Firstly let me say "hello" to all of you; I am new here and I have come to you all for advice.

Summary of what I want to do:

It is a non-fiction text suitable for paramedics, police, doctors and supplementary hospital staff. It will be about 600 pages in length, of which one third of the b ook has to be in full colour. The subject matter is to do with gunshot wounds, especially the forensic and radiological aspects as pertain to the living patient.
Unfortunately for me the subject matter is very 'valuable' and I have had problems getting the appropriate professionals to peer-review my manuscript (which is almost finished) without having my material 'disseminated' in the field prematurely. I have decided to publish a draft review manuscript and have that peer-reviewed before approaching a large publisher to tackle the project formally.

I have read a little about POD publishing. I contacted a company called The London Press and I have established that it will cost me approximately £3500 in setup fees and £47 per book thereafter for this project. The main cost seems to be the £11 they charge to setup each colour page. The rest of the cost involves typesetting (which I don't think I can do by myself) and printing but fortunately there will be no design costs because I do my own graphics, including the cover.

My question is this: can anybody recommend The London Press? Has anyone used them? What are all my options, as a health professional who has not yet published anything, but has a huge manuscript that seems to be attracting a great deal of attention (some of it nefarious)?

I really appreciate any advice I can get.

Our self-publishing expert Richard Brown will, I'm sure, be able to give you some good advice and suggestions when he's back online in a day or two.

I have no personal experience of The London Press but I have just used Antony Rowe (tanya.langridge@antonyrowe.co.uk) to scan and completely reproduce (colour cover and all) a 500 page non-fiction book with many black and white illustrations. The set up cost (i.e. in this case the scanning process) cost about £160. Each paperback POD volume costs me about £6.
Given that you are looking at a pre-publication format it may be worth looking at a scanned version which, of course, would not be typeset (My unreliable memory says that A. Rowe quoted about £500 for producing a typeset version of my book starting from the Word format). The colour illustrations will undoubtedly bump up the price but I'd definitely recommend contacting Tanya at A. Rowe before going much furher. I have just received the first batch of reproduced books and they are excellent.
Incidentally, one advantage that A. Rowe have is that they are in the very same building as Gardners Books - one of the main wholesalers. This makes the process of supply to retailers very simple!
Good luck with the project! If you have a moment, do let us know how you get on.
Richard.

Dear Richard and Anna

Thanks very much for the advice. I will look into Anthony Rowe.

At the moment I have one draft review manuscript that has been printed on a home inkjet printer. The source files are Word documents (one file per chapter, 11 finished so far) and 700 illustrations occupying 6gb of space on the hard-disk. These illustrations are in various file formats but for the purpose of creating a draft review manuscript I used ACDSee to print a 'contact sheet' of all the images, making sure that there were not more than six ganged images per page. The prints are high quality, from a photo printer.

When you say that I might be able to 'scan' my material do you mean that I would be giving the POD company my draft manuscript as it stands, printed from home, or do you mean something else? Most of the illustrations I have are digitally created or altered, so there are no hardcopy originals to be scanned. The only hardcopies I have are those that I can print. How does 'scanning' work?

Oops...just noticed that 'Antony' has no h...sorry

You're right in that if all the words and images are already available in your computer then, assuming that your imaging system is comptible with theirs, there would be nothing to scan. (I imagined that at least some of the illustrations were not digitalised).

Best to talk to A. Rowe about the options but if you want the work to be in standard book format then I'm sure it will have to be typeset. There may, though, be a way of producing a bound draft which will not be as neat as a book but which will achieve your goal of having a version which you can circulate to elicit feedback.

I'll be interested to hear what A. Rowe have to say.

Richard.

When I did the research, I took more than 1600 photographs on a digital camera. I have some X-ray films too, but I have already scanned them myself on an Epson 4870. All the other films in the research were digitized at the hospital from the lightboxes. The only other physical items I have are forensic samples such as bullets.

