Fiona Lowe Outback Romance; small communities, big hearts

©The Printing of a Book©

Ever wondered how a book is actually printed? I was fortunate to see my very first book, 'Pregnant on Arrival' go through the process from start to finish.

Here is the photo tour! Many thanks go to Craig Maher and all his staff at McPherson's Printing, Maryborough, Victoria who showed me around and answered all my questions :-) And to Sharon Arkell who came with me and chronicled the visit with all these great photos. Thanks, Sharon!!

The manuscript arrives by email from Harlequin and is loaded onto a template. A proof copy is printed out on a laser printer, cut to size, glued together and proofed. It looks just like a real book but without the cover..even has the advertisements in the back. Here I am holding a proof.

The next step is creating the aluminum template. This process takes about five minutes. The image of the words is burned into the aluminum on a machine that looks like a giant photocopier. Then the template goes through a liquid bath and then through a heater. The large template is then ready to go to the printing machine.

The large template goes into the printer and my book is printed in sets of two ..end to end onto paper from Tasmania. As the printing finishes the paper is neatly folded and then stacked onto a pellet ready to be transported by forklift to the binding room. It now looks like this.

Now these bundles are loaded onto the machine to start the binding process. This means the book is glued together and the cover is put on.

Here are the covers for Pregnant on Arrival.

Two covers are printed head to toe on one

sheet

The first step is the pages are sliced open, then the cover is glued on and folded over. Remember, two books are bound at once so for a short while they look like this.

The book then goes for a long ride on a conveyer belt so the glue can cool before the two books are cut in half and then the edges are guillotined neatly. This process is fully mechanised.

To recap, here is a photo showing the proof copy, the folded printed copies and then the fully bound finished copies.

The final step is done manually...the books are packed by hand into boxes and then shipped across Australia, to New Zealand, Hong Kong and Fiji.

And finally, I got to hold my book!

Fiona Lowe

Outback Romance