Preparing Your Manuscript
Before you're ready to take your manuscript to the printer, be sure to read and revise it several times. Have someone else with good language skills read it, preferably someone who is familiar with genealogies, to catch errors you might have missed.

Your printing bill will be a lot cheaper if you can provide camera-ready copies of your book's pages, so that the printer doesn't have to do typesetting. Camera-ready means that each page of your manuscript is formatted just as you want it to appear in your book, including headings and page numbers.

The printer will take the material you supply and make films of it—in other words, a negative of your book's pages. These films are used to make plates, which transfer the image of the book pages to the blanket rollers of the printing press, and then onto the paper.

Make sure you have a high-quality copy of your manuscript, since any blotches or breaks in the typeface will show up in your final printed book. It's recommended that you use a laser printer and that the resolution be 300 dpi (dots per inch) or higher for the text, and 600 dpi or higher for illustrations.

If you can't provide camera-ready pages, the printer will take a typewritten copy of your manuscript, double-spaced with one-inch margins, and typeset it for you. You'll probably pay $5.00 or more per page for typesetting. If you can provide the printers with a computer disk containing your manuscript along with the printed copy, they will usually reduce the typesetting fee. Don't use any fancy formatting, such as bold headers, centering, or justified text. These add codes to your word-processing files that the typesetter will have to seek out and delete, adding more typesetting costs to the price of your book.

Decisions
Even if you don't intend to do your own camera-ready work, you need to plan your book's layout so that you know how many pages your book will have. The number of pages directly affects the printing price. A few things affect the layout: typeface and size of the font; photographs, maps, and illustrations; front and back matter; and the size of the book. The most common book sizes are 5 x 8 , 6 x 9, and 8 x 11. The larger the size, the more expensive the printing costs per book.

Choose a typeface for its readability. There are many to choose from, and your printer should provide you with examples of what's available. The size of the letters, measured in points, also affects the ease of reading. A 10-point typeface is common for books. It's about the same size as elite (12) pitch on a typewriter.

Photographs are reproduced in books using halftones. Small dots are used for light areas of the photograph and larger dots are used to create the impression of shading. You'll need permission from the copyright holder to include photos, drawings, and maps done by someone else in your book.

You'll also be the copyright holder for your book. After publication, you can register it with the U.S. Copyright Office for $20.00. The address is Register of Copyrights, Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20559.

When you're counting the pages of your book, remember to include the front and back matter. Front matter can include the title page, the copyright page, and table of contents. In the back will be the bibliography and, as all genealogies should have, a thorough index. You can do the indexing yourself or hire an indexer. Usually the indexer will work from a printed keyline, a proof of your book. The time it takes to index, then typeset and print the index, can add two to four weeks to your printing schedule. The going rate for indexing is $20.00 to $40.00 an hour, or $2.00 to $6.00 per page.

Try to arrange your book so that the number of pages will be a multiple of sixteen. Because of the printing process, sixteen pages are typically printed together on one large sheet that is then cut and folded to make your book pages. Each set of sixteen is called a signature. If your page amount varies too far from this standard, you may pay extra for running half-signatures, due to the decrease in printing efficiency. Book pages are typically printed on 50- or 60-pound paper.

Another decision you'll have to make concerns the cover of your book. Do you want hardback or softback? Soft, or paperback, is the less expensive way to go. Paperback covers can be coated on one side (called "C1S") for a glossy, more attractive look.

Paperbacks are usually perfect-bound, which means that the pages and cover are glued together and there will be a spine. Having a spine is an important consideration if your book becomes part of a library collection. You may also want to purchase a unique ISBN number for your book, so that it can be easily identified in library databases. ISBN numbers are purchased through R. R. Bowker Company, 121 Chanlon Road, New Providence, NJ 07974.

Other bindings for paperbacks include saddle-stitched (the pages are stapled together) or comb binding. Hardcover books are usually cloth-covered and can be either sewn or perfect-bound. Hardcover is more expensive, but lasts longer and adds to the retail value of the book.

Prices
Now we get to the bottom line. How much will printing your book cost? Self-publishing experts recommend getting as many as six price quotes from different printers, and, at the least, no fewer than three. You can request a quote by preparing a sheet about your book stating the number of pages, the cover type, the paper weight, the ink color, the dimensions, and whether you'll be providing camera-ready material.

Send this sheet to various printers and compare the quotes you receive. You might find printers in your local telephone book. You can also find advertisements for printers in magazines such as Writer's Digest, in genealogical newsletters, and over the Internet.

When comparing printers' quotes, make sure you know what is included in the price and what is extra. Will it cost extra to get proofs of your book? Is cover design included in the price? Quotes for a 400-page, 8 x 11 paperback can range from about $4.50 to $16.00 a book, depending on the printer, so check several printers before making the final decision.

To know what price you can afford to pay for printing, you must first estimate at what price you will be able to sell your book. The best way to do this is to look at ads in genealogy publications or book lists to check the prices of family histories similar in size to yours.

For purposes of price examples, we'll use quotes for an 8 x 11, softback, 400-page book. After looking at the prices of several genealogies, the average selling price for this size seems to be $51.00 per book. Four hundred pages is about average for a genealogy; also, it happens to be twenty-five signatures, making it an ideal amount for printing.

Production costs, including printing, indexing, shipping, and promotional costs, should be between one-fifth and one-eighth of your list price to help ensure you don't suffer a loss. Included in selling costs are the costs of advertising, shipping labels, packing slips, and boxes for shipping. This means that for your $51.00 selling price, the total cost of production should be between $6.38 and $10.20 per book.

The larger the "run," or amount of books printed, the lower the printing price per book. Small printing amounts—fewer than five thousand books—are called short runs.

According to publisher Patricia J. Bell, author of The Prepublishing Handbook, you can expect the average selling price of your book to be about 45 percent of the retail price. If you price your book at $51.00, you may only get $22.95 if you offer discounts for promotions and sell to libraries. You can see by the table (upper right) that the costs of production can quickly add up. According to the figures in the table, which are an average of quotes from different printers, to break even on the printing and post-production costs of 200 books, you would have to sell 97 books. This is without considering advertising costs. If you pay for typesetting, you'd have to sell 202, more than the amount printed, to break even.

To find your break-even point, divide the cost per book by the average selling price. The result is the percentage of books you would have to sell in order to break even. Use these formulas on the price quotes you get and ask yourself, could I sell 97 books? Or 202?

A lot of preparation must go into getting your book ready for the printers, and a lot of decisions have to be made. But when you hold the finished copy in your hands, all the attention to detail will have paid off.

Christine A. Reed is a freelance writer with experience working in the printing industry. Her articles have appeared previously in Ancestry and other national and regional publicatoins. Her Web site address is http://come.to/writerpage.