Info You Need To Know

How long will my printing take?

Our turn around depends on two things; the complexity and size of your order and how busy we are. Once you contact us, please let us know when you need it by, and we will give you an estimate on when you can pick up your order. Generally, paperback orders take 2 to 4 weeks, hardcovers – 4 to 8 weeks.

Pricing:

We can provide a quote for your order by sending the details via email to info@kaligraphic.com.au. 

You can also estimate prices per book following the price guides below. Prices depend on the number of pages, qty you order and the type of covers – standard covers (gloss or matt) or covers with foil.

Please return to this page whenever you order, as prices are fluid and might change anytime. 

Many of you, who have trusted us with your book orders for a while, know that we used to give a small discount on printing multiple titles in one order. However, with rising costs of paper, foils, cello glaze and other materials, we are forced to either increase the prices or abandon our discounting policy. 

We decided – to keep the same price structure for now with no further discounts. We might be giving discounts on re-orders when we can run files from our archive.

Prices below are per book and GST excl.

SOFT COVERS:

HARD COVERS are calculated in addition to the price for the soft cover:

How do I pay?

You can pay in advance, upon pick up, or we will send you an invoice to be paid by a due date. You can pay online, over the phone, or in person.

BANK PAYMENTS:  Always put Invoice or Quote number as a reference.

Paper / Printing / Foils

Paper Stock

Paper stock for your books is our major challenge at the moment. In the past few years, we have changed Book paper a few times, and we thought we had finally found what we wanted and loved when we introduced our current Bulky Book Ivory stock a couple of years ago. We love the colour and texture, and the main thing is – we know you love it too!

Even though we love the quality of the stock, it comes with logistical nightmares:

  1. Containers arrive late.
  2. Prices increase with each container (the manufacturer holds us to ransom, knowing how desperately we require this stock).

While looking for some alternative stock, we had to decide: Bulky Ivory will be used for books up to 400pp (not 550pp as before). 

Any texts over 400 pages we will print on our Enviro stock.

Enviro stock is a typical 100% recycled stock with a grey-ish tint, rather than a cream-ish tint as Bulky Ivory. On the plus side, Enviro stock is not bulky, meaning your cover artworks for mainstream printers do not need re-adjustments.

If you print a series, with some books under 400pp long and some over 400pp long, if all books in the sequence must be in the same stock, please choose Enviro.

Meanwhile, we actively seek more options to diversify our book stock without price hiking and reliable supply.

Paper stock for your books is our major challenge at the moment… In the past few years, we have changed Book paper stock a few times and we thought, we have finally found what we want and what we love, when we introduced our current Bulky Book Ivory stock a couple of years ago. We love the colour, we love the texture, and the main thing is – we know, you love it too!

Even though we love the quality of the stock, it comes with logistical nightmares:

  1. Containers do not arrive on time.
  2. Prices go up with each container (manufacturer holds us to ransom, knowing how desperately we require this stock)…

While looking for some alternative stock, the decision was made: Bulky Ivory will be used for books up to 400pp (not 550pp as before). Any books over 400 pages will be printed on our Enviro stock.

Enviro stock is a typical 100% recycled stock with grey-ish tint, rather than cream-ish tint as Bulky Ivory. On plus side, Enviro stock is not bulky, meaning your cover artworks for main stream printers do not need re-adjustments and can be used as they are.

If you print series, with some books under 400pp long and some over 400pp long, and if it is critical that all books in the series are printed on same stock, please choose Enviro.

Meanwhile, we are actively looking for more options to diverse our book stock without price hiking and reliable supply.

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FOILS:

We offer inexpensive digital foiling.

Digital is an affordable way to create reflective metallic finishes without spending thousands on letterpress foiling techniques.

