Spot Colors and Printing with Lulu

[greyorm]

Well, I've finally decided to take the plunge and get a print version of ORX set-up and ready for sale. And yes, those of you at Forge Midwest saw what was basically a home-printed preview of that effort.

Unfortunately, I've run into a small snag: Orx uses a dark, reddish-colored ink for its main text, and a bold red ink for section headings. Now, I could just use a near-black for the main text without worry, but I'd prefer to keep the section headings colorfully intact (plus there may be some design issues if I try to print them as-is in grayscale, requiring a redesign and thus a delay).

The snag: Lulu does not appear to have a spot-color option and the price for the only alternative to B&W -- Full Color -- sends my production costs up ridiculous amounts.

Are there any POD printers like Lulu who do have a Spot Color option available? If not, what are my alternatives regarding printers and costs?

[Justin D. Jacobson]

As far as I know, any POD printer will treat a page with any color on it as a color page, which raises the per page cost from, e.g., 2c to 25c. So having just a little color on most pages doesn't seem very helpful. Perhaps you can redesign the layout to keep the splash of color but limit it to more of the color on fewer pages, e.g., chapter pages only.

[btrc]

I had the same problem with EABA, which in the pdf version uses liberal amounts of color text for emphasis of specific types (GM notes, alerts, examples, etc.). What I had to end up doing was to change all the colors to a dark grey, which is nice and readable, but is still different enough from solid black to stand out a bit. Not a perfect solution by any means, but it is workable.

For doing the actual change of color to grey in the layout file (Quark), I just went into the colors section and redefined my colors (like "red" is now 70% black instead of 100% red), so I did not have to actually change the layout in any way except to make sure everything fell within the Lulu print margins.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[MatrixGamer]

The cost increase is because they have to print the page on a color printer (probably a laser printer) so even if most of the page is B/W it costs about ten times as much in toner because black on color printers mixes in other colors.

You can get spot color like that using a digital duplicator if you use a second drum. I'm considering doing that in future games I make, but it means running pages multiple times through the printer. A bit labor intensive.

I like the suggestion to switch to gray. That is a solid move and easily done.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

[joepub]

Hey...

I've been on a magazine editing board for three years...

and as far as printing that magazine goes, spot colour is a reasonably cheap thing.
As long as they have only a single colour (in varying shades).

Then, that was a magazine, not an RPG. And the print run was about 5,000 (but was fairly low-budget printing. ie, newsprint).
So... I don't know if that is any help.

[greyorm]

Thanks for the info/advice, guys. I will try out the dark gray suggestion, since it has been used in print before, and requires the least amount of re-design.

I'll leave the thread open for now in case anyone has any other suggestions not already covered.

[timfire]

RPI will only charge you for the pages with color, unlike many POD printers like Lulu where its all or nothing. However, it's still about $0.25 a page, and that QUICKLY adds up.

If you're willing to take the plunge, you can get spot printing at a traditional printer, probably at a comparable price to B+W POD, but then you have to print 1000+ copies.

[Nathan P.]

It doesn't sound like this applies to your particular case, but if you need spot color on the same place on each page, like a colored border, there is a way to do it POD without printing full-color pages. For the perfectbound version of Timestream, my printer (Avalon Innovations) set up a one-color offset press run of the pages for the books with my one-color (blue) border, and then just printed right onto those. It only raised the cost by a couple cents per page, which, for a shorter book, will still leave you a pretty good margin on standard markup. It did markedly increase the turnaround time on the job, however.

Hope thats helpful to someone!