Zine Printing: Stapled or Perfect Bound, in Your Hands in Days

The price cards on this page are real totals. 100 A5 stapled zines with 32 pages cost £188, which is £1.88 a copy, all in full colour. Their pages are 130gsm silk, and covers use a heavier 300gsm silk given a matt laminate for protection. Order 250 of the same zine and the bill comes to £355. Those figures already cover your free file check and the courier to your door, and printed zines carry no VAT. If your zine doesn't fit one of the three builds, tell us the spec and you'll get a price from Harriet or Mike.

Yes, in two ways. For one copy up to twenty, our instant calculator works out the price as you click. For a bigger run, the cards near the top of this page show real totals from 100 copies up, and the quote form reaches a person who replies with a full price for any other spec.

Yes, there's no minimum at all, and each copy gets cheaper as the run gets longer. A test copy first is fine too: we print one zine, charge only our cost to print, bind and send it, and you see it in the flesh before ordering the rest.

Once you've approved your artwork, stapled zines arrive within three working days. Allow five for perfect binding and seven for hardbacks, and UK delivery by tracked courier costs nothing. Big litho runs and special cover finishes need longer, so mention any fixed date before you order and we'll check it's achievable.

Up to 20 stapled or perfect bound copies, we check your files and send them straight to press. From 21 copies, and on every hardback, nothing is printed until you've approved a PDF proof.

Yes. It makes no difference where in the country you are: finished zines leave our Colchester press by tracked courier and arrive the next day, with delivery to one address in the UK built into the price. You send the PDF, we check it free of charge, then the box is printed, packed and on its way.

A5 is the classic zine size. A6, A4 and a 210mm square also print economically, and beyond those almost any size works: portrait anywhere from A6 (105 x 148mm) to A3 (297 x 420mm), landscape at A5 or anything up to A4 on its side, and squares from 148mm to 297mm, although squares bigger than 210mm cost more. For photography, 10 x 8 inches (254 x 203mm) is worth a look.

A7 can't be stapled, so we print it as a one sheet slit and fold zine instead. Our zine size guide lines up twenty real zines with their print costs and shop prices.

With staples, a zine can be as slim as 8 pages or as fat as 72, cover included, and the total always divides by four, since every sheet, once folded, makes four pages. Perfect bound zines need 32 pages or more once you count the cover, or the glue has too little to hold, and hardbacks need at least 28 pages inside. So a zine of 32 to 72 pages can go either way. If you're torn, give us your page count and we'll recommend one.

Staples are the zine classic. Printers call it wire stitching or saddle stitching, but it means the same thing: folded sheets, nested together, held by two staples along the spine. It keeps the cost down and the zine light, and a photograph can sit right across both pages without vanishing into the binding. With perfect binding, the pages are glued to a square spine, the way a paperback is made, which leaves space to print the title along it and suits longer zines. Our guides to wire stitching and perfect bound zines go into more detail.

Most of the zines we print use 120gsm uncoated or 130gsm silk for the inside pages, thick enough that pictures don't show through and light enough to turn easily. Drop to 90gsm and it feels like newsprint; go up to 170gsm and every page has a lovely heft, though the zine gets thicker and costs more. Silk and gloss make photographs sharper and colours brighter, while uncoated feels natural in the hand. Covers run from 160gsm to 350gsm, and 300gsm makes a sturdy default.

Paper is hard to judge on a screen, so ask for a free sample pack and feel the options for yourself.

On most zines with a card cover, yes. Folding a printed cover can crack the ink along the spine, and lamination, a thin film over the printed cover, stops that and keeps scuffs off in the post. It adds very little to the bill. Matt is our usual pick and suits silk and uncoated covers, while gloss gives a shinier, louder cover. Soft touch feels like velvet but shows every greasy thumb, which is why one of our test copies ended up looking as if it had been used as a breakfast plate.

A real person goes through your PDF one page at a time before anything is printed. If something needs fixing, we tell you exactly what, and sometimes it's quicker to sort it ourselves: when a lyric book arrived without bleed, we added it in InDesign rather than lose a day. Bigger runs and hardbacks then pause until you've approved a proof, and small runs head to the press as soon as the check is done. Your zines are then printed, trimmed, bound and boxed, and a tracked courier brings them to your door.

There's no basket and no upload portal, just people. Get a price from the cards on this page, the instant calculator or the quote form. Once the artwork's finished, send the PDF by WeTransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive or email using the Send your file button at the top of the page, and tell us the size, pages, paper and binding you want, the number of copies, your deadline and the delivery address. We check the file free of charge, confirm the details and book your job in.

Our Print Journey walks through each stage, and the Styling Hub helps you settle the look of your zine before you design it.

