If your book is very short — more of a booklet or even a brochure — then you don’t need to think about breaking it up into chapters or writing an introduction and including an index. But if it’s a longer work with more than 50 pages or a few hundred pages, then chapters, an introduction, and an index make the organization more logical, the reading experience easier, and the overall sense of the professionalism and completion of the book much stronger. If you’ve taken our advice to build some sort of storytelling — a narrative structure — into your design, then the chapter divisions will most likely suggest themselves following the logic of the narrative grouping and chronology of the images. The introduction should be mostly about the book itself, its inspiration, background, and purpose. If you want to add short author and photographer biographies, too, why not? But they’re usually better positioned at the end of the book, between the end of the final chapter and the index. Indexing is a complicated business and is best left to a professional indexer. A quick search online will lead you to any number of reputable indexers whom you can engage for the project.
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With your first book, you have no idea (honestly...) how it will sell. So, your 500 copies may well take a long time to sell, and in the meantime, you have to keep them in a damp proof storage location, preferably not on metal shelving (winter cold creates damp that way), and other factors apply, too.
Nowadays, it's much easier and cheaper to use POD (Print On Demand) from a firm like Lightning Source, so you can just print 50 or so, and replenish how many or few when needed. This also improves your cashflow, loss of investment potential (of the bigger print run cost, and possibly storage costs). If you're in the UK, safe storage is often a hassle, USA may be easier.
However, back to first time author scenario - even regular publishers don't always know how a book is going to perform; a self-pub author is even more so the case - it's adviseable to do a POD run first, until you've worked out your marketing and distribution strategies, and established the need for a bigger print run.
Also, if your book is doing great, and you sell overseas as well, Lightning Source will print it and deliver it to order overseas, and USA as well. Their postal costs are much lower than yours, so that helps, too. Also, if they supply distributor orders, e.g. to a bookshop, there are times there's no postage cost to you at all. If you have an ISBN and sell via Amazon, they supply Amazon with no delivery cost to you, either.
Goto Heao Printing to know more.
Just please remember that I don't know your full details, e.g. how you intend to supply print-ready copy, and much more, so I can't say whether some other solution may be better for you - it may help to use say, CreateSpace. You need to really investigate self-pub in depth to establish your best route. I can only say, fairly confidently, that doing biggish initial print runs, especially in China without having good contacts first, is not likely your best option.
For the record, My wife and I have been in publishing (UK) for the last 18 years, and we do most of our books on POD with Lightning Source until we know how they perform. The days of big print runs as a norm are long gone.
If you haven't done so already, you could also read up a few self-pub books, there are many around that give you a lot of valuable information. When we started, I read up Dan Poynter's books, and I still tell people how useful his books and website are. Look him up on amazon.com, and his website is, if I recall right, [www.parapub.com]
I hope that helps some.
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