Reduce Costs #1 - Print On Demand

Every day is a great day to reduce costs, while still providing the same value.

Print On Demand is often considered a misnomer. The very defininition of Print On Demand (POD) implies, "When you need it, Print it!" While true POD is not only possible, but indeed a great advantage with many projects, it is not always the best way to produce a project.

Let's start with a book example first: The old way of printing would require a setup, proofing, and minimum of 1,000 printed books to become anywhere near efficient. Printing digitally has allowed us to print much smaller quantities of books: say 20 - 100 efficiently. There is still some setup cost and spoilage in printing that requires an extra 3-5 books to be printed in order to get 1 good book done: trimming, laminating, and binding makready. For this reason, with a Perfect Bound/Paperback book you may be best off printing in very short quantities in order to maximize the setup efficieny: Orders of 5-20 books are a lot better than 1,000.

The next layer of cost that can be addressed is Administration. Employees require pay to get them to keep coming to work. Traditionally, the same amount of administrative work has been required for printing 5 books, or 5,000 books: A call to the Sales Guy, an Estimate Request to the Estimator, Writeup on Company Letterhead by the Sales Secratary, Entering and Tracking through Production by the Customer Service Representative. Wow! That's a lot of people! AGS has created an automated system that reduces this Admininistration to zero, thus making your project cheaper to print: From Concept to Shipping. Since the printing in this method is not always Print On Demand, its called: Virtual Publication Management (VPM for short).

VPM may be the perfect solution to get your book printed for promotion, test marketing, advance copies, or an older book for which demand has diminished, but not gone away.

e-mail me with the words, "Send me the Grid", and I will send you a link to check out costs to getting your book printed with great quality and "On the Cheap".