We’ve already talked about the little-known, higher-than-imagined costs of electronic publishing. Now we’ll talk about their opposite: the surprisingly low costs of print publishing.
The work of printing #
Once again: it’s important to factor in your labor when calculating what it will cost you to publish a journal. Fortunately, once you’ve started publishing electronically, you’ve already handled most of the work necessary for creating a print edition, too. Your issues exist; you just need to print and ship them.
So, getting your online issues physically into readers’ hands takes only a few final tasks.
Setting up: Find a printer #
It’s extremely unlikely that you have direct access to facilities for printing, binding, and shipping publications en masse. So, when getting started with print publishing, a good first step is to simply search online for “printing and publishing services” and find a company you’d like to work with who can handle these tasks for you.
As you browse, you’ll probably want to look for a service provider with:
- First and foremost, prices that fit your budget. Here’s something specific to check on: Make sure to pay attention to their international shipping prices and methods — if they have the right shipping setup (that is, one designed to operate on a large scale), they won’t charge you too much more for international shipping than they do for domestic.
- Appropriate mailing services. In addition to checking their international prices, you may want to check whether they handle any domestic options designed for printed matter (such as, in the U.S., Media Mail or Periodicals rates). Such programs may involve a little extra legwork (for example, to use Periodicals rates, a publication must apply for approval and then file paperwork annually to maintain its status). But especially if your printer is willing to help with that work, they can ultimately be the most economical choice. Make sure to discuss the pros and cons with your prospective vendor.
- Good quality products. Get a sample of their work, and look at the paper and the quality of the printing. You don’t necessarily need the premium package, but you don’t want tissue paper or smeared ink, either.
- Good communication systems, including a streamlined setup for accepting files. You will need to send requests to your vendor throughout the year; make sure you find the process smooth and intuitive.
- Warehousing services, for storage of extra copies. Avoid the trap of thinking you can just toss spare issues into your garage! Extras multiply surprisingly quickly, so let the printer worry about storage space for you.
- A way to reprint previously shipped issues.
- Experience with scholarly publishing. It’s always nice to work with someone who likely has already encountered the same issues you’ll run into!
This might seem like a long list, but remember — if you choose wisely, you’ll only have to go through it once.
From then on, the day-to-day (or, more approximately, month-to-month) work of printing is quite straightforward.
Once per issue: Send PDFs and addresses to your printer #
After you’ve fully published an issue online, creating a print version is as simple as sending those same files to your vendor. They will likely offer an online submission system for this process.
You should have a conversation with your vendor early on to see if there’s any particular way they would prefer you prepare your files. Sometimes, if you can produce your PDFs to fit their automated systems, a vendor might be able to offer you a cheaper price for file preparation. If the preferred changes fit nicely into your existing workflow, it’s a worthwhile step.
You’ll of course also need to tell your printer how many copies of each issue to print, and where to mail them. Different vendors might have different formatting preferences for this data. At MSP, we typically send our mailing lists as spreadsheets — one row per address, and one address line per column — and we send a new list with every issue we print. This ensures both that our vendor can easily turn our addresses into printed mailing labels, and that they’re using the most recently updated information every time.
As you go: Managing mailing addresses #
On the subject of mailing labels: Make sure to keep your delivery addresses up to date! This likely means, at minimum, asking for updated mailing addresses every time you bill your subscribers for a renewed subscription. Even better, you should also make sure your customers have a way to update their mailing information with you if it changes mid-year. Even libraries change their addresses from time to time, and you don’t want to accidentally send a whole year of their issues straight to the dead-letter office.
As needed: Replace missing issues #
If any issues do get lost in the void, however — or if they get damaged in transit — it’s your responsibility to send a replacement copy to the intended recipient. Therefore, you need to provide a mechanism for your subscribers (or your agencies) to claim any missing or damaged issues.
Setting up a simple webform is a great way to keep claims organized; but you can also take such requests by email. When you receive a claim, you’ll take a look to be sure it makes sense — was this issue actually lost, or does the customer probably just need to wait a few more days? — and ask your printer to send the appropriate replacement shipment. They may be able to send replacements out of the stock of extra copies they’re storing for you; or, if you have no extras, this is an instance where you’ll make use of your printer’s ability to reprint past issues.
You should also inform your subscribers how long they have to file a claim with you. Typically, a subscription journal will replace any missing or damaged issue for any subscriber without additional charges, as long as the request is received within (say) six months or a year of the original issue’s shipping date. Simple claim policies like this help ensure your subscribers pay attention to what they receive and when, and limit your liability so that you won’t find yourself still shipping copies of the January 2024 issue in December 2027.
