Richard Romano:  Hi, I’m Richard Romano from WhatTheyThink.com and we’re here at the Oce Wow Live Event in Boca Raton, Florida.  And we are talking with Jeremy Hess, who is the Director of Marketing for Gasch Printing.  Jeremy thanks for joining us.  

Jeremy Hess:  Thank you.  

Richard:  Now, tell us a little bit about Gasch Printing, where you’re located, who your customers are, and what types of work you do that kind of thing.  

Jeremy:  We’re a book printer located just south of Baltimore, Maryland.  We do short to medium run books; anywhere from 10 to 2,000 quantity.  Our main market is small to medium sized publishing companies as well as a lot of independent publishers as that’s a growing, growing market.  

Richard:  Now, independent, I assume you mean, self or vanity publishers?  

Jeremy:  Self-publishers, yeah.  People who come to us from either online, whether they have one title, some of them even have 10, 15 titles, but yet they’re not going through the traditional publishing route…  

Richard:  And you find that growing.  

Jeremy:  It’s growing dramatically.  I mean, people really would rather avoid going through the publishing companies that are taking all of their profits and cuts.  They’d rather go through, sell the book themselves, just get it printed through us and then they distribute it however they like.  

Richard:  Now, do you handle any of the back end stuff?  Some of the sales and distribution or is it just the printing and then they are in charge of doing whatever… 

Jeremy:  They handle all of the you know, distribution because they’ll have different models that the like, you know, but it is a growing market in terms of why somebody else do it when I can do it myself and therefore keep control of everything instead of having somebody else have control of the project.  

Richard:  And some of those official publishers that you work with, what type of markets do they tend to be in?  Is it scholarly or is it trade or… 

Jeremy:  Yeah, a lot of trade or scholarly, it’s a good mix of both, I think.  Obviously books are making an impact on things, but the printed book is still preferred by a lot of people, so I don’t see it going away any time soon.  

Richard:  And what types of equipment do you have?  

Jeremy:  We have Oce 10000 Plex, and we also have a Oce 7550, both black and white, both digital web presses.  

Richard:  And how do you find working with Oce?  

Jeremy:  Good.  I mean, we just purchased the CS10000 a few months ago and we purchased it for the specific reason of half tone quality.  The customers we were going after had to have the half tone quality.  We searched all around, compared all the different products in their class, in that category and the 10000 was by far the best one.  It was, for us, a no-brainer.  

Richard:  So what are your marketing plans for attracting new types of customers, those types of self-publishers that you’re trying to attract?  

Jeremy:  We have a big footprint online, people who are, you know, searching for printers obviously for the independent publishing market.  They really don’t have the contacts within the printing industry, so they’re just sort of Googling everything trying to find out who I can get to help me with this.  So, that’s a big part of it as well as, you know, word of mouth.  You’re an independent publishers and you’re an independent publisher, if you’ve done business with me and have had good success, then you’re going to tell your friend and he’s gonna tell their friend and so on and so forth.  

Richard:  do you have any like prepress challenges, I’m sure dealing with the vast rabble, you probably get all sort of strange file, not necessarily from professional designers.  

Jeremy:  It makes it tough, especially in this kind of market, in the independent publishing area where they don’t necessarily always know what they’re doing.  You sort of have to educate them along.  And it’s a learning process for them obviously, but it’s something for us, it’s worth doing.  You know, what I mean.  If I can take the time to help you out personally with your book and you know, make that a success, that’s very valuable to you that you may not get from a bigger printing company somewhere else.  

Richard:  Do you do any e-book work?  

Jeremy:  We do some.  It’s obviously a growing trend and we want to be a part of that, but it’s a very complicated and mess industry right now in terms of all the different devices, all different you know, screen sizes and formats and all that kind of stuff.  But obviously, people are looking to get into it more and more and so we’re trying to do the best we can to help them with that. 

Richard:  And you’re staying on top of all the different formats and stuff?  

Jeremy:  We try to.  It’s a challenging process.  

Richard:  Like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.  So now, what brought you to this even down here in Florida?  

Jeremy:  We were actually with Oce at a conference in New York and they asked me to come down and speak on a customer panel, but we’re also looking at the Canon 7010 Color Box because we’re in the market for a new color box also.  And it’s always good to meet with you know, the industry leaders in terms of keeping up on the markets and what’s happening.  

Richard:  So what of the specific takeaways from this that you’re gonna sort of bring back when you head back to Baltimore. 

Jeremy:  I think you always take back on what other people are doing.  It’s good to always stay informed on… because obviously it’s a huge complicated industry.  There’s so many different avenues within book printing that everyone’s doing it differently.  So it’s always good to know, what can I do better? What are they doing that’s worked?  What are they doing that’s not really worked and what’s sort of learned from all of that.    

Richard:  Great.  Well thank you very much.  

Jeremy:  I appreciate it, thank you.