Built by real book printers.

The Self Publishing Site is built and maintained by the family of companies behind Imprint Digital, a book printing company in Exeter, England, and Imprint Academic, an independent publisher whose journals — including History of Political Thought and the Journal of Consciousness Studies — have been in print since 1980. Between them, the group has been publishing, printing and binding books for over four decades.

That is the experience these tools are drawn from. We are not a software company that chose books as a niche; we are book people who built the software we wished our customers had.

The calculators on this site use the print trade's real arithmetic. The book printing cost calculator is built on genuine trade rates — setup, per-page click costs, real paper stocks with their true calipers. The spine width calculator uses the same paper data our press does. KDP figures come from Amazon's published fee tables, and the cost guides quote market-rate bands rather than single made-up numbers.

Where a figure is an estimate, the page says so. Where it depends on choices only you can make, we give you the range and the tool to model your own.

Every tool runs free, in your browser, with no account. The business model is simple and printed on the tin: some of the people who plan a book here will want physical copies, and when they do, our sister company Imprint Digital would like to quote for the printing. No lock-in, no upsell emails — the tools are useful whether you ever print with us or not.

Publishing conventions shift — fee tables change, standards move. Every dated page on this site shows when it was last substantively updated, and we only bump those dates when the content genuinely changes. If you spot something out of date or plain wrong, we want to know: reach us through Imprint Digital's contact details and it will find its way to the person who wrote it.