: Experience Dealing with Chinese book printers? I've finished writing my first fiction novel and while it's being edited, and trying to nail down how I am going to get it printed. While Lightning

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With your first book, you have no idea (honestly...) how it will sell. So, your 500 copies may well take a long time to sell, and in the meantime, you have to keep them in a damp proof storage location, preferably not on metal shelving (winter cold creates damp that way), and other factors apply, too.

Nowadays, it's much easier and cheaper to use POD (Print On Demand) from a firm like Lightning Source, so you can just print 50 or so, and replenish how many or few when needed. This also improves your cashflow, loss of investment potential (of the bigger print run cost, and possibly storage costs). If you're in the UK, safe storage is often a hassle, USA may be easier.

However, back to first time author scenario - even regular publishers don't always know how a book is going to perform; a self-pub author is even more so the case - it's adviseable to do a POD run first, until you've worked out your marketing and distribution strategies, and established the need for a bigger print run.

Also, if your book is doing great, and you sell overseas as well, Lightning Source will print it and deliver it to order overseas, and USA as well. Their postal costs are much lower than yours, so that helps, too. Also, if they supply distributor orders, e.g. to a bookshop, there are times there's no postage cost to you at all. If you have an ISBN and sell via Amazon, they supply Amazon with no delivery cost to you, either.

Just please remember that I don't know your full details, e.g. how you intend to supply print-ready copy, and much more, so I can't say whether some other solution may be better for you - it may help to use say, CreateSpace. You need to really investigate self-pub in depth to establish your best route. I can only say, fairly confidently, that doing biggish initial print runs, especially in China without having good contacts first, is not likely your best option.

For the record, My wife and I have been in publishing (UK) for the last 18 years, and we do most of our books on POD with Lightning Source until we know how they perform. The days of big print runs as a norm are long gone.

If you haven't done so already, you could also read up a few self-pub books, there are many around that give you a lot of valuable information. When we started, I read up Dan Poynter's books, and I still tell people how useful his books and website are. Look him up on amazon.com, and his website is, if I recall right, [www.parapub.com]

I hope that helps some.

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