CH1
"Red Guard"(NLYL)
Sounds about right actually. The History of Brixton I spoke of was about £5,000 I believe.I've just been involved in producing a book. We only got 1500 copies (all we could afford) of a 150 page journal-ish size (slightly bigger than A5) spine bound book with only the cover in colour, and it's cost us a bit over £3,500 just for the printing and the layout/design person. None of the writers got paid as it's a political project. Plus then they'll be other costs like ISBN number, etc. that I haven't stuck in there. We're working on it being about £4,500 when everything is in.
It's been done at a decent printers that pay well, and there might have been cheaper options (although looked at plenty of print-on-demand stuff and they never worked out significantly cheaper tbh) but from others experience they often come out of poorer quality and have other issues.
Raw materials and production costs have massively gone up for books in the last bit of time. It'll cost us about £3.00 per copy to print in the end, but then you give some away (writers, reviews, etc.) a few get damaged or lost. We're charging £4.50 a copy to cover some of those losses/free copies, but then distros and bookshops take a cut, and it ends up being £12 or more on the shelves. Then you have postage costs, envelopes, a website if you want to do that, etc etc. I'll be surprised if we break even in a year.
Was 104 pages similar page size to yours - all photos were black and white with colour cover.
All councillors got a complimentary copy (64) plus some officers.
The rest were sold at £9.99 each (still on sale - but had a revised 2nd printing)