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Buying a simple inkjet printer is easy, and cheap, and you can do it just about anywhere. But almost as soon as you open it things start to go downhill. Quality decreases rapidly, most printers run into hardware or software glitches, and you run out of ink quickly—ink that is extremely expensive to replace.

In fact, have you ever questioned why ink is so expensive to replace? After all, it’s just 10 to 20 milliliters of colored fluid. You should be able to get such a small amount of that type of liquid for a song—like motor oil or even gasoline which also have complex formulations.

HP justifies the markup by claiming that they spend over a billion dollars a year on research and development to make ink that is extremely high tech and that works with virtually no hiccups, in contrast to cheaper third parity inks which may fall anywhere along the quality curve.

“These liquids are completely different from a technology standpoint,” said Thom Brown, marketing manager at HP, in a Computerworld story.

So why not just write the volume of ink on each individual cartridge to help consumers decide what cartridge is the best value, what they get the most of for their money? According to Brown this would only confuse the customer as “Each system has a different way it uses ink or the drop size is different. If you looked strictly at volume you wouldn’t see those differences and it would be confusing to the customers.”

The simple fact is that ink is expensive in part because printers are cheap, and because once you have a printer you are locked in to purchasing that particular cartridge. Fortunately third party internet sites and other sources are offering some measure of competition to suppress prices and benefit the consumer. 

Office supply officers for companies need to be aware that old scams are resurfacing to take advantage of many company and corporate austerity measures. These office supply scams basically involve your company being tricked into paying for goods that you did not order, and the supplies commonly include paper, maintenance supplies, advertising, or (most of all) Laser Toner Cartridge supply.

The scammers make the approach typically with a phone call, claiming to e your regular supplier and offering a ‘special’ or ‘one time only’ sale on supplies that you typically buy. Of course these are not your regular suppliers and the sales that they advertise typically involve overpriced items of poor quality.

The scammers will attempt to collect a few details from you, such as what brand printer you use, who is your office manager, whose name goes on the invoice and so on. This fact finding endeavors to collect all the information they need to send you product that looks like it belongs with an invoice that might pass a casual once over as it would contain all the correct information. If the invoice is paid the products start coming regularly and begin to leach funds from your company.

Other tactics that you may encounter may include: cold invoices for services that were not ordered, addressed to an employee. Calls from someone lying and claiming to be a regular supplier and who states that you have ordered these supplies before. Cold calls to employees offering a free gift that, when it arrives, comes with goods that were NOT requested and an invoice. A shipment of goods followed shortly after with an invoice claiming that you have not completed payment.

Since the recession many of these scams are focusing on how much money the products can save or new toner or ink formulas that last longer. Companies looking to save on office supply costs are more likely to be drawn in by these promises. Fortunately, defense is fairly easy.

The Federal Government officially states that any products sent to a company that were not ordered may be treated as a gift, no payment should be sent. However this may still be risky as the products that arrive may be low quality, low enough to damage printer heads or cause paper jams. Train your employees to use common sense and recognize scams. No employee should ever give out or clarify information about your company unless they know what that information will be used for. Have a policy against business proposal agreements made over the phone—always receive propositions or offers in writing. Limit the number of people who are authorized to make orders or pay invoices and train them to recognize common office supply scams and to know your regular suppliers well as well as what your typical products look like and when they are supposed to arrive.

These scams can be costly and exhausting if companies are brought in. After false sales have been made for a while many scammers will become aggressive if payments stop, calling in and objecting, harassing individuals over the phone in an attempt to collect. Report these numbers to the government or check online to see if they have a history recorded.

When ordering toner make sure that you know the company ahead of time and that they have a reputation that is positive and goes back several years. Ordering Oem toner is your best bet as this toner, created by the same company as makes your printer, is specially formulated to work better and longer and to add years of functionality to your printer. This is especially important with large laserjet printers that create large volumes of text very quickly. Poor quality toner will melt unevenly in the heating element which may cause bubbling or may stain or drip on the inside of your printer, possibly destroying several thousand dollars of equipment. Other devices, such as smaller Dell or HP inkjet printers may also be damaged or print with poor quality when non OEM ink cartridges are used. Reputable online sellers, however, should provide high quality cartridges that will not damage your printers, at prices much more competitive than the printer manufacturer’s homepage.