Antony Rowe: Tanya is away and Mark is handling her emails and giving me an estimate. I have sent him a sample chapter and three sample images so he can give me a quote on typesetting. The setup prices for a camera-ready file seem to be very similar to what The London Press quoted me. I am waiting to hear what he says when he sees my samples.

Brandon

Thanks for the further info. Please let us know the final outcome - I'm sure others will be interested.

Richard.

Last year, I went on an AWC one day course on self-publishing, held at Antony Rowe's place. It was very useful, with small numbers so plenty of chance to ask questions. Antony Rowe gave one of the talks, very professional and really knows his stuff, and there was a useful tour of the POD factory. The link below will take you to details of this year's courses (one in May and one in October); it costs £65 which is I think very reasonable.


http://www.gmp.co.uk/writers/workshops/programme.htm

Terry,

Many thanks for this - very interesting! It confirms my impression that the Antony Rowe company are good people to do business with.

Richard.

Thanks for the replies, everybody. I am still waiting for Mark at A.Rowe to get back to me. I am mindful that we are early into the year, so I am not expecting rapid email responses. I'll let you know what he says as soon as I have that information.

Greetings once again, everybody.
I have just received two lots of information: one from A.Rowe (via email) and one from The London Press (printed matter).

First A.Rowe:
They had a look at my sample chapter and images and they advised me that it would be expensive if A.Rowe setup the pictures in the prepress PDF file. The figure I have been quoted is a minimum of £5500, which does not include other costs. If I supply the camera-ready PDF, the cost will be half that.

London Press:
They sent me a sample of a book they have done and a colour plate so I can evaluate the quality of it. There is also a greyscale sample. They have asked me to return the samples. I'm not happy with the quality of the greyscale or the colour plate but if I was pressed to pick the greater of two evils I would say the greyscale worries me the most. There are also certain aspects of the communication I have had with The London Press which create a less than ideal impression of the company. They don't typeset in-house, and their production costs are higher than A.Rowe for my project.

I have two options now.

Option 1: I get the book typeset in South Africa. I have a contact there who can arrange this for me and I envisage that the cost to me will be significantly less than I would have paid here in the UK. I also trust this contact to find a suitable person to typeset this book. It doesn't require fancy setting, just plain paragraphs with pictures inserted where I have placed the captions. Perhaps an entry-level DTP operator who is one or two years out of school will welcome the chance to be paid a tidy sum, especially when you consider the exchange rate. When I have the PDF I will have to consider my next move carefully.

Option 2: I rethink the self-publishing option. This means that I will not be able to get the manuscript peer-reviewed by all the individuals I had hoped, and I would essentially have only a home-printed draft that I could get an opinion on, from a handful of individuals I can trust not to screw me over. The final work will not be as polished and I will have to find the right agent to get it published in the traditional manner. The advantages (as I see them) are the elimination of cost and the quality of offset printing. The big disadvantage is the loss of copyright. I don't perceive this book to be a money-earner so the reduced return is not an issue with me. It just makes things difficult if I want to expand on the case file or make an educational DVD on the subject.

What would you do if this was your project?

I can see why you have a problem in deciding! You said at the outset that you have had problems getting peer reviews of the material but it sounds now as though you can identify a 'handful of trustworthy individudals'.Without doing a detailed analysis of the issues, my more or less instant reaction is to go for the second option. If the book is going to be produced at all it is surely worthy of the highest quality of reproduction.

Richard.

Dear Richard

Yes, it seems if I want this peer-reviewed, I can't send it overseas. I am currently having it reviewed by a person who is right under my nose in London, so to speak. And when that person is finished I will have someobody else review it. It's a shame I can't get opinions from the best in the field, in SA, but that is my lot.

I don't have enough information about agents and publishing contracts to make a decision at the moment. I have not ruled out POD and I am waiting for some m ore information from SA before I continue.

What a delicate game this is.

Delicate indeed. Good luck with it all!

Richard.