If I had to pick the most exciting half hour of my summer, I’d choose the thirty minutes I spent with Kyle Pressley, a man not my husband. We connected. He understood me. I was head over heels in love with his machine.
That would be the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), one of the newest production options for writers.
I heard about this nifty new way to create a book from a fellow writer. I Googled Espresso Book Machine locations. There were a few in California, the closest was the Sacramento Public Library. I broadened my search to Michigan, where I’d spend part of my summer, and found one in East Lansing. That sparked my thrilling relationship with Kyle Pressley. By e-mail he walked me through the basics.
EBM is a variation of print on demand. The big differences are that the set up fee for EBM was only $5, and I left with books in hand. The per book cost was $13.34 for 367 pages.
I handed Kyle my thumb drive (with two PDFs, one for the book, one for the cover). I watched as he hit a button and the machine copied and collated my pages, printed a cover, trimmed and bound it all into the first copy of my novel. The process took ten mminutes. It was like giving birth, without the pain. How cool is that?
EBM meets the needs of a special market. If you have a memoir meant for your family, a cookbook you want to share at Christmas, a family genealogy, or other small run project, it’s a great way to go. For poets, it’s the perfect way to create a professional-looking chapbook.
For the writer wishing to sell a million copies of a novel, EBM is still a valuable tool. You can print your work in progress cheaper than you can have copies made at Kinko’s. And it LOOKS like a book. You’ll get an emotional charge when you hold the finished product in your hands and see your WIP as a real book.
