You've done it. You've spent hours refining your manuscript, agonizing over every word, sentence, and page break. You've chosen gorgeous cover art that perfectly reflects your vision and style. You're ready to hold your book firmly in your hands as a testament to your achievement. But before you can crack open that freshly printed book and enjoy that new-ink smell, there's a stage you can't overlook: prepress.
Think of prepress as the dress rehearsal before opening night. When everything goes right at this stage, the end result will be flawless. If you skip this process altogether, you could end up with misaligned text, washed-out colors, or worse, leading to a sloppy book launch and an even sloppier first impression of the finished product that you've worked so hard to perfect.
The good news is that OnPress Book Printing makes the prepress process fast, easy, and smooth. Here's what to expect when you work with us during the prepress process for book printing.
Prepress for book printing: not just boring tech stuff
Picture yourself standing in a bookstore. You pick up a book and notice that the cover looks kind of dull. The spine text is too thin to read well. The margins are set in a way that reads awkwardly. Inside, some of the images are pixelated and blurry. Now, imagine another book, with sharp cover art, crisp text, vibrant illustrations inside, and everything aligned perfectly. The second book looks and reads professionally. It feels like it was printed for a major publishing house. The first feels like it was hashed together on someone's inkjet.
That's the kind of difference that prepress can make. It's that extra behind-the-scenes polish that takes your work from manuscript to masterpiece. Knowing what happens during the prepress process for book printing helps you avoid common pitfalls that scream “amateur” and let you sidestep being blindsided by delays and corrections before your big launch.
Get to know the stages of the prepress process
Although every book printer is different, the professionals at OnPress Book Printing have been decades of experience crafting books of all sizes, styles, and genres. Trends have come and gone, but our commitment to pristine, bookshelf-quality books has never wavered. Here's what to know when it comes to the prepress process and getting your book printed:
Preparing your files and using templates
The first step in the prepress process is getting your files ready. That means making sure your interior pages, cover, spine, and so on all match our print templates. You can get these templates via the Project Center.
Each template includes
- The right trim size (the final size after cutting) and bleed (the extra image or background that goes past the trim edge). We require a 0.125” bleed on all sides for full-bleed elements.
- Margins or defined safe zones so that text or important design elements aren't too close to the edges.
- A cover template that includes the front, back, and spine. The spine needs to match what the template calls for based on page count and paper thickness.
Make sure your template is designed for single pages, not spreads, when it comes to the interior. That means each page is its own file.
Checking image, color, and resolution standards
Image color and resolution standards are one of the most confusing parts to get right if you go into the prepress process unprepared. Your files will need to be in CMYK format, not RGB. It's possible to convert them but that may change how the colors look.
Use true black for crisp dark text or graphics, not registration black, which has hints of cyan, magenta and yellow and can cause problems with printing. Make sure all of your images, including the cover and illustrations, are at least 300 DPI (or PPI). If they're too low resolution, they'll look pixelated, blurry and washed out.
Reviewing fonts, text, and embedding
Fonts can be sneaky troublemakers if you're not prepared. For example, if the system printing your book doesn't have the font you used, it will substitute its next best guess, which could be wildly different than what you imagined. The end result? Weird spacing, style changes, or missing characters replaced by odd glyphs.
For the best possible results, embed your fonts into the PDF itself or convert to outlines. Make sure your PDF is clean: no annotations, no comments, and no sticky notes left in Acrobat or other PDF editors as these can create artifacts or problems during the prepress review.
Verifying spine design and layout details
If you're printing a hardcover book or a softcover with considerable pages, the spine is visible, and you don't want to treat it like an afterthought. The template you use will tell you your spine width based on page count and paper stock. The spine isn't the place to try out fancy scripts. If anything, keep it plain, simple and easy to read on store shelves, and add in plenty of breathing room around the text and design elements.
Prepress review and proofing quality check
At OnPress Book Printing, we include a complimentary prepress digital review with every order. That means our team checks for things like color mode problems, missing bleed, unembedded fonts, image resolution issues, and so on. You can see a proof either as a hard copy (which costs more) or as a PDF. We recommend getting a hard copy proof, as there's nothing quite like finally holding your book in your hands and seeing it up close and personal!
Final approval and send to print!
Once everything is approved, we move on to production. Your files must be exactly as you've approved them. We take over from here, making sure printing, binding, lamination (if chosen), trimming, and cover finishing look phenomenal. Our turnaround time is also second to none, with novels ready in as little as 2 business days for small runs.
Get started today with your free estimate on our website!