Also make sure that you keep an eye on the rate that your cartridges are used and the rate that they are replaced. Busy companies, schools, or hospitals often lose track of their printing supply and as a result some employees have taken to skimming cartridges off the top and selling them online, making hundreds of dollars a month in some instances. 

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They prey on writers who have failed to obtain traditional publishing gigs and basically trick the individuals into buying large amounts of books that then never sell out. They don’t have any selection criteria, they don’t read your book, they don’t edit it, and they certainly don’t sell it. Avoid them. Stick to the companies who basically just make a book for you and provide tools on the side (professional copyediting, though I cant speak for the quality that comes out, graphic design, etc…) or who offer to keep your file online so that individuals can buy copies from them, and they pass royalties along (createspace.com by Amazon is one possibility).

If you are looking for a less official binding, most shipping companies like UPS or FEDEX offer services where you can have large printing jobs done quickly and then have them bound. There is, of course, no graphic design service or copyediting, but the job is cheap and fast and it works.

Not to say that no one is published officially—but it is extremely rare and at some point you just want to see your work in print, and going to a self publisher or a company to have your work printed is not a sign of defeat. A work of writing is a victory, one that you can share with your family and friends for years to come, and you should be proud of it.

This blog will, first of all, not deal with methods to reach out to traditional publishers for one simple reason: to do so would be paramount to attempting to write a blog post about how to win the lottery. The odds are against you, your time is better spent doing something else than sending in countless manuscripts which aren’t going to be read, sorry to say. Generally speaking you need an agent to have a shot at getting published, and to get an agent you need to be published.

Now, more feasible options.

You want to avoid going and grabbing your home inkjet or laserjet printer and trying to actually make your own book. There is exciting technology in the works to allow home or office printers to print efficient paperback books. But that is still a long way off and using your printers that way will simply burn through ink and toner without giving you a good product. By all means feel free to turn you settings down and print out a copy for editing, but not for the finished project.

Next you could consider a print on demand service. Digital printing has come a very long way and some of the applications are great. These companies, which you can find online, take your data files and literally just print out a book for you. Most are paperback and the quality is decent. But be careful. Some of these companies, the ones who act like they have some sort of selection process or who make you buy bulk books which they will sell for you, these are scam sites. 

If you are thinking about choosing a solid ink printer for your office, you should be aware of the cost first of all. While they have come down in prices since the initial model, at ten thousand US dollars in 1991, the printers still run reasonably expensive rates compared to normal laser toner printers. But the advantages are there.

As far as quality goes most consider solid ink printers to be among the best out there. According to one solid printer ink review “Due to the way solid ink printers put the ink onto the page, print quality is considered to be excellent with lively colors. Excellent results can be achieved with low-quality stock, as the wax covers the stock with a glossy surface.”

There are downsides. Unless you plan on leaving your printer in sleep mode, instead of turning it off, you are constantly going to cool down the portion of ink kept above its freezing point in the print head. This will result in that amount of ink being cleaned and drained down into a used in reservoir where it must be cleaned and disposed of on occasion.  

Thus, although solid ink printers are typically more efficient, they actually waste much more ink when you constantly turn them off and on again, making them better for situations where they almost never lose power, such as hospitals or round the clock office situations.

But rest assured, if you do invest in a solid ink printer, the performance should exceed your expectations. 

Laser printer toner is not exactly an area that people expect to see a ton of technological advancement in, but the people at Xerox have been setting the printing world abuzz this year with the development of a new Xerox 6360 toner that is reputed to be significantly more environmentally friendly and produces better image quality at the same time.  In the world of toner research and development that is akin to introducing the lightbulb into an industry still cluttered with gas lamps.

