COSTS?
for Design and Printing
You will need to pay the designer to bring your book up to a professional standard
What are you paying the designer to do?
- Your designer will need to familiarise herself with your manuscript.
- In collaboration with the author she will choose fonts and an appropriate size and layout for the book.
- She will import the digital manuscript and with obligatory use of stylesheets*, begin re-formatting the text into a book: (Title Page, copyright page, Table of Contents, introduction/ preface/ prologue/ dedication/ acknowledgments. She will attend to footnotes, running headers and page numbering, reference sources, indexes and bibliographies.
- She will edit/restore photos, create art or illustrations or incorporate provided art into the book.
- She will create an ISBN barcode for the back cover, write a back cover blurb, take an author's photo, design the full cover (front and back).
- She will make sure the book is pleasingly laid out and photos are correctly anchored to their paragraphs. She will add sub-headings to break up text, shorten over-long paragraphs, correct any errors that missed the editor and check the book over technically to make sure it will print without problems.
- She will be test printing as she goes on a colour laser to make sure the book's layout and all colours are working
- During this time she will be emailing regular PDF progress reports to the author for feedback and changes.
- She will also be liaising with the printer about appropriate stocks and setting up the job in their system, creating an account for the client etc.
*every line and character in the book has to belong to a specific paragraph or character style to avoid printing problems later or a failed conversion to e-book.
All this presupposes the book has been well edited.
Simple books of about 100 pages that are mainly text, with a few illustrations or photos, and cover, should easily come in under $1000. Complex books taking months to produce - with many references, footnotes, a large index, diagrams to draw, photos to edit, and constant changes to text, can easily run above $5000.
Recent Designer costs (2025)
| Book | Extras | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 38 pages, full colour, illustrated children's book and cover art both sides. | Art provided by illustrator often needed significant massaging to work. | $1035 inc GST |
| 2 | 50 page recipe book and cover using provided art, 175mm x250mm portrait | Art - provided by overseas third party illustrator needed a lot of alteration | $989 inc GST |
| 3 | 90 page Genealogy book landscape, 250mm x 195mm | Major issues in formatting provided text, creating family trees, fixing inadequate photos and handling continual late-stage additions to text | $2760 incl GST |
Printer's costs
Printers have state-of-the-art printing and binding equipment to buy and maintain, stock inventories to keep up, employees to pay and a business that needs to break even
Printer's costs for the same books
| Stocks | Extras | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | glossy stock for cover and interior - 150 copies | including promotion and distribution package of $400 | $2955.50 inc GST |
| 2 | cover - colour one side, inners: black ink only, perfect bound, 100 copies | including promotion and distribution package of $400 | $1748 inc GST |
| 3 | Interior pages and cover - silk matt stock of different weights, 40 copies | No package promotion - only listing in online store | $1141 incl GST |
If that seems expensive to you, the next question is ...
So why not print overseas?
Asian printers are doing good work. In parts of Asia printers can produce a book for less than half the cost of a NZ printer. But you need to be printing high volumes to make it work for you, eg., think 1000s of copies rather than hundreds, and do your sums carefully. What are freight costs back to NZ going to be, in days of rising transport, paper and inflation costs? One NZ printer of my acquaintance began specialising in books largely because he had met so many NZ authors who had had bad experiences with overseas printers. Yes, printing "in-country" is more expensive but much more hands-on when there are issues. And with much smaller print runs the impact on the wallet is much lower.