What print on demand is, and why it matters for a translation

With print on demand, the printed copy of your book is made only after someone has ordered it. No stock, nothing paid up front, no boxes in the living room. The printing cost simply comes out of the income from that sale.

That is why a single author can now publish a printed book in a language they cannot even read, without betting on thousands of copies.

How it actually works

You upload a file for the inside of the book and a file for the cover, set a price, and the book gets a page in the shop. So far it looks exactly like a digital book.

The difference starts the moment a reader clicks "buy". Then, and only then, an order goes out to a print shop, the copy is printed and it is sent to them. Amazon puts it without much ceremony: they print on demand and deduct the printing cost from your royalties, which is why there is nothing to pay in advance and no stock to hold.

What you get on each sale is a set share of the price you chose, minus the printing cost of that one copy.

What decides the cost of printing a copy

Four things, according to Amazon: the size of the book, the number of pages, whether it is printed in black and white or in colour, and the type of paper. And a fifth variable that is easy to forget — which shop in the world the reader ordered from, because the printing happens close to them.

The formula itself is not complicated: there is a fixed component, plus an addition for every page.

From which follows a conclusion that touches translation directly. The page count is not fixed across languages.

Why this matters for a translated book in particular

Text that moves from one language to another changes length. Hebrew is a relatively compact language, and the same idea in English or German often takes up more room. A book that ran two hundred pages in Hebrew may come out longer in the English version.

That is not a disaster, and it is not a secret either — but it means two practical things. First, the printing cost of the translated version will be a little different from the original. Second, if you priced the original right on the edge where it still just about pays, work the new version out again rather than copying the number across.

A bigger advantage sits on the other side of the equation: you can publish a book in a new language without printing a single copy in advance. If the language does not work out, you are not left holding stock. We wrote about this choice at length in digital, printed or narrated.

What this method does not give you

Two things, and they are worth knowing in advance.

The first: a single copy is more expensive than printing a thousand copies at a print shop. You are paying for the convenience of not holding stock, and that is a fair trade — but anyone who knows for certain they will sell a large batch in one evening, at a lecture for instance, will find a different calculation works better for them.

The second: physical bookshops generally do not order books printed this way, because they want the option of returning copies that did not sell. If your goal is a shelf in a shop rather than a page on the internet, that is an entirely different conversation.

What to check before publishing a printed edition in another language

Three things.

The cover. A printed cover is not one image but a back, a spine and a front, and the spine gets wider the more pages there are. A longer translated version needs a cover adjusted to it, not the same file. We went into this in does a translated book need a new cover.

The typesetting. The interior file is built to a particular width and height. If the new language runs in the opposite direction, as Hebrew does against English, the position of the page numbers and the margins changes too.

A physical copy to check. Before you publish, order one copy and hold it in your hand. That is the stage where mistakes a screen never shows you turn up.

More questions that come up at this stage are gathered in the frequently asked questions.