What Affects the Cost of Printing Booklets? Our Real UK Prices Explained

A 16 page A5 booklet costs £1.64 a copy when we print 100 of them. Order 250 and the very same booklet drops to £1.12. Those are our published prices, not a hopeful range, and they are the clearest way we know to explain the cost of printing booklets: put real figures on the table first, then show you which decision moves which number.

Since 2006 we've produced booklets out of Colchester, Essex, and the three below are the ones we publish prices for, exactly as they appear on our booklet page this October.

Everything below is measured against those three rows. Where we talk about a specification the table doesn't cover (500 copies, say, or a heavier paper, or a glued spine) we won't invent a figure for you. Put it through the Printed Project Builder instead. It takes 12 clicks and sends the exact price to your inbox on the same day.

Why 250 copies cost less per booklet than 100

Look at the 16 page A5 row. A hundred copies cost £164. Two and a half times as many cost £280, which is only about 1.7 times the money. Per copy, the price falls from £1.64 to £1.12, a saving of 52p on every booklet, or nearly a third.

The reason is the work that happens once per job, however many copies follow it. A real person checks your file. The press is set up and the colour settled before the first good sheet appears, and the stapler is adjusted to your size and thickness. That costs the same whether we then print 100 or 250, so the longer run spreads it thinner. Put another way, the extra 150 booklets add £116 to the bill. That's roughly 77p each, under half of what each of the first hundred cost.

The 32 page A5 booklet shows the same pattern with a gentler slope: £1.88 a copy at 100, £1.42 at 250. That's 46p off each one, close to a quarter. With twice the pages, more of each booklet's price is paper and press time that every copy needs, so a smaller share falls away as the run grows.

Where this really pays is a booklet you know you'll need again. Two separate runs of 100 of the 16 page version would cost £328; one run of 250 costs £280 and leaves you 50 spare. For the 32 page booklet the comparison is £376 against £355. The honest caveat: 250 booklets you never hand out are no bargain at all. Boxes of last year's price list in a cupboard help nobody.

Booklets grow four pages at a time

A single sheet, folded once, gives you four pages. That is how a stapled booklet is built. An A5 booklet is printed on A4 sheets, which are folded and stapled through the fold, so the page count always lands on a multiple of four. Our 16 page booklet is one cover sheet wrapped round three inside sheets. The 32 page version is that same cover round seven.

Doubling the pages from 16 to 32 does not double the price. At 100 copies the bill rises from £164 to £188, an increase of £24, which is 24p a copy for sixteen extra pages (one and a half pence a page). At 250 copies it climbs from £280 to £355, an extra £75 or 30p a copy. The checking and setup were already in the first number; the extra pages mostly add paper and press time.

The awkward moment is content that lands between fours. Thirty pages of material becomes a 32 page booklet with two blanks, and you pay for both of them. Before reaching for a filler page of stock photography, try going the other way. Merge two short sections, or move the credits inside the back cover, and see whether the whole thing settles at 28.

Moving from A5 to A4 adds £1.18 to every copy

Our two 32 page booklets share everything except size. At 100 copies the A5 costs £188 and the A4 costs £306, so the bigger page adds £118 to the job and £1.18 to each booklet. An A4 page has twice the area of an A5 page, yet the price rises by about 63%, not 100%. The file check and the setup don't double just because the paper did.

A4 earns its extra £1.18 when the content needs the room, such as full page photographs or a portfolio someone will study at a desk. For programmes and guides that live in a coat pocket or a tote bag, A5 is easier to hold and read.

One comparison worth keeping in mind: £355 buys 250 of the A5 version, only £49 more than 100 copies of the A4 one. For close to the same budget you get 150 more booklets. If you're still torn, our booklet page puts the A5 and A4 versions next to each other, and the builder will price A4 at 250 for you since we don't publish that figure.

Silk at 130gsm is the middle road for inside pages

All three priced booklets use 130gsm silk inside and 300gsm silk on the cover. Inside pages on our booklets run from 100 to 170gsm, and for a thick cover we offer 300 or 350gsm, so the table sits near the middle of the inside range and on the lighter of those two covers.

Silk is a smooth paper with a soft sheen. Photographs hold their colour on it and body text stays comfortable to read, which is why it's the stock in every row of that table. Gloss pushes colour harder and suits image led work. Uncoated has a natural, slightly toothy feel that suits text heavy booklets and anything people will write on. Each of those, and each step up in weight, changes your price by an amount we would rather you saw than guessed, so try them in the builder.

Weight is about feel as much as money. A heavier inside sheet makes a booklet feel more substantial in the hand, but on a fat stapled booklet it also adds bounce, the way the middle pages spring open around the staples. A lighter sheet lies flatter. Ask and we'll mail out sample sheets free of charge, so the stocks are in your hands before you commit, and our guide to paper choices explains each stock in more detail.