Send us a high resolution PDF with 3mm of bleed and crop marks. A PDF keeps your fonts and layout exactly as you made them, and every major design program can export one. InDesign has a free trial, and more of our customers now send files from Affinity Publisher or Scribus too.

Our step by step guides cover stapled zines, perfect bound zines and covers, with templates and video tutorials. If bleed, RGB images and crop marks are new to you, start with the general file set up guide, and if anything's still unclear, email or call and we'll talk you through it.

Three we like:

• Compact: A5 stapled, with a 170gsm uncoated cover round 24 pages of 100gsm uncoated. Small enough to read on the Tube, with crisp, sturdy pages.
• More like a book: A5 perfect bound. The cover is 300gsm uncoated with matt lamination, and 56 pages of 115gsm uncoated sit inside.
• Smooth and sharp: A5 with a glued spine, 72 pages of 130gsm silk for extra punch in the photographs, and a matt laminated cover in 300gsm silk.

The builds priced on this page make good starting points too.

Use photographs saved at 300dpi for the size they'll be printed, and wherever a picture meets the trim, extend it 3mm into the bleed. Silk and gloss give photographs the most snap, while uncoated absorbs a little light and softens them, which suits some work. Dark pictures are the ones to watch, because a press and a different paper can change a shadow. That's why Dusan Maletic ordered one test copy at cost before printing Inner Space, his square zine of Texas. For layout ideas, browse the photo zines in our portfolio.

One side of paper is one page. Each sheet carries two pages, one on each side, so a quote for 40 inside pages means 40 pages in your PDF and 20 leaves in the finished zine. You'll hear us call the inside pages ‘text’ pages, which is only printer talk: fill them with photographs, comics, illustration or words. The inside covers can carry artwork or adverts too.

One where the cover is printed on the same paper as the pages inside. The whole zine might be 120gsm uncoated from front to back, which makes it lighter and gives it an honest DIY feel. Review Volume 5 for JGM Gallery is a self cover booklet of 68 pages on 100gsm recycled uncoated.

Yes, and the cheapest way is to print the colour. Only a few coloured papers can go through our presses, such as the Papago Pink on Soofiya's Auntie Fatima zines, and they cost more, so most people print a solid colour behind their cover artwork instead. It looks best on uncoated card, because the slight sheen of silk can make a flat colour look a little off. This video has tips for getting a coloured cover without paying extra.

Yes. We print on 100% recycled uncoated papers, and FSC certified stocks are available across our range. Fruitlands Zine Issue 2 went on 100gsm Evolution Uncoated, which is fully recycled. Our free sample pack puts several papers in your hands so you can compare them before you decide.

Yes. A slit and fold zine is one sheet of paper, folded and cut once through the middle to make eight little pages, and it's how A7 zines are made, since staples don't work at that size. We print them as flat sheets, like the A4 sheets of pink paper behind Soofiya's Auntie Fatima zines. Our slit and fold guide shows the folds, the cut and how to plan your pages so they come out the right way up.

We don't have an in house designer at the moment, but we can point you towards good ones. For freelancers, read our tips on finding a designer through Fiverr or PeoplePerHour. For a more tailored approach, try 10 agencies to design your book for print or our pick of book design solutions. We've even written a design brief you can send to the designers you like the look of.

A zine (say “zeen”) is a small, self-published booklet, made for the love of it rather than for profit. It can hold comics, essays, photographs, poems, reviews or anything else you can put on paper, and it's usually sold cheaply, swapped or handed out. Zines grew up in underground scenes and have long given a voice to people that mainstream publishing ignores, so however niche yours is, somebody out there wants to read it. Zine printing just means getting copies made properly, whether that's one copy or several hundred.

It comes down to purpose. Zines tend to be personal and made for a small crowd, while magazines keep a regular editorial rhythm and chase a wider audience, and that difference shapes the tone, page count, paper and binding. Our guide to zine vs magazine sets out the differences, and our breakdown of magazine printing costs explains what drives the price if your project is heading that way.

Plenty. These are the best places to start:

• What is a zine? covers the basics
• Zine sizes explained compares twenty real zines
• Understanding wire stitching is all about staples
• Understanding perfect bound zines explains glued spines
• Wire stitched zine showcase shows paper and design choices
• Zines for business looks at creative, corporate and agency zines

ZineWiki is an open wiki of zines, zinesters and distros, and a good place to lose an afternoon. Village, the independent bookshop in Leeds and Manchester, stocks zines alongside art and photography books, and Self Publish, Be Happy runs publishing projects, events and education around photography.

Start with the zine tags, #zine, #zines and #zinester, then add a couple for what's inside, such as #photography or #typography, and #independentmagazine if yours reads like a magazine. Tag #exwhyzedprint as well, so we get to see what you've made.