Can you recommend a professional for doing layout for Print on Demand?

November 7, 2021 1:11 PM

Looking for recommendations of a layout/design pro or company, please! I’m in the U.K. and need to make a print on demand book. Next month, ideally. It will consist of thirty short poems and thirty images, which already exist and have fixed dimensions.

I need this turned into something that I can set up on one of those print on demand sites. The book can be simple but needs to look visually *good*! I am looking for a good designer/layouter (and a good PoD service!) I can pay the going rate but don’t want to break the bank. Thank you!

posted by The Last Sockpuppet to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

I would look for someone on Reedsy. I know of it from coworkers in the publishing industry. You ought to be able to find someone with the right skillset for a reasonable rate.
posted by (Over) Thinking at 5:03 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Email the course leader on one of the publishing MAs in the UK. Explain what you need and ask them to recommend any former students that are now freelancing.

You should get someone competent, well trained and charging reasonable rates.
posted by einekleine at 10:39 PM on November 7, 2021

I'm a former prepress guy/typesetter, but I'm not your prepress guy/typesetter. I just made a very similar book for ms scruss. I did it in Word with some stylesheets, and it looks decent. That's partly so ms scruss could stick with the workflow she knows, and partly because I know what I'm doing with stylesheets. The same workflow produces a decent epub from the Word source as the PDF that went to press.

PoD is usually lower-end textbook quality, and is almost invariably black and white laser printed at 1200 dpi. We couldn't find colour PoD in Canada at a price that was better than our local digital print shop. The printing ending up being incredibly expensive (roughly $40/copy) but we're both happy how it turned out.
posted by scruss at 5:37 AM on November 8, 2021