Who are 'the book patch' and should you print your book with them?

For most self-publishing authors, print on demand is the obvious choice for getting your book in print, and there is an abundance of services to choose from too. Of course, you have the big names like KDP publishing and IngramSpark, but another company called The Book Patch offers this service and could be an option for your book.

So, who are ‘The Book Patch’?

They are a US based print on demand company founded in 2009 by the bestselling author Victor Ostrovsky, they print and sell both eBooks and hardcopies of books too, like other POD services, when a book is ordered, it is then freshly printed and sent out to the customer.

What services do they offer?

Firstly, book printing, you can order as little as one copy of your book and there are no set up fees, however, there are handling fees which are calculated $1.50 for the first book plus $0.10 per book after (plus a 3% debit/credit card charge). The printing charge per book will vary upon how many pages your book is along with trim size and binding type.

An example of printing cost: 5x8 Perfect bound B&W interior with 250 pages = $10.50 printing cost(per book) or the same book but as 6x9 would have a printing cost of = $9.50. However, they do offer discounts for the larger the order, 100 – 249 copies 5%, 250 – 499 10%, 500 – 999 15% and 1,000 and above 20% discount on printing cost.

They offer two different bindings for books, the first is spiral, this is commonly used for workbooks, diaries, manuals, etc. and the second is perfect bound, this is what most paperbacks are bound as. The color options for print are:
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1. Black & White Interior / Color cover
2. Full Color Interior / Color cover

However, they do not currently offer bleeds for the interior, this essentially means that you cannot have images/illustrations/graphics/background colors inside which go right up to the edges of the page, any graphic elements inside should be at least 0.125in away from the edge.

Files for printed books

They accept one PDF for the interior and then either a bmp, gif, jpg, jpeg, png, tif or tiff for the cover (they won’t accept a PDF for the cover). Margins for the book’s interior will vary depending on page count:

• 0.5in for the inside margin for books up to 300 pages
• 0.625in inside margins for books 301 – 500 pages
• 0.75in inside margins for books 501 – 700 pages
• 0.875in inside margins for books 701 to 842 pages
• The outside margins are all a min of 0.5in

They do also offer templates to help you set up the book’s interior, these can be downloaded from their website.

eBooks on Book Patch

They also sell eBooks from their own bookstore, but you will need to have the printed version of your book uploaded already, and with each sale of your eBook they will take $1 (so your eBook can be no cheaper than $1).

They accept ePub, mobi and PDFs, although they do not offer a formatting service for eBooks, so you will need to have your files ready beforehand.
 
Distribution with The Book Patch

This seems to be a service which is geared towards true print on demand, your book is printed via their sister company (Wiltshire Press) and then shipped out to the customer, so you can dropship book orders to other sites like Amazon and of course your own website too, but this would be something you would need to set up yourself beforehand.

But if you want to order as little as 1 or as many as 1,000 for yourself and own distribution goals, they can offer this service (they currently don’t offer proof copies, so it would be worth just ordering the one to ensure you’re happy first).
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They offer a turnaround time of 2-3 business days to print your order and then to ship it to you on the 3rd or 4th business day.

ISBNs

You don’t necessarily need to have an ISBN to use Book Patch, however, they do give you the option of having one and also sell ISBNs to authors too, you can use your own 13-digit ISBN but they do not accept 10-digit ISBNs. They can also provide the barcodes for your ISBN to go upon the back page of your book cover.

Royalties

Any royalties you earn will get paid on the 15th of each month, however, they’ll come out when you accumulate a balance of $40 for an individual book, the royalties are paid per book as opposed to being per author, royalties earned get sent to you via a check in the mail.