Calculating Your Order

There are a few things to consider in figuring out your final cost on an order. Print out this page and do the calculations on it, and you will have your quote for your order, which you can confirm with us before sending it in.

The biggest number is going to be cost of the copies themselves. THIS PAGE will tell you the per copy cost will help you figure out a number of things, first of which being the cost of the copies. Simply multiply the per copy cost by the number of copies, and you'll get your cost of copies. Please note, we require at least ONE COPY of your order to be directed to Dimestore, for listing in the Distro. The particulars of Distro workings is on the Distro site, and are separate issues to printing, thus not discussed here, beyond the ONE COPY mandatory.

BOOK TITLE and issue # =_________________________

Page count of book, NOT including cover =______________________

___________(per copy cost) x ___________(# of copies)=______________(Cost of Copies)

Membership Fee: Dimestore, for it's efforts in setting up, checking, and handling printing, does deserve something for it's efforts. Therefore, we are charging 2 cents a copy Member Usage Fee to run orders.

___________(# of copies) X .02 =______________(Membership Fee)

PROOF COPIES: We have developed a completely PDF Proofing system, which eliminates 99% off printing problems, and ALL of the cost of Proofing a book. If you absolutely need to run a proof copy of your book before printing copies, please read our Proofing page on that. If your choices mean Proofing costs, don't forget to enter that here =____________(Proofing)

Shipping is a separate charge and issue. With our system, you will pay only exact shipping charges based on how you want copies shipped, how many different locations, and other factors, which you can learn more about HERE. HE HIGHLY ADVISE you read the shipping page, but you can use this as a guide in figuring out your total cost and other factors of getting your publication ready to print:

Full size comic: $60 per 1,000 copies to be printed, AND $35 per location sent to = _____________(Shipping cost), or
Larger Page count/ Perfect bound books: $75 per 1,000 copies, AND $35 per location =________________(Shipping), or
Short run publications: $10 per 100 copies, AND $10 per location =_________________(Shipping)

To gather together your basic final cost, add the these numbers...

_________(Cost of Copies) +                 (membership fee) +_________(Proof copy) +________(Shipping) =_________(Total cost)

That's the approximate total cost of what your order will end up being. There are no other hidden fees in our system, and we will do our best to make sure that your order does not incur and additional charges from file fixing or such, if all the prescribed procedures we use are followed.

AT THIS TIME: E-mail us the information you've gathered, to confirm that your needs can be met as you are planning at the cost you have calculated. Printing@dimestoreproductions.com Please note that our turn around times are based on the idea that your files are truly ready to print...and that in our PDF proofing stage, you will be responsible for doing your own fixes to the images...with our advice and assistance if needed of course.

COVER PRICES

What else can you do with that number? Well, you can set your cover price, with a little bit more calculation. You want to set a price that you can make money on, that will be able to be carried by distributors. And this is how you set that:

Take your total cost of the printing, add any production costs, whatever you paid your writer, artists, letterer, colorist. Add your own personal cost of materials. Add any monies you plan to spend on advertising. The total of all of that is your complete cost of getting your book printed. Divide this by the number of copies you are printing for your Real Per Copy Price.

_______(Total Cost) / _______(# Printed) = _________(RPCP)

add to this number 150% again of this number. To keep this example simple, I'll start with the RPCP being $1.00...

$1.00 + 150% = 2.50

Now, if you're looking to offer this to distributors, they expect 60% off the cover price, so that they in turn can sell to retailers at 50% off the cover price. but 60% off 2.50 is $1.00...so you need to add your profit on to your $2.50. I usually suggest adding 25 cents, and rounding any odd numbers to their next highest logical number. So if your number came out to be 2.87 after performing the calculations and adding a quarter, round it up to 2.95 or such. This method makes sure that you will make some $$ back when selling to a distributor. If you are getting most of your sales direct from stores or individual sales at convention appearances, then you'll be doing even better on those copies. And for mail order, you can sell at cover price, it costs about 80 cents to mail a comic book in the USA individually, so your $2.75 comic still gets you $1.95, or 95 cents profit per copy sold. You can also figure out how many copies you need to sell at the retail level, to make back your creator and advertising costs on the project, break even, and move into profit range. The 60% off cover/ 150% added formula can be used for that by changing the # printed up and down to see where your RPCP gives you the cover price you want, and then just play with the numbers till you see how doing a series of shorter run copies can ADD UP later to profits, and how many copies that will take, etc. Knowing your limits you can spend, and how to reach goals and use them to get to bigger goals, all the while building your audience so the next book does better off the bat...is the name of the game we're in, in small press/self publishing/short run printing.

If you have any questions on setting your cover prices, always feel free to discuss them with us in the Printing Forum