Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

The company was formed in 1982 and has used The Choir Press as a trading name since 1994.

Print on demand mono and colour books.
Short run mono and colour books.
Long run books including high quality colour books.

No, we charge for the services we provide to publish your book.

No. Our contract with you will state the process and procedure we will apply to publish your book but the intellectual property rights remain firmly with you. Our publishing contract grants us permission to place your intellectual property in printed book or ebook format in the public domain but it gives us no additional rights, and you may withdraw permission by giving 30 days notice in writing.

Print On Demand is our service to print small quantities of books as they are needed. When a consumer orders a single copy from a bookshop or online bookseller a book is printed to fufil that order. It avoids the need for stockholding and the expense of distributing pre-printed stock to booksellers.

Short run printing enables us to provide books to printed specifications not available with print-on-demand. Short run printing does not include fulfillment of consumer orders and there may be a minimum quantity – say 30 copies - that we can print to a particular specification. Short runs will be delivered to you.

Long run printing usually means quantities of at least 500 books per order and enables us to give you the lowest production cost per book and we can offer more manufacturing specifications than Print On Demand or short run printing. Long runs will be delivered in bulk in cartons.

You receive the profit after deducting the costs of production and the discount we give to booksellers.

For Print On Demand reorders it's 1. For short run printing usually between 20-50 and for long run printing it's usually 500 or more depending on the specification of the book.

Yes, we supply hardback books with or without dust jackets as well as with a printed paper case. A printed paper case (PPC) is a hardback book where the coloured cover is an integral part of the hard case and is not a separate dust jacket wrapped around.

Yes. All our books are produced with a colour cover and there is no cost saving if you don't have a colour cover unless you are having a hardback book without a dust jacket.

The cost of preparing sample pages is included in our contract price. If you ask us to prepare sample pages before submitting an order we will charge a design fee to prepare a sample spread. This must be prepaid but if you proceed to place an order with us you can offset the payment against your bill.

Yes we'll help you to obtain an ISBN for your book. We can not supply an ISBN if you are not publishing your book with us.

If you want your book to be available for the general public to order from the internet or a bookshop you will need an ISBN. If the book is a private publication that you will be distributing among family, friends and personal contacts you do not need an ISBN. You may publish privately and then subsequently apply for an ISBN and incorporate it in a revised printing.

You can email us or phone 01452 500016 (and talk to a real person straight away!) or you can arrange to visit us. Our service is personal and we are always pleased to meet our customers.

We require a minimum of £250 (or 10% of the estimated order value if greater) with order and the balance immediately prior to printing.

Subject to a few exceptions VAT is not charged on printed books i.e. they are zero rated for VAT purposes. The exceptions include, among others, address books, diaries and notebooks. Please ask us if you are concerned your book may be liable to standard rate VAT. VAT is charged on all ebooks at the standard rate.

You own the books (where stock is printed i.e. if the service we provide is not print on demand) and you retain your copyright and intellectual property rights.

Unedited books are quickly identified by bookshops, reviewers and readers as books which have not been published by professionals.

A print-ready file is an Acrobat PDF file with all the printer fonts embedded and ready to be printed without any intervention. Images and text must be positioned exactly as they are to be printed because no alteration of the content of the file will be done. We will assist with the preliminary pages to ensure the correct presentation of the title, ISBN and copyright information is included.

The cover will need to be a SEPARATE PDF file and should include the back cover and spine. If you are preparing your own cover file we will tell you what the spine thickness should be. This varies depending on the printing method and paper you have selected.

If you would prefer us to assemble the cover from your components please ask us for a quote to do this. If you have several files which make up the main text we can join them together. Please refer to the file preparation guidelines.

A composed ready to print file in Microsoft Word must contain all images and text positioned exactly as they are to be printed including page numbers and running heads if applicable because no alteration of the content of the file will be done without incurring additional charges. We will assist with the preliminary pages to ensure the correct presentation of the title, ISBN and copyright information is included.

Microsoft Word files will sometimes change when they are moved from one computer to another (e.g. from you to us), due to differences in fonts and versions of software, so we will make a PDF file and send this to you for approval. Please check this file carefully to ensure the layout of text and images is what you intended. We will accept no liability for errors in the printed book that were in the PDF file.

If you are supplying a Word file of the inside pages we will assemble the cover from your layout instructions.

Please refer to the file preparation guidelines.