of 1,500 or more books, LSI partners with offset printers to provide us better pricing. At times, the digital pricing comes out even better than offset. Even using offset, there are advantages for going with LSI:

  • Quick Service: You must get in line a least a month in advance with a typical offset printer, but an LSI offset order takes only ten days to two weeks (often less).
  • Distribution: A typical offset printer can produce your books, but they cannot provide you with distribution. With LSI, you’re in the system.
  • The Digital Option: If the LSI digital presses are not busy, sometimes they opt to print our orders digitally (and that means fast service). With orders of 2,500 or more books, digital presses are now competitive with traditional offset. 

12. Does LSI Offer Any Volume Discounts?

Way back in February of 2008, LSI effectively lowered their prices by instituting the following volume discounts that still stand today:

Units Ordered   Discount
100-249               10%
250-499               20%
500+                    25%

If you don’t need more books and don’t have extra cash laying around, we recommend that you order only as many books as you can use in the next few months. That’s the beauty of this system.
If you need more books, not only do larger orders merit larger discounts; the shipping is also cheaper. It costs about as much to ship 500 books as it does to ship 1,000 books.

13. How Quickly Can You Get Your Books

This is the all-important question every author asks, and the answer is this:

Once you approve your final text and cover, the corresponding files will then be uploaded to LSI. If a proof copy is required, it typically arrives in about 5 days. In the past, we always had a proof copy shipped to us so that we could since we examine it carefully and make sure everything was as it should be. Now, however, we can view the proof online. Once that title is marked as approved on the LSI site, it is ready for production. If you have already placed an order, it will be processed immediately. If not, you should decide and advise us how many copies you want in the first printing and where to ship them.

When an order is placed, LSI suggests that you allow 10 working days to receive your books (5 days for printing and 5 days for USP Ground shipping). We’ve found that it usually takes less. To be on the safe side, order your books at least 2 weeks before you will need them.

14. How Do You Order and Pay for More Books

Your Order/s:
Unfortunately LSI only deals with publishers, so you need to send your order to us (if possible at least two weeks before you actually need the books).You can do this by email ([email protected]) or by phone (225-262-1937). Emailing your order is the most convenient method for us. In your communication, let us know the following:

  1.  How many books to order
  2. Where and how the books are to be shipped (Shipping is more economical if you order by case lots, but it is not required.)
  3. How you would like to pay

 The reason it is important to give us the shipping address is that the LSI online order form requires the method of shipping before they will quote a price.
The shipping alternatives are USPS (for small amounts of books, 25 or less), UPS Ground (for most orders) and commercial truck for larger orders. Second Day air and overnight are available, but books are so heavy that shipping them this way becomes unreasonably expensive. We are always happy to give you quotes on varying amounts of books, so that you can decide how many you need to order.
 
Your Payment/s:
When we began in 2004, we had so few authors that we could order the books, pay in advance, and then bill them as a 30-day business account. This is no longer possible. We have so many orders now that we need your payment in advance.
Your payment options are:

  1. Send Us a Check: Make your check payable to McDougal & Associates, 18896 Greenwell Springs Road, Greenwell Springs, LA  70739. We will deposit your check and place the order the next day.
  2. Pay by Credit Card: If you pay by credit card, we must pass along to you the 2.5 processing fee, and we strongly urge that you give us information from one credit card to keep on file so that you do not need to send sensitive information in an email.

 
Notifications:
We will notify you by email:

  1. When your order has been placed and
  2. When we receive the ship notification from LSI and will include the corresponding tracking numbers.