Matt lamination is already in the price, and it stops the cover cracking

Every price in the table includes matt lamination on the cover, and we include it because of what happens at the fold. Ink sits on the surface of the paper. When a printed 300gsm cover is folded round the pages, the ink along that fold can crack, and a cracked spine looks shabby on day one. A thin laminate over the printed cover holds everything together.

So we'd steer you away from dropping lamination to save money. A split fold makes a booklet look cheap far faster than a modest paper ever could. The real decision is which laminate. Matt works best with silk and uncoated covers. Gloss gives a shiny, high impact finish. Soft touch has a velvety feel that is lovely to hold and shows every greasy thumbprint, so keep it for booklets that will be handled gently. The builder shows what a different laminate does to your total.

The stapler handles 8 to 72 pages, while glue wants 32 inside pages or more

Every booklet in the table is stapled, which the trade also calls saddle stitching or wire stitching. Our stapled range runs from 8 pages to 72, in steps of four. A stapled job also comes back sooner than a perfect bound one.

Perfect binding glues the pages into a square spine, like a paperback. The minimum is 32 inside pages, which makes a spine just 3mm across. You need roughly 5mm before there's room to print a title along it, so a slim perfect bound booklet gets the square edge without any shelf presence.

Here is a detail the price table hides. Our 32 page booklets are 28 inside pages plus the cover, which leaves them four pages short of the perfect binding minimum. At that count the alternatives are staples or hardback binding, whose floor is 28 inside pages, giving a 9mm spine. Hardbacks sit in a different price bracket entirely, and our separate post on hardcover printing prices covers that side of the budget.

Glue changes your layout too. Roughly 7mm either way from the hinge disappears into it. Give text and faces a 12mm margin from the spine as a minimum, and expect a picture running across the middle to lose around 14mm. A stapled booklet opens flatter and gives you those spreads back whole.

From 32 inside pages up to the stapling limit, both bindings are open to you. For something people read once, like an event programme, staples are quicker and usually the lighter quote. For a booklet that will sit on a shelf and needs its name on the spine, perfect binding is worth the extra wait. Price both in the builder and the gap is right there in front of you. Our binding styles guide puts the page count rules in one picture.

The turnaround clock starts when you approve your artwork

Our lead times are counted from the moment you approve print ready artwork, not from the day you first email a file, and free tracked UK delivery is part of the price. Longer litho runs and premium cover finishes take longer. If you have a fixed date, such as a launch night, tell us when you ask for the price and we'll say straight away whether it works.

That is why a clean file sent early is the simplest way to hit a deadline. Runs of 1 to 20 copies are checked by a person and go straight to print. From 21 copies up, you get a PDF proof to approve first, and the clock waits for your yes. Leave a proof unanswered for two days and your booklets arrive two days later.

The file check is free; fixing the file is where days go

Nothing goes to print until one of our team has looked over the file, and that check costs you nothing. When something is wrong we tell you plainly and suggest the fix, and then the job waits while you make it. These are the faults we'd most like you to catch before you press send:

• No bleed. Anything printed up to the edge needs 3mm extra on every trimmed edge, or a sliver of white paper can show after trimming.
• Spreads instead of single pages. Supply each page on its own, in the order a reader meets them, and leave the imposition to us: that's the job of arranging pages on each sheet so they fall in sequence once folded.
• A page count that won't fold. A stapled booklet can't have 30 pages, so decide whether to add two pages or lose two before we have to ask.
• Type crowding the trim. If your design uses white borders, make them 8mm at the very least; 10 to 12mm looks right.

Our artwork hub covers file setup in more depth. And if you'd rather not trust a screen, order a single test copy first. There's no minimum order, so one booklet in your hands before the full run is the surest check we know.

Save on size and quantity, never on the cover

Here is how we'd bring a booklet budget down without anyone holding the result and thinking it was done on the cheap.

1. Order the run you'll use, all at once. As the figures above show, a single run of 250 undercuts two runs of 100.
2. Edit down to a multiple of four rather than padding up. Four fewer pages means one fewer sheet in every copy.
3. Pick A5 unless the content truly needs A4. On 100 copies of 32 pages, that keeps £1.18 a copy in your pocket.
4. Staple anything that doesn't need a printed spine. Up to 72 pages it is the quicker binding, and normally the lighter one on the invoice.
5. Keep the 300gsm cover and its lamination. People judge a booklet by how it feels when they pick it up, and a floppy or cracked cover undoes good printing inside.
6. Compare quotes like for like. Our prices include UK delivery, and printed booklets are normally zero rated for VAT, as HMRC sets out in VAT Notice 701/10, so a standard booklet quote usually has no VAT to add. A lower quote that bolts on delivery afterwards may not be lower at all.

A page count and a date are all we need to start

If your booklet matches one of the three rows above, you already know what it costs. If it doesn't, the builder will tell you in 12 clicks, or you can look through sizes and stocks on our booklet printing page first. For books and zines, our print cost guides do the same job. Then tell us the day you need copies in hand, and we'll plan the job backwards from it.