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BOOK PRODUCTION

Large Trade Publishers can afford the expensive equipment needed to print and bind books.  Small presses, literary presses, and university presses, however, cannot afford such equipment.  Neither can they afford the staff necessary to physically produce the books. Therefore, small presses either send their books out to larger publishers or to book manufacturers, who print the books under the name of the small press, for a fee.  The fees charged by book manufacturers depend on several things:

• quality of the book's paper (higher quality & weight = higher price)
   

• thickness of the book's paper (thicker paper = higher price)
   

• number of pages in book (greater number of pages = higher price)
   

• photographs inside book (photographs must be printed on a special, clay-covered paper = prohibitively higher price)
   

• physical dimensions of the book, i.e., Hardcover, Case Laminate/Hardcover, Trade Paper, Trade-Digest Paper, Mass-Market Paper
   

• cloth (hardback) or paper cover
   

• if paper cover, whether it will be laminated (increases price)
   

• if paper cover, whether it will be "no-roll", i.e., the cover will not curl up (increases price)
   

• number of colors in book's cover (more colors increase price since it raises number of passes through press)
   

• photographs on book's cover (greatly increases the price)
   

• the book's binding, e.g., stapled, spiral-bound, perfect-bound (squared spine) (perfect binding = higher price)
   

• whether the book's pages will be glued or sewn to the cover's spine (usually only applicable for cloth hardcover)
   

RockWay Press does high quality Trade paper format  of some of the finest writing available in the world today, and we get our books out to the bookstores through national distributors who handle the distribution of small press books.

Because we do Trade paperback format, our books can be submitted to national periodicals for review. Mass market paperbacks, which are printed on newspaper-print paper, are not eligible for review unless they are simultaneously published in hardback, and it is the hardback version that is submitted to the reviewers.

This is one way national reviewers attempt to "pre-determine" the quality of a book. Reviewers & periodical owners alike assume that because it costs more to manufacture and publish Trade paperbacks, the publishing house has more confidence in the author.

The reviewers also assume that the book's quality — especially the writing, story-telling, and character development — are of an appropriately higher quality and standards to warrant the higher cost of manufacturing the book.

Therefore, Trade paperbacks are eligible for review by national publications without simultaneous publication in hardcover.

RockWay Press sends its books out for review consideration to the top national publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews,  and Publishers Weekly.

We produce high quality books, with heavier paper so there is no "bleed-through" of ink from the other side, with quality  4-color no-roll laminated covers, and with perfect binding (squared spines).

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