Ink, paper and what it costs

This is the page to read before you design anything.

Ink is the big one

Printing cost is charged per page, and the ink choice moves that figure by several times over. Black ink is the cheapest by a wide margin; premium colour is the most expensive. Across a 60-page book the difference is several dollars a copy — which comes straight out of your royalty on every sale.

On most platforms, ink cannot be changed after you publish. Not "is awkward to change" — the option is fixed on a live listing. Choosing colour for a book that would have printed fine in black is a decision you will be paying for on every copy you ever sell.

This is why a layout book's premise screen leads with the print format instead of burying it below the title.

What Manuscript Studio shows you

The format controls show a printing cost and a minimum list price for your current settings.

The minimum list price is not a suggestion. It is the lowest price at which the platform's royalty covers the printing cost. Price below it and the listing is rejected.

Where the numbers come from — and when there are none

Manuscript Studio shows a cost only where it has the platform's own published figures. Everywhere else it shows nothing, deliberately.

You will see no number when:

• the platform does not publish its cost bands,
• the binding does not print in the ink you chose — some combinations simply do not exist, and that is flagged as a blocker rather than priced,
• your page count falls outside the published tiers.

The alternative would be extrapolating a confident-looking price for a book that cannot be manufactured. A blank is the honest answer, and it is the one you get.

Paper

Three choices where a platform offers them: white, cream and groundwood.

Paper affects two things — how the book feels, and how thick it is. Every sheet has a caliper, and the spine is page count times that caliper. Groundwood is bulkier, which authors of short books sometimes choose deliberately to get a spine wide enough to carry text.

Changing paper therefore changes your spine, and Manuscript Studio treats a confirmed spine as invalidated when you switch stock.

Bleed

Bleed is for art that runs off the edge of the trimmed page.

It grows the page asymmetrically — wider and taller, but not on the bound edge, because the bound edge cannot bleed. It also raises the platform's minimum outside margin.

Turn it on if your artwork reaches the paper's edge. Leave it off for a book of framed designs with white borders, where it only complicates the geometry.

Low-content books

Some platforms have a low-content classification for books that are mostly blank or repeating — journals, planners, notebooks.

It costs money in both directions:

• Tick it on a book that is not low-content and you may forfeit a free ISBN, series eligibility and expanded distribution.
• Fail to tick it on one that is and the title can be rejected.

Each preset carries the right answer for its category, sourced from the platform's own rules.

What to watch for

• Decide ink before you draw. A book designed in full colour and then moved to black ink usually looks wrong, because the artwork was composed for colour.
• Grey is not a safe middle ground in a black-ink book. Below a minimum fill percentage, light greys do not print at all — the lines come out broken. The preflight checks for this, and the coloring preset flattens AI line art to pure black and white for exactly this reason.
• A page count that changes changes everything downstream — spine, cost and minimum price. Measure late, and re-check after any edit.