We introduced Foiled Covers just a few years ago. One of our local authors (without naming names on this page – we will dedicate a separate page on our website, where we acknowledge and say thank you to all the authors who keep suggesting new services, pushing our limits, broadening our horizons, and aren’t afraid to be our ‘guinea pigs’ for new products), – she saw us doing foiled invitations for our corporate customers, and suggested, why not do foils on covers… We had a tiny slow-running machine, which couldn’t do fine print, and we had only three colour foils then – Gold, Silver and Bronze. Those early foiled covers came to life, and everyone was super happy, even though they were not as near as good as what we are offering now,

Fast forward to 2023 – we have a big machine, which produces much better results, and a range of colours, which we didn’t even know existed!

The foils we buy now are of much better quality, but still, we want to stress – this process is evolving and not going to be perfect at all times – there are some imperfections, which we decided are acceptable for the price this service offers.

Sometimes the foil is perfect, some times it has slight flakes/residue stuck on its surface. These flakes are not scratches. You can wipe them off with a soft damp cloth or flick them off with your fingernail. 

We do not know why this residue gets drawn back to the foil and does not stay on a foil roll where it should remain – we do not know. Could it be a bit too many fine elements? Could it be a bit more moisture in the air? Could it be both?… If we knew, we would’ve solved this problem (and one day we will). Machinery and new technology – we continue to invest where we can.

Illusion Foil is particularly ‘flaky’, and as much as we love the look, we strongly recommend not choosing Illusion if you are very ‘fussy’ and unprepared to wipe off the flakes at your end if need be…

As for now, if you can’t live with tiny imperfections – try to use rugged/broken fonts, where imperfections are part of the design; don’t use fine text/elements for foil and consider doing some other special finishes – it doesn’t have to be foil: we offer different types of cello glaze – leather or linen, and of course, our new product – edge printing – will make your book look special.

Printing - Internal Pages - Images

Files must be supplied as PDF, with minimum 3mm bleed all around (refer to Bleed section bellow).

Internal pages:

Only recently, we noticed more and more books coming with images. When it was just a few on rare occasions, we didn’t need any special rules, but with the volumes we are running now, some requirements must take place.

Solid Black background pages or nearly black images covering all page:

Our BW machine, which we installed a year ago specifically for Book Printing, which is cheaper and faster, is not designed for solid black, especially on Book paper stock. Book paper is rough and ‘fluffy’, and creates a lot of paper dust… This paper dust causes unprinted white dots on pages with solid blacks. We can’t guarantee the quality we are known for, so:

Any books with solid black pages will be printed on an alternate machine. That is more expensive to run. It might add an extra $3 to $5 per book, depending on the number of pages. We will create a unique price guide for this type of books and encourage you to return to this page on a regular basis to make sure you get all the additional info we will be publishing here.

Greyscale images (up to approx. 50% grey) are accepted and welcome.

SIZES:

No special rules apply to following sizes (you can supply same files, you use with other printers):

5’x8′ (127x203mm)

5.25’x8′ (134x203mm)

5.5’x8.5′ (140x216mm)

A5 (148x210mm)

these are just the most common sizes, you come to us with, but anything smaller or in between these sizes – No Special Rules, PDFs with 3mm bleed all around (if there are no images with bleed, no bleed required).

SIZE 6’x9′:

Those of you, who have printed with us for a while, know that the size we print is a bit smaller, 150x220mm; we are making size changes at our end, meaning you don’t need to reformat your files.

We will continue doing so with only one significant change:

Books with no images or with images that are inside the page (do not bleed to the edge) – will be printed on Bulky Ivory or Enviro stock, same rules as for smaller sizes.

However, books with bleed (images go to the edge of the page) – will be printed on Enviro stock only.

Our Enviro Stock comes in long sheets, enough to have an extra few mm of bleed.

Bulky Ivory is a slightly shorter stock and unsuitable for book sizes 150x220mm with bleed.

EDGE PRINTING:

Edge Printing (or what some calls Sprayed Edges) is available now. We print multiple books in one go, so keep in mind, that every book will be slightly different. Files for Edge Printing need to be supplied either as a seamless pattern, which we can impose at our end, or to our table size: 580mm x 230mm. No cropmarks or Bleed required. Colour mode – CMYK. 