Xerox already has a well deserved reputation for developing some of the most innovative ink and toner products on the marketplace.  After acquiring the Phaser brand from Tektronix in 2000 Xerox became the sole producer of solid ink based printers.  These printers have earned a reputation for producing high quality graphic images due to the the wax-like ink that they use while still saving consumers money on the cost of the ink.  Solid ink printers are also well known as being the most environmentally friendly printing option on regular consumer market, since these printers emit no ozone during printing and use no plastic cartridges that get discarded after they run out of ink or toner.  Now, with the development of the new Emulsion Aggregation Toner Xerox is able to lay claim to manufacturing two of the most innovative and environmentally friendly inks in the world today.

Emulsion Aggregation Toner is a chemical toner that is prepared using the emulsion aggregation process from which the name is derived.  This process is used to grow very small uniformly shaped and sized particles from smaller toner components in a laboratory.  Or, to say it in English, the scientists behind Emulsion Aggregation Toner (EA toner) build the powder through using nanoparticles and a chemical process to increase their size.  The researchers behind the new Xerox toner created a liquid material that resembles regular house paint and then added additional ingredients, such as pigments and wax, before setting it all out to dry.  The liquid bonded all the ingredients together as it dried up, creating a very fine powder that can be used in a toner cartridge.

By comparison, traditional toner is created by melting a plastic polymer with a colored pigment in it, letting it solidify into a slab, and then grinding into the dust that is used in laser printers.  This process creates very small but irregular shaped particles that we know as toner.  This process also uses up a fair amount of energy in grinding the polymer slab down into the dust particles your printer needs, and since those particles are irregularly shaped the printer also uses excess amounts of ink to make a shape closely approximating the original image to be printed.

EA toner solves those issues.  First, since all of the particles are both smaller than regular toner and uniformly spherical, they are able to create a much sharper image than the larger irregular shaped toner particles created by grinding down a polymer chunk, sharper on the scale of what is capable with xerox 8560 ink.  And since the smaller particles create a sharper image, less toner is ultimately used in the printing process.  Secondly, since the particles are created simply by letting the original mixture dry out up to 30% less electricity is used in the manufacturing process, providing environmental and cost cutting benefits to the process.

However the original researchers discovered a problem with the new miracle toner: in order for this to be viable as a product it needed to be mass produced, yet the scaling process for mass production actually resulted in changing the chemical properties of one of the necessary precursor materials, halting the mass production of EA toner.  A new pair of researchers were able to address this problem and alter the scaling process in order to account for the chemical change and thereby allow the EA toner to be manufactured en masse.  As a result all of the researchers on the team were awarded with the American Chemical Society Award for Team Innovation.

The white paper detailing this new Xerox toner breaks all this down into three advantages for the consumer: 1) sharper image quality and text, 2) higher printer reliability resulting in lower service costs, and 3) faster warm up time for the printer.  The faster warm up time is due to having a toner that is always ready to print and no longer needs to use an oiled fuser like traditional toners.  As a result all industrial Xerox toner printers are now being designed to work with EA toner, and it can soon be expected to have a significant impact on the personal consumption market as well. Similar advancments are also being made in the feild of xerox ink (such as xerox 8400 ink).  In one fell swoop Xerox has changed the game with toner technology, both reducing the severe environmental impact that toner cartridges have on the planet and creating a cheaper and better product at the same time.

Solid ink printing was invented by Tektronix first and later by Xerox after they purchased the company. The technology is cutting edge as far as printing goes and avoids normal printer ink or toner cartridges, instead utilizing literally globs of solid ink in the colors that are required. These ink packets are waxy, nontoxic, and you can even hold them in your hand. No cartridges to throw away afterwards.

The mechanism is similar to offset printing, and the solid ink is heated and the melted portion introduced into the print head where it is applied to the paper and cools. Solid ink, because the process is similar and the waxy material more versatile, can actually be used on a variety of papers making it perfect for publishing or comic book applications. And the chemical composition of the ink also makes it possible for the colors contained in the ink to appear much brighter and more vibrant than other methods of printing.  

