by Michael Winters

When you want to self-publish a zine or book, it's hard to find good information about how to get it done. We thought we'd share the steps we took to produce CUTS in hopes that it might make things a little easier for you if you're making a zine or small run photobook.

Many of my thoughts on this process are informed by Jorg Colberg's book Understanding Photobooks. That resource is super helpful for working through all of the steps involved from forming the book's concept all the way through marketing. For this post we'll just talk about the part of physically producing the book.

Even after I had the book concept pretty nailed down and the basic layout in mind, so many decisions needed to be made. I wanted the book to feel unique since I was only making a small number of copies, but I also didn't want it to be too expensive to make. I ended up deciding I wanted to produce CUTS pretty much on my own without outsourcing too much of it because I wanted to continue learning each step of the process for myself.

Printing: Inkjet on an Epson 3880

This decision to produce it in-house created some limitations though. Everything we print in-house for Material is by inkjet printers built primarily for fine art photo printing. I knew it would be a great way to make sure I got the print quality I wanted, but the downside it verrrrrrryyyy slow printing, and a lot of money tied up in paper and ink cost. The slowness of this method was what really convinced me to only do an edition of 25. It took a few full days of work just to run the sheets through the printer and the paper and ink cost was up somewhere between $10-15 per book.

Inside Paper: Red River Paper Double-sided Premium Matte for the photos. French Paper Co. Dur-O-Tone Newsprint Aged for the poem pages.

When printing with inkjet printers, an inkjet coated paper is needed to get good photo prints. There are very few double-sided papers made for inkjet printing, but the Red River paper worked pretty well. The surface is a lot like Epson's double-sided premium matte, but whereas the Epson double-sided paper comes only in 8.5x11", the Red River paper is available in larger sizes. I did have some issues with scuffing. The surface is pretty sensitive, especially where I had images with black backgrounds.

For the poem, I wanted it to work together with the pictures, but also to have its own space. I put it on newsprint and spread it out throughout the book to change up the flow.

COVER: Chip board, inkjet printed and laser cut.

I wanted the cover to be something other than just the same as the inside. I thought it would be cool to have the title, "CUTS," cut out of the cover, but I didn't know how to do that. Chris Bennett designed the text for me and letterpress Brad Vetter set me up to laser cut the covers at Firstbuild, a co-working maker space here in Louisville.

BINDING: Saddle-sewn with orange thread.

For the first book we produced, FALLS, we hand-sewed the binding with black thread. The black thread came in a box with orange and purple thread too, so I already had the orange thread on hand. I hate threading needles though, so I was thinking I'd probably just staple this project, but my friends that give me feedback regularly - Tim Robertson, Emil Handke, and Dave Harrity - all said it should be sewn, so I gave in and did the extra work. In the end, I'm glad I did.

It felt really great to finish this project in book form and to figure out each step of the process. As I'm writing this there are just a few copies of CUTS left available. They can be purchased here.