CafePress Basics - Publishing On Demand

This is a Historic document. As of July 2017, even though the CafePress site still had help documents explaining how to use their self publishing system, their self publishing wing was no longer functional. When I wrote them to ask about the help documents, they apologized and said they would be taking those down.

CafePress is well known for its self-publishing brilliance. You can print your own mugs, your own t-shirts, your own shopping bags, and much, much more. It's a great way to get your photos and kids artwork out to the world. It's no wonder that they have now offered the ability to self publish books. There is no up front fee in order to be in CafePress.

You set up an account, then in that account you set up a shop. Shops are meant to hold all sorts of things - mugs, bags, shirts, and so on. You add a product to it, and choose a book as that item. Note that unless you pay for a "premium shop" you can only have one book in your shop. Their standard shops only allow one item of a given type (book, cd, shirt, etc) in that shop.

They offer a number of standard sizes, along with standard ring-binding and perfect binding (i.e. standard book). For my test I went with the small mystery book / romance book size, the one you see in most stores. That is 4.18" x 6.88" in their system.

Their pricing is:

saddle
$4 + .045/pg
200 pgs book = $13
up to 52 pages
wire rings
$5 + .045/pg
200 pgs book = $14
1-500 pages
perfect bound
$7 + .03/pg
200 pgs book = $13
50 - 580 pages


Their sizes are:

4.18 x 6.88 (paperback) - wire, binding
5x8 (big paperbck) - all 3
6.625 x 10.25 (comic) "
7.5 x 9.25 manual "
8.5 x 11 (letter) - saddle / rings

Once you have those basics decided on, it's time to load the actual content of your book and cover into the system.

Loading Up the CafePress Book


Believing Your Eyes - a medieval romance at CafePress.com

CafePress Self Publishing Main Page
What Does It Cost to Ghostwrite a Book?
Lisa Shea's Editing Services
Lisa Shea Free Ebooks
Lisa Shea Full Library of Published Books

Getting Your Book Published
Writing Tips and Online Books

Lisa Shea Medieval Romance Novels
Online Literary Magazines

Lisa Shea Website Main Page