I got the copies of vs. Monsters from the printer and the books look good. Nice printing job. The only odd thing is that each book includes 8 extra blank pages at the end.

For just under $400 I got:

101 -- 80 pages 5.5" x 8.5" perfect-bound, B&W cover
101 -- 40 pages 5.5" x 8.5" perfect-bound, B&W cover
UPS shipping to my house

http://www.quintinpublications.com/printing.html

I'll use these guys again. The link above shows their prices.

Many printers work in "signatures" of 16 pages to make trimming and binding easier. If a document is shorter than that, they'll pad it with blank pages, so that's probably why you have the extras.

I'm glad to hear things went well - I'll have to take a look at a few of them at GenCon.

Yeah Justin's right about Sigs. When I worked in-house for a computer books publisher, we'd check how many pages were left out of a sig and make the rest "notes" pages.

-Matt

Yes, I understand signatures. But 16x5 = 80 and my 80-page book has 88-pages now.

If it was only the 40-page book that had 8 extra it would be understandable.

I'll be sure to post here what I learn about these 8 pages.

Depending on the size of the pages the printer uses, and the size of the resulting book, the signatures can run (from my experience in educational publishing) anywhere from 4 pages per flat (as we called them) to 32 pages. I'm trying to figure out where the 88 came from myself (I'll let you know if I do).

Ahhh, the wonders of publishing....

Kerrie

Not likely, but could there be a stray carriage return in your document or a stray blank that you can't see which knocks the page count over 80 to 81? Then they'd have to do a 88 page run. They could have also goofed in editing/repaginating your document by accidentally inserting such a blank page.

I'm just making guesses. :)