Of course, as with everything there are downsides. The cost of the printers is one, as is the scarcity of third party supplies used to print more cheaply. The printers also, while generating very little waste normally, run through a lot of unused toner if they constantly lose power, making them only feasible for environments with regular printing requirements. Also solid ink printing requires a long warm up time, the printers need several minutes before they are ready to print the first page.

And be careful if you print too much onto a single page as more there is applied to the page the easier it is to rub the ink off. 

To be a professional writer you are also going to need your own webpage. Don’t expect that people will find you on searches, however, at least at first. Rather include your address on emails (get an email address through the site) and on your cards. This will give you a place to upload your portfolio for view by perspective clients and will give you background so that they know you are for real. Feel free to upload your resume and a bio as well. If you do put a portfolio on make sure the that the files are uploaded in PDF form as this makes them slightly harder to copy, and it will make the files non-searchable so that the search engines do not penalize you for ‘copying’ any of the text that you wrote for former clients that is currently online.

Print nice copies of your resume on nice paper for clients. Do it.

Software does create a problem. You will need a better program than WordPad certainly, but there are varieties of programs for Linux, Apple, Microsoft, and independent platforms. Writers will often swear by programs you have never heard of before, but the standard is to simply use Word by Microsoft. Adobe Illustrator may be necessary if you are preparing book pages, and Microsoft also has a program called Microsoft Publisher which does many of the same thing (though, many would argue, not as well).

Writing isn’t about the hardware of course, make sure to read, to watch the industry, and to always be on the lookouts for referrals and new clients. You an make it, hang in there.

Just be aware of how much ink and toner costs these days and factor that into your plans.

Of course writers can always head down to their local shipping company and order bound books or large qualities of printed materials if the need arises.

Writers also need something of extreme importance that is too often neglected: data backup. Modern computers practically demand that they back themselves up unless you turn that feature off. Unfortunately those backups are huge and non specific, all you really need to do is buy a flash drive (for small files) or a portable hard drive (for whole computer backups / movies / music) or, if  you would prefer, obtain free or paid for space on a cloud service such as Amazon cloud or one of many others. All of these options allow you to save all of your information to an external point so that if your computer crashes you can access it without losing everything. Just be sure you actually follow through and update your information once in a while.

Cloud backups are the newest option and one of the best for writers as saving files to the cloud allows you to pull samples down and show them off as needed on any computer, or use cloud printing. Look into it.

Business cards. You can order large numbers of cheap business cards very easily, have them printed off, and sent to you—and you should. Include your name, the name of your company (John Smith Content creation… if it is just yourself) and the fact that you are a professional freelance writer. Also include directions to your webpage.

On the other hand are increasingly popular ultra books. These are super thin and weigh a fraction of what the bigger laptops weigh. Plus they typically have quick start up times and good battery life. However they do cost more and leave out bulky options like disk drives or extra input slots, so you will need external drives in order to use them. Both of these options are great depending on your lifestyle and needs.

Other options include: netbooks. These ultra portable little computers are going out of fashion. Tiny computers were cool, but the miniature keyboards were difficult to type with (much less to make a living with as a writer) and they just weren’t as cool as tablets or smartphones.

Tablets. Tablets are a workable solution if you buy a case with built in keyboard. But the keys may still be cramped and the tablet often doesn’t have the work potential of a real computer. Just get a laptop.

Smartphones with keyboards. Possible—but just barely. While this option is super portable it is hard to type on a screen so small and hauling the keyboard everywhere eliminates the portability benefit.

Writers also need to think about what type of printer they need, and this all depends what they are doing. A small home office inkjet printer is adequate for those who mostly work from email and only occasionally need to print files off. A larger laserjet is for those who do have more substantial printing needs. All in one printers are good for those who have a lot of images they need to scan or copy—and that utility may even be worth some printing performance.