Memoirs of the Self-Published: Part V - Printing
For printing, I had an advantage: my cousin has a print shop in Sacramento. Specifically, he's spent his career remanufacturing toner cartridges, and he has 100+ laser printers in his warehouse.
We ended up printing the manuscript on recycled toner cartridges. My cousin had many broken and defective cartridges laying around the warehouse, and what he'd do is take the working parts out of one and put them in another, and assemble a complete, working cartridge. We printed 65,000 pages this way (counting double-sided pages as 2 printed pages).
The tough part was getting my Adobe InDesign CS3 file of my manuscript (which I exported as a PDF) to print in double-sided booklet format. This was no easy feat for the 120-page manuscript. I'd done booklet printing before, but never on this scale and with this number of different printers. Here I am with my first successful print job:
There was an abundance of printers, but not many could do double-sided printing. Some took a USB connection from my Mac, but others needed drivers installed, and still others needed a USB to serial port adapter. And once I got the pagination correct, I needed to make sure the margins were right, the toner density correct, no toner bleed or smudges, and many other factors to make sure the page looked exactly as I had layed it out.
Printing took a total of 5 days across 2 weekends because of the constant quality control, I was only able to run at most 5 printers at a time. It required constant attention to make sure paper was being reloaded in the trays, that they were printing in the correct density, etc. I learned a lot about printing during this experience, and it was amazing to watch my cousin troubleshoot and fix any printer error on the spot. Run out of toner? No problem, he'd identify the make and model and refill the toner in his toner hood.
Chip not being recognized by a new printer? No problem, he'd pop out the motherboard from the toner cartridge and replace it with another one. He swapped mag rollers, plastic gears, and worked all kinds of toner magic.
We ended up printing the manuscript on recycled toner cartridges. My cousin had many broken and defective cartridges laying around the warehouse, and what he'd do is take the working parts out of one and put them in another, and assemble a complete, working cartridge. We printed 65,000 pages this way (counting double-sided pages as 2 printed pages).
The tough part was getting my Adobe InDesign CS3 file of my manuscript (which I exported as a PDF) to print in double-sided booklet format. This was no easy feat for the 120-page manuscript. I'd done booklet printing before, but never on this scale and with this number of different printers. Here I am with my first successful print job:
There was an abundance of printers, but not many could do double-sided printing. Some took a USB connection from my Mac, but others needed drivers installed, and still others needed a USB to serial port adapter. And once I got the pagination correct, I needed to make sure the margins were right, the toner density correct, no toner bleed or smudges, and many other factors to make sure the page looked exactly as I had layed it out.
Chip not being recognized by a new printer? No problem, he'd pop out the motherboard from the toner cartridge and replace it with another one. He swapped mag rollers, plastic gears, and worked all kinds of toner magic.
I was happy to head back to Berkeley with 32,000+ pages printed with recycled cartridges!
