They didn’t for me. I printed editions with a different cover for my Kickstarter backers and only sold standard edition covers through DTF. Worked great.

Thanks, James. I read that a while back. Good stuff.

That makes sense. I’m actually doing my research now for CG’s first limited hardcover release ever, so for that side I’m a newb. And actually I think DTF is the cheapest I’ve seen so far.

True, Bart! I did notice that when I was costing things out. The trick for me was that I needed hardcovers, both for singles and omnibuses, for each Kickstarter. CreateSpace can do hardcovers if you ask, but the setup cost is around $200 per book. The extra $400 for going with them for each project made going with DTF the better choice. I suppose I could have gone with CreateSpace for the softcovers and DTF for the hardcovers, but I preferred to deal with a single provider to assure similar quality.

All that said, I have a line on a few high-quality hardcover printers I may use for my next project.

Of course Createspace doesn’t offer hardcovers so it would mean using 2 printers, but for smaller runs where each copy is almost $1 cheaper, it might be worth a bit of extra work.