This section is work-in-progress, we will upload more info and picture samples soon. Meanwhile, any questions, email katya@kaligraphic.com.au

Book Printing Specs

Bleed

At Kaligraphic Print, every book we produce is trimmed, as the last stage of the production process. To ensure this is neat and clean, with no strange slivers of white at the edges of pages, we require all files with some kind of background which goes to the edges of the images to have a minimum of 3mm of bleed. Bleed means that when you design the product, the background must extend 3mm outside of the actual product size.

You can set this up very easily with all professional design programs. When opening a new document, in the document set up settings, there will be a section that refers to Bleed, with a box in which you can set the amount you need. For Kaligraphic, we prefer 3-5mm, if you forget at this point, you can always go to File > Document Setup and fix it there. If you’re not using Adobe programs, it may also be in settings for layout, or printing.

When your new file opens you will see a blank page, but around it, 3mm away from the page boundaries, there will be a red or dotted line bordering the page. This is your bleed limit, and your backgrounds and graphics that go outside of the page boundaries must also reach this bleed limit.

When you have finished your design, it is also important that you include this bleed in the export process. In your export settings, there will be options to turn on crop or trim marks, which you need to select, and also it will allow you to set the bleed limit. In Adobe programs it will have a box you can check to ‘Use Document Bleed Settings’, which will automatically set it to your initial bleed set up. If you decide that even though you’ve set it to 5mm, you only need 3, you can uncheck this box and put in 3mm instead.

In Adobe  settings this will be under the Marks and Bleed tab.

For books featuring images and backgrounds going to the edge of the pages within the text of the book, the same requirements and settings apply.

Setting up your cover for foiling

At Kaligraphic Print, we do inexpensive foiling, and a range of celloglazed finishes. Due to how foiling works, this can be a complicated process or a very simple one. To foil elements on a printed design, we must print those elements in black, and then run the sheet through our celloglazing and foiling machine. The foil then sticks to the printed areas cleanly and permanently.

If you’re having foiled shapes and text on a white background– this is a simple two step process:

  1. Print the foiled areas in black
  2. Apply foil

If you want foiled shapes that overlap a background, or other background elements that aren’t foiled, this becomes a four step process:

  1. Print the background elements that are not foiled
  2. Celloglaze background (this applies a layer of clear laminate that will prevent the foil from sticking to the ink of the background elements)
  3. Print the foiled areas in black
  4. Apply foil.

For designs where you have printed areas, and foiled areas, but they don’t touch or overlap on a white background, you can eliminate the need for celloglazing by using this 3 step process:

  1. Print foiled areas in black
  2. Apply foil
  3. Over print the non-foiled areas

Due to this process, the document set up when you wish to include foiling is also different. In order to foil correctly we require your design to come in two separate pages. One page must be the non-foiled elements only. The other page must be the foiled elements only, in black, regardless of which colour foil you have ordered.

Foiling works best on bulkier fonts, simply because the end result can be a little tricky to read, and the bulkier it is, the clearer the words are. We do not recommend it for paragraphs of text, or thin lines that must be perfectly aligned.

In mass production, things can get out of alignment by a millimeter or two quite easily, and if your line is only a millimeter wide and is out of place- this can be very obvious- while we are always watchful for when this occurs, the more margin for error in a complicated 4 step process like foiling is best. For example- if you have foiled lines of 0.5mm to border a black square on a white background, if the machine shifts a page 0.3mm in one direction, suddenly the border of the square is noticeably out of place. When this kind of mistake is made, the two printing, and one celloglazing layers that came before on this page have now gone to waste. And if this happens in 1 out of 5 pages, of a 100 page order, this results in 20 wasted pages of ink and celloglaze. Had the border line been 1mm or 2mm thick- this slight misalignment would have caused no issues. So keep in mind that we require a certain amount of margin for error to avoid waste and delay in completing your order.

If you have any questions about this or any other kind of file set up feel free to email our Graphic Designer, Mel, at graphics@kaligraphic.com.au, and she will assist you!