The price of printing #
So, that’s the work involved (which, as we will continue to hammer home, is a cost of its own). How about the money? How much do these printing and shipping services cost? And how can you pay for them?
It might be surprising to hear, but much printing can be done these days at very competitive prices. If anything, the “death of print” has made these services cheaper as vendors strive to compete. Currently, we at MSP might expect to pay our printers perhaps $20 per 200-page issue, including shipping.
Multiply that by the number of issues per year, add a little extra, and that’s the amount you need to collect from each print subscriber in order to cover your print expenses. Simply add that number to your electronic subscription price, and your print edition can pay for itself.
That “little extra” we just mentioned is important. You need to make sure there’s a bit of room in case your vendor’s prices go up, or in case you wind up publishing more pages than you initially expected. An overabundance of quality content might seem like a “good problem to have”, but an expense total that outweighs your income total is not! Plus, you need to account for the cost of replacing those missing and damaged issues we mentioned.
And of course, make sure to include the cost of your own work in your calculations. In offering print, you are taking on some complexity; make sure you (and your staff) receive fair compensation for that labor.
We should note that our experience comes from printing and operating in the United States. Prices may vary across international borders. And, too, changes in materials costs can impact vendor prices. Our “$20 for a 200-page issue” example will surely not always apply.
But wherever you are, and whatever your particular vendor charges you, the principle remains: with a little care, you can set your print prices so that the process sustains itself.
Sidebar: Should I pay, or should I DIY? #
We’ve described here how we at MSP draw the line between the print-management work we take on ourselves, and the print-management work we pay a vendor to do. But that’s not the only possible division of labor.
Many vendors that offer printing and shipping services will also offer subscription-management services. That is, you may wish to pay your vendor to handle some (or all) of the subscriber-facing tasks for you, such as collecting delivery addresses and managing replacement copies. If you’ve got a comfortable budget, but an uncomfortable workload, this can be a fine solution. (Just make sure to calculate your print subscription prices accordingly!)
Or on the other hand, it might be tempting to try to save money on vendor services by paying for fewer of them. This can also work…up to a point.
While there’s certainly much you can do on your own as a small publisher, there are also one or two things you really need outside help for. The actual printing and binding of issues, obviously, are two such examples. But in addition to these, we strongly believe you should not try to handle the actual printing or shipping of your issues on your own, either.
The process of receiving, packaging, addressing, and then putting into the mail all the print copies of every single issue of a periodical becomes unmanageable more quickly than you might imagine. Besides, an experienced vendor will have access to (and knowledge of) helpful information, systems, and resources that simply won’t be available to you directly. Here’s one easy example: remember how we mentioned that with the right setup, international shipping costs little more than domestic? That “right setup” is based on volume. It’s something that only works for outfits regularly moving huge quantities of products — not for small, independent publishers. With the wrong setup, international shipping is quite expensive (and not even especially reliable).
We know (from experience!) how attractive it can be to try substituting individual effort for financial investment. So we want to say it clearly: when it comes to shipping your journal to readers, it simply doesn’t work.
The value of printing #
We’ve tried to give you a sense here of what it takes to offer a print option of a subscription journal. And we’ve tried to make clear that these costs are, or can be made, manageable. But all the same, print does have a cost. So that still leaves one question: Why bother?
For one thing, print effectively ensures perpetual access is available to your subscribers. Libraries want to know that if they cancel a subscription in the future, or if the publisher’s website becomes entirely unavailable, they’ll still retain access to the already-published content they’ve paid for. Some libraries use electronic solutions like LOCKSS (which we’ll discuss further in a future post); but this requires the journal’s participation. If you haven’t signed up for such a service, and if your journal doesn’t offer any other electronic option for access beyond the lifetime of a subscription, a print option is a must.
But really, the simplest answer is that, in our experience, some libraries still want print. Whether a library is concerned about long-term preservation, views print as offering broader accessibility, or, say, serves faculty who prefer print journals, there is a demand for print content. And satisfying that demand creates one more avenue through which you can put your authors’ research into the world.
If your budget, in terms of dollars and time, is limited, you may decide that you will not be able to provide a print option. But our advice is that you should sit down and weigh that decision, rather than take it as preordained. You may find the costs of print are smaller than you think, and more than worth it.
Header image by unknown artist, available from Old Book Illustrations. Public domain.