Print Quantities

Q: How many books can I afford?

A: To answer this question it is important to start with the end in mind. For traditional offset printing, we recommend maintaining a total production budget of 25% to 35% of your total retail. As an example: If you wish to sell a book for $20 per copy, we recommend budgeting to hold the costs to $5 - $7 per copy. This allows for a reasonable markup to bookstores and other resellers. To do this we find that quantities for most softcover books begin around 1000 copies and most hardcover books are 2500 or more. Other factors can come into play if the book has additional requirements such as embossing, padded covers, metallic inks, slipcases or foil stamping.

Q: What about print on demand options?

A: Riverstone Group does support POD. The costs are in preparing the artwork and uploading to a website are the initial costs to the author. But, beyond this expense, the books are at a fixed price irrespective of the quantity you might order. If you are willing to live with some limitations that POD options do not offer and don't expect to sell enough books to make it worthwhile to print traditionally, this can be a viable solution.

Q: What are overs and unders?

A: Because printing books has multiple steps and processes, most printers produce additional components for each portion of the book. Spoilage occurs as the set up is done for each step along the way. This spoilage means an exact count of the number of books produced will not be known until the last process has been completed. For smaller quantities of printing (under 10,000) the industry standard of allowable variance is 10% of the print run. Books that are in excess of the quantity ordered are "overs" and if spoilage is significant enough and not enough books were produced those books below the quantity ordered are described as "unders".