Self Published Books Review: Mixam UK

I continue my hunt for the best self-published book maker and I think I have found the best for me. I have some earlier posts here and here about my odyssey of publishing Three Wood Lands my book on three Cambridgeshire woodlands. I started out with Blurb, the most obvious. They have a very nice 13x11 inch landscape hardcover. Other publisher like Lulu and Mixam seem to stop at A4 (8.3x11.7 inches) so if a large coffee table book is what you are after look to Blurb or Saar Digital. Still A4 is a great format. Blurb is basically pretty good quality and very high priced. 

Recently in Reddit I noticed someone in in the UK had recommended Mixam for a zine (magazine) publisher. Not having heard of them before I looked them up. They do a lot of different printing tasks including hard and soft cover books, zines, posters, flyers, cards, almost everything. They have a great way of quoting work with a series of drop down menus to select the size, number of pages, paper options, and volume to see exactly the cost. Unlike Blurb and Lulu they do not expect you to upload your content to see the final price. Very nice service. They do not have any tools to produce the photobook content unlike many other self-publishing houses. If this is your route to content creation then Mixam is not for you. If you are fluent in Word or InDesign or any other publishing package that lets you create PDFs though you may want to take a serious look here. 

Content Creation

My first self-published book on Blurb used their BookWright software. Blurb, Lulu, and Mixam all allow you to submit a PDF file for the content of the book. It needs to have the proper dimensions each printer specifies for their book formats. 

They all differ in the way that the cover is created though this too is submitted in PDF form. (I tend to use Photoshop Elements or Microsoft Publisher for covers as they have more flexibility where margins and text manipulation is not required.) For instance with Blurb (and Lulu) you can submit a single PDF for the cover separate from the internal pages. This is a single sheet with the front, back and spine. 

Example Covers for Blurb and Lulu

With Mixam they split the cover into three PDF images front, back, and spine. (Note that for the hardcover A4 book I made they do not have a cover template available and this caused me a lot of confusion initially. I used their A4 template but later learned this is only for the softcover version. Only when I submitted it for printing did I get an email informing me of the problem and after some back and forth I got the dimensions 337x250mm and 12x250mm for the spine. (The spine width is determined by the number of pages and weight of paper.) 

Front Cover

Back Cover

Spine

For a basic photobook you can supply individual pages with file names that have the corresponding filename. Mine has a mix to text and images so I prefer to supply a single document.

Basically you need to get to a PDF file with the dimensions they specify. They have templates for most of their products that help you get to the dimensions you need. I think most printers assume Adobe InDesign as the mainstream publishing. I use Microsoft Word. A career using it has left me fairly proficient and I have used Word to create this and other photobooks successfully. You set up the document to the dimension specified in the template then add appropriate margins and fill in the images and text. 

The front back and spine must have those words in the title so their SW can tell them apart. This is required but not sufficient to get this right. The page count of the main section must match exactly the number specified in the pull down menu on the website. Until I figured this out it was extremely confusing as their software would pick a normal page as the back cover even though I had loaded a file labeled back cover. The other publishing sites I have used knew the number of pages from the content. Once I sorted this out all was good.

You can then look at the online preview to ensure the whole thing flows as you expect as well as download a PDF of the final result to review. I did both. The result takes about a week to print and ship. 

Results

What I got back was the best I have seen. Comparable to Blurb in quality. The black and white images have no discernable color casts. I submitted the black and white images inside the book as RGB JPGs. The covers I specified to print as monochrome. Their service was great and helped me through my cover difficulties and even told me about a spelling error on the back cover (Editing is not part of their service!)

I would recommend them to anyone and indeed I ordered 10 more copies today. I could get 10 copies for about $80 more than a single Blurb copy. 

For a single copy I paid more than Lulu but got hardcover and better quality images. If you need to order more then the price gets much better. (I ordered 10 copies at £184.80 (shipping included) so about $24.00 each.) 

Attribute             Blurb                                                Lulu                                            Mixam

Size                      13"x11" (330 x 280 mm)               8.3" × 11.7" (210 × 297 mm)    8.3" × 11.7" (210 × 297 mm)

Cover                   Imagewrap Hardcover                   Softcover                                   Imagewrap Hardcover 

Pages                    90                                                   104                                            108

Paper                    Lustre Premium 100# (148gsm)     Coated White 80# (118gsm)    Satin 90# (130gsm)

Price                    US $147.87                                    US $19.03                                   £55.50 ($71 @1.3)

Shipping               US 11.99                                        US $4.47                                    £6.50 ($8.45 @1.3)