: Re: Publishing a book- Age I wouldn't really consider myself a great writer, but I enjoy it and if my family reads it, they quite like it as well. I've written 2 books before and love doing

@Annie587

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I'm interpreting your question to mean that you want to print one of your novels as a physical book. This is NOT about finding an agent and being discovered by a Big Publishing House®, but about creating a single, or a few, tangible books that can be given to friends and family so they can have the pleasure of reading your work in the medium it's intended.

If the goal is to create a physical book, it can be accomplished without spending a huge amount of money, called one-off book printing, or sometimes Print on Demand (same idea, marketed to authors who want to sell).

Before you look at prices on the many websites that promise this service, be cautious. There are often hidden fees and "gotcha" marketing, and the quality is not all the same. If you go to a local printing shop, they will also perform this service and you can touch samples and talk to someone in-person. It will cost more than online, but you will have a better idea what you are getting for your money.

Amazon and Apple both have expensive versions of one-off printing, too.

Price will include a set-up fee, and then a cost-per-book, plus shipping/delivery. How much each book costs depends on some hard facts like: the actual size of the book, how many pages, the quality of the paper, what type of cover it has – they usually have 2 or 3 choices for each option. To save money, and maybe just to have control over how your novel looks on the page, most will have a template for you to download and format your novel to their specs in Word or as a PDF, etc.

The cost-per-book goes down as you buy more of them and there may be a minimum number (10-25) you have to buy, but at a certain amount (100+) one-off books become too expensive to make. The next tier is to bulk-publish, which means you are printing more like 1000 to 2500 books at a time. The reason the price break suddenly jumps from under 100 books to over 1000 is the lower cost of industrial printing.

There is no age restriction to using print services. However, if you want to sell the books, that is a different story. Books for sale are required to have an ISBN number (a barcode) which costs money to register. And you will be giving retailers (iBooks, Amazon, JoeSchmo, etc) banking information to get paid. There may be laws, or they may have rules that restrict minors.

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