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 US...