After my last post about designing and producing a journal in China, I got an e-mail from Alex, who lives in NYC and wants to design and produce a journal locally. She isn’t sure that the quantity she needs is high enough or the demand is great enough that she place a large order or print overseas. She’d like to just make a few journals first and see how it goes. Maybe you can relate. In this follow-up post, I share some of the answers I gave her about producing a small quantity of journals. I hope they help some other entrepreneurial journal-creators, too!
Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash
Pros to producing a journal in a small quantity
You can keep your costs low.
Of course, the main reason you might want to produce just a few journals first is to see if there is indeed a market for them before shelling out a lot of money for a pile of journals that will collect dust in your garage.
You can easily try out different styles or looks.
Not sure if your audience likes yellow or green better, or script or block print? A short run allows you to have the liberty to produce just a few of each style of journal, if you wish, and see how they sell.
Cons to producing a journal in a small quantity
The per journal cost is high.
Set-up costs for printing are high, but once a print shop starts printing and binding, it doesn’t take much longer to make a few more journals — which is why the price usually starts to come down for greater quantities. Your profit margin will be significantly smaller. You will probably pay two to four times as much for each journal as you would pay when printing in a large quantity and/or overseas.
Finishing options will be limited.
Some features that make a journal feel high touch may be unavailable for low quantities (like deboss, emboss, foil, leather or PU / faux leather material, etc.) because the set-up is complicated (read: expensive) enough that it doesn’t make sense to do when you are only printing a small run of journals (ie: 25, 50, 100).
Finding a journal printer or producer locally
As far as finding a local supplier or printer for custom journals, what you need depends on what kind of journal materials, printing and binding that you want. For example, do you want:
regular softcover, regular hardcover, PU (faux leather) cover, real leather cover…?
black and white interior or full color interior?
glued binding, stitched (sewn) binding, spiral binding…?
Or maybe you want to decide these details based on what your local printers can do for you. Try googling phrases like:
“full service book printer”
“short run book printer”
“short run journal printer”.
You can add the name of your city or state / province to your search and see what you find. Hopefully you can get an idea from the printer or journal producer’s website if they are low or high end. However, there are a lot of printers with out-of-date websites who can do perfectly good work, so be careful about judging a book by its cover! More important than their branding or marketing is a printer who understands what you’re asking about, or answers emails or calls quickly and thoroughly. Sometimes I ask for references if I’m having a hard time getting a feel for the printer’s experience/background.
A few good questions to ask a local journal printer are:
“Have you produced journals before?”
It’s always easier to work with someone who has done this exact kind of work before.
“Can I see samples of previous journals you have created? Is it possible for you to create a real mock-up of my final journal product after I give you my digital files and instructions?”
Giving you a real mockup is usually hard to do, at least for an affordable price! But the printer should be able to give you samples of previous books or journals to have or to look at, and swatches of materials or paper or colors. Printers will usually give you samples like this before you commit to working with them.
“Will you produce the entire journal in-house, or will you outsource part of the process?”
Some smaller print shops will tell you they can make journals, but they might be outsourcing to a bigger printer, which means they probably can’t give you as good a price as a company that is doing it all in-house. For example, if you live in a small town with a small print shop, they might tell you they can make journals but actually be getting the journals from a bigger city or from an online provider. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s fair for them to tell you their process.
“This is what I am envisioning, but if you can suggest ways to make small adjustments that will either give me a BETTER or MORE AFFORDABLE final product, could you do so?”
Sometimes a few tips from an experienced print representative could save you hundreds of dollars or give your product a more professional finish.
Finding a journal printer or producer online
If you’re finding the price of printing a small quantity of journals locally prohibitive, or simply not finding a local supplier, you might widen your search and just look for any online custom journal source within your country, or look for “print-on-demand” printers (like Blurb or IngramSpark) and maybe even build your journal around their preset sizes and styles to keep the price reasonable. For example, Blurb offers this “notebook journal” product which can be ordered in any quantity. Just a note that lots of online printers say that they offer “custom journal printing”, but by that they only mean that the covers are printed with a custom design, but insides are blank or lined. If this is the case, you might be able to contact them and ask what it would cost to have a custom interior.
Making a journal as a product seemed so easy in your head, right? Let me know if you need any help with design, pre-press checks of your journal files, or finding a printer! Or book a one-hour brainstorming session with me to get a head start on your journal planning and production!