Two tips for those who want to print some copies of their self-published novel
If you've entered the world of self-publishing and have released your novel online as an e-book but would also like to print up a few hard copies to give to your friends and family to have as keepsakes or to sell, the advice here should be helpful.
Don't attempt to do the bookbinding yourself
There are many bookbinding tutorials, as well as DIY bookbinding kits available. However, you should have this done professionally by a printing company, rather than attempt to bind your own books yourself. Bookbinding is an art that requires at least a few months to become reasonably competent at and many years to excel at. As such, any hard copies of your novel that you try to make on your own are likely to be quite poor with weak spines and pages that don't sit neatly on top of one another and which fall out when anyone turns them a bit too quickly.
If you want to sell the newly-bound books, then binding them yourself would be a disaster, as your customers would almost certainly request refunds before they've finished reading your novel. Likewise, if you want them to be keepsakes that you give to your family members, binding them yourself will probably mean that the books end up falling apart and having to be thrown away, instead of being stored amongst the classics on your loved ones' bookshelves for the rest of their lives. In short, the binding work must be done by professionals so that your books stand the test of time.
Find a printing business that provides both printing and bookbinding services
If there is a printing business nearby who is running a special offer on their printing services, but they don't provide bookbinding services, it is best to give them a miss, even if taking advantage of this offer might save you money. The reason for this is as follows; if you need to transport the printed pages of your novel from this printing shop to another one that binds books, there is a good chance that these pages might not all make it to the second shop in one piece.
For example, if your novel is three hundred pages long and you need twenty copies of it, there is a chance that a few of these many pages might get lost, get creased or have some liquid spilt on them during the journey. If you don't realise that there are pages that have gone missing when you hand them over to the bookbinder, you might end up creating hardcopies that are missing crucial pages, without which your novel won't make sense. By having both the printing and the binding done in one shop, there will be far less chance of anything like this happening.
Reach out to a local bookbinding service to get more information.
