The Print Journey

The quickest way to know what you want is to see it printed. Our portfolio is full of real jobs we've made for people just like you, filed by format, and most carry a short spec box under the photos.

Save two or three that feel close to yours and paste the links into your quote request. A finished book we've already made tells us more about size, paper and feel than a page of description, and it gets you a more accurate price.

Every book comes down to three choices: binding, size and paper. Settle the binding first, because your page count has most of the say.

Mike covers what each binding feels like in the clip below. The numbers are the bit to hold onto: staples go as low as 8 pages and as high as 72 (a sheet folds to four pages, so the count climbs in fours), perfect binding wants 32 pages and a hardback case wants 28 inside pages. Land between 32 and 72 and all three are open to you, which is exactly when having the real papers on your desk pays off.

Standard sizes keep the price down: A5, A4 portrait and 210mm square are the cheapest to print. On paper, silk suits most books, gloss gives photographs their deepest colour, and uncoated feels warm and takes a pencil well.

Printing 20 copies or fewer? Our instant calculator shows a live price that updates with every choice, so you can test a different paper or page count in seconds. For bigger runs, the quote form takes about half a minute to fill in, and a real person prices it. Send it between 9am and 5pm on a weekday and the price usually reaches you within a couple of hours. Evening and weekend requests are first in the queue the next working morning.

Ask for two quantities while you're there. Per copy, a run of 250 can cost far less than a run of 50, so the second figure often changes the plan. And because there's no minimum order, one copy can arrive first for you to check.

Send us a single PDF, sized to the finished page, with the pages running in reading order and images at roughly 300dpi. For perfect binding and hardbacks, add a separate cover file: back, spine and front laid out as one spread.

Any colour or photo running off the page needs 3mm of bleed. Books are trimmed in stacks, and that extra sliver of background is what stops a hairline of white paper showing after the cut. If your design keeps a white margin all round, you can skip it.

Unsure? Send it as it is. Before any job reaches a press, one of us opens the file and checks the bleed, the order of the pages, the spine width and every image, free of charge. Often we'll fix the bleed or rebuild the cover ourselves.

From here it's mostly our job. There are four moments, and only the first two need anything from you.