Once I had put together The Stork, I needed a place to get it printed. For the trial run, I used Kinko’s/FedEx Office. Fantastic results in less than a day, but very expensive. I wanted to be able to print it cheaply enough to sell for $1-$2 or just give away.

I had seen some of the work Guild of Blades had done for card games and they recently started doing Print on Demand books. Their prices were insanely low. So I called them up, discussed the job, and sent them the PDFs. I didn’t hear anything back. I called about a week later to follow up. They were really busy and hadn’t had a chance to review the files. This went on for two months. Finally, in January, they had time to look at my files.

They said everything looked okay, but they were concerned about the amount of red on the cover. The cover is a bright Netflix red with a black stripe and logo. The guy, Ryan, said he couldn’t guarantee that the red would be consistent from one book to another. Like the shade of red might be a little different on some. I told him that was fine as long as it wasn’t like pink or orange or something crazy. He said that maybe 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 books might have an issue. In any case, he said that if the job was messed up, they would fix it.

Guild of Blades does not offer a print proof, so you need to place a minimum order of 10 books to see if they are printed correctly. That was going to be my plan a few months ago, but it was now getting too close to the STAPLE Independent Media Expo and I didn’t think there would be time to do a proof run of 10 and then a full run of 100. Especially considering that they had a two week turnaround time. So, reassured that they would make sure nothing went wrong with the print run, I went ahead and ordered the 100 copies.

Two weeks went by and I hadn’t heard anything from them or received any kind of shipping notification. I called them up and Ryan said they hadn’t printed the books yet, but they would get to the job soon. A few days later I got notification that the books had shipped.

When the package arrived, I eagerly opened it. The first thing I noticed was that the books weren’t exactly a bright red. It was more of an orangish red. But this was overshadowed by the fact that the cover wasn’t even a solid color. It looked like they had been printed in an inkjet printer that was starting to run out of ink. The color faded to a light orange near the spine, around the back and then became a darker reddish orange again. The gradient looked like a woodgrain pattern, like the surface of a table. I could understand if it were that way on a few of the books, maybe the ones at the end of the print run. But every book had the identical pattern.

At first I thought maybe I could print new covers at Kinko’s and just replace the bad ones. But then I noticed that the books had been perfect bound instead of saddle stitched, like I had asked for. The book is only 12 pages. Guild of Blades doesn’t even offer perfect binding on books of less than 42 pages. You can *only* get saddle stitching.

I called them right away and got their receptionist who speaks broken English and never conveyed a sense that she understood what I was saying. Prior to this, any time I left a message with her, it was either ignored, undelivered, who knows. But no one ever called me back as she promised. She told me Ryan was busy with a customer, but he would call back later that evening. He never called me back. Days went by. I had to go out of town. I thought he might email me or leave a message. Nothing.

I wrote him an email describing what was wrong. Eventually, Ryan wrote back and reminded me that we had discussed that the printer could not guarantee consistent reds. I didn’t see how this related at all. In our discussion, he was talking about consistency between individual books, not across a single cover. And it *was* consistent in a way: the faded woodgrain texture was identical across all 100 books.

As for the binding, he said that they “experimented” (his exact word) with both saddle stitching and perfect binding and decided that the perfect binding looked better. I explained that this was not his decision to make. I had requested saddle stitching. The least he could have done was to ask me first, run the idea past me. The book needs to be saddle stitched so you can fold the back part of it, making it easier to write on. You can’t do this very well with perfect binding.

From that point on, all of my emails and voice messages went ignored. I reminded Ryan that he had pledged to fix anything wrong with the print job and to please hold himself to that. As time went on and I realized he wasn’t going to respond, I requested a refund. I could take the money and do a smaller run at Kinko’s, in time for the media expo. No response.

As I had paid via PayPal, I went to the site and opened a dispute there, requesting a refund. Finally, Ryan responded, if only to deny my claim and repeat his mantra of “we cannot guarantee consistent red”. He never once addressed the issue of the woodgrain-like texture or his decision to use perfect binding instead of saddle stitching. PayPal would not pursue the matter further as their policy “only applies to the shipment of goods. It does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods received.”

This same sort of thing happened with House of Whack and indeed every printer who has botched a job. It does not matter what they promise beforehand about fixing something wrong with a job. It has always been a lie. Once they have the money in hand, they will do nothing to fix mistakes.

So, at this stage, I cannot afford to do another run before the expo in two weeks. I’ll just have to show up with what I have. The interior looks decent and the contents are what is important, but I wish it had a more professional-looking presentation.