One of the questions I get asked most often, usually by authors who are new to publishing, is how many copies of their book we plan to print. It sounds like a simple question with a numerical answer. It is neither. The decision about print run size involves economics, logistics, educated guesswork, and occasionally a leap of faith that keeps me up at night. I want to walk through how we actually make this decision at ScrollWorks Media, because I think it reveals something about the inner workings of publishing that most people never see.

The Basic Economics of Printing

Let me start with the fundamental fact that drives every print run decision: the more copies you print, the less each copy costs. This is because a significant portion of the expense in printing a book is in the setup, not the per-unit production. A printer has to create plates, calibrate the press, run test sheets, set up the binding equipment, and adjust for paper weight and trim size. Whether you’re printing 500 copies or 50,000, those setup costs are roughly the same. The difference is that with 50,000 copies, you spread those fixed costs across a much larger number of units.

To give you a concrete example: for a standard trade paperback (roughly 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 300 pages, black and white interior), a print run of 1,000 copies might cost around $4.50 per unit. Bump that up to 5,000 copies, and the per-unit cost might drop to $2.50. At 10,000 copies, you might be down to $1.80. And at 50,000 copies, you could be paying $1.20 or less per book. Those numbers are approximate and vary by printer, paper stock, and other factors, but the pattern holds. Volume discounts in printing are steep.

This creates an obvious temptation: print as many copies as possible to minimize the per-unit cost. And if you could guarantee that every copy would sell, that would be the right strategy. But you can’t guarantee that, and unsold copies are not free. They cost money to warehouse. They cost money to ship back from bookstores that didn’t sell them. And eventually, if they sit unsold long enough, they cost money to pulp, which is the publishing industry’s euphemism for destroying them. I’ve watched pallets of books get loaded onto trucks headed for recycling, and it’s not a pleasant experience.

The Variables We Consider

When we’re deciding on a print run at ScrollWorks, we look at a bunch of factors. None of them gives us a definitive answer, but together they help us triangulate a reasonable number.

The first factor is pre-orders and advance interest. If we’ve been marketing a book and taking pre-orders through our distribution channels, those numbers give us the closest thing to hard data that we’ll get before publication. A book with 2,000 pre-orders needs a first print run of at least 4,000 to 5,000, because pre-orders typically represent a fraction of total initial demand. But the ratio of pre-orders to first-month sales varies wildly by genre, by author platform, and by how much marketing we’ve done. For an author with a large social media following, pre-orders might represent 30 to 40 percent of first-month sales. For a debut author with no platform, pre-orders might represent 10 percent or less.

The second factor is comparable titles. We look at books that are similar in subject, audience, and positioning and see how they performed. This is more art than science, because no two books are truly comparable, but it gives us a range. If the three most similar books we can find all had first print runs between 3,000 and 7,000 copies, that tells us something about the likely demand for our title. We won’t print 50,000 copies of a book in a category where the ceiling appears to be 10,000.

The third factor is the author’s platform and marketing plan. An author with 100,000 engaged followers on social media, a popular newsletter, or regular speaking engagements can move books in ways that an unknown debut author cannot. We factor this in, though we try to be realistic. Having followers doesn’t automatically translate into book sales. I’ve seen authors with huge online audiences sell surprisingly few copies, because their audience follows them for content that’s different from what the book offers.

The fourth factor is the publication schedule and season. Books published in the fall, particularly in October and November, benefit from holiday gift-buying. Books published in January often face slower initial sales because the retail market is sluggish after the holidays. We might print slightly more copies of a fall title and slightly fewer of a winter one, all else being equal.

The fifth factor, and this is the one that’s hardest to quantify, is our own editorial judgment about the book’s potential. Sometimes you read a manuscript and you just feel it. The writing is electric, the subject is timely, the voice is distinctive. That feeling doesn’t always translate into sales, but it’s not nothing. We’ve been wrong about books we were enthusiastic about, and we’ve been wrong about books we were cautious about. But over time, editorial instinct has proven to be a useful data point, especially when the other signals are ambiguous.

The Risk Calculation

Every print run is a bet. You’re putting money on the table before you know the outcome. The question is how to size that bet so that the downside is manageable and the upside is captured.

Here’s the scenario we want to avoid most: printing too few copies and running out of stock in the first few weeks. This is worse than it sounds. When a book gets attention, whether from a review, a podcast appearance, a social media moment, or just strong word of mouth, there’s a window of maybe two to four weeks when demand peaks. If you don’t have books available during that window, you miss sales that you will never recover. The reader who can’t find your book today will find a different book tomorrow. Bookstores that can’t restock will give the shelf space to something else. The momentum dies.

Reprinting takes time. Even with a cooperative printer, a reprint run typically takes three to four weeks from the decision to order to the arrival of finished books in the warehouse. If you’re using an overseas printer (many publishers use printers in China or India for color-intensive books), the turnaround can be eight to twelve weeks. During that entire period, your book is out of stock, and every day out of stock is lost revenue and lost momentum.

On the other side, printing too many copies isn’t immediately catastrophic, but it hurts your cash flow and your storage costs. A small publisher like us doesn’t have unlimited warehouse space. Every pallet of unsold books in our warehouse is capital that’s tied up and unavailable for other projects. If we print 10,000 copies of a book that only sells 3,000, we’ve got 7,000 copies occupying space and slowly depreciating. After a year or two, we’ll have to decide whether to continue warehousing them (at a cost) or remainder them (sell them at a steep discount) or pulp them (a total loss).

Print on Demand: The Safety Net

The rise of print-on-demand (POD) technology has fundamentally changed the risk calculation for small publishers. With POD, you can print individual copies of a book as orders come in. There’s no minimum order quantity, no setup fees, and no warehousing. The trade-off is that the per-unit cost is much higher, typically $5 to $8 for a standard trade paperback, which is two to four times what you’d pay for an offset run of a few thousand copies.

We use POD strategically at ScrollWorks. For titles where we’re uncertain about demand, we might do a small offset run (1,500 to 2,000 copies) to fill initial orders and bookstore placement, with POD as a backup to prevent stockouts while we evaluate whether to do a larger reprint. This hybrid approach lets us capture the cost advantages of offset printing for the copies we’re confident we’ll sell while using POD as insurance against the copies we’re not sure about.

POD has also made it possible to keep books in print indefinitely, which was genuinely difficult for small publishers in the pre-digital era. Before POD, once a book’s initial print run was exhausted, the publisher had to decide whether the remaining demand justified a reprint. If the book was selling 50 copies a year, a reprint of 1,000 copies would take twenty years to sell through, which didn’t make financial sense. So the book would go out of print. Now, with POD, those 50 copies a year can be printed on demand at a reasonable cost, and the book stays available. This is genuinely good for authors, readers, and the cultural ecosystem.

What Happens When You Get It Wrong

I’ll tell you about a mistake we made early on, because I think it’s instructive. We published a book that we were extremely excited about. The writing was strong, the subject was timely, and the author had a modest but engaged platform. We decided on a first print run of 5,000 copies, which for us at the time was ambitious. We planned a robust marketing campaign and secured some good advance reviews.

Then the book came out, and the response was… fine. Not bad, but not the breakout we’d hoped for. First-month sales were around 1,200 copies. Six-month sales were around 2,000. A year later, we’d sold about 2,800 copies and had 2,200 sitting in our warehouse. The book wasn’t a failure by any reasonable measure, but we’d overprinted by about 40 percent, and those extra copies represented thousands of dollars in tied-up capital and warehousing costs.

What went wrong? In retrospect, we overweighted our own enthusiasm and underweighted the comparable titles data, which suggested a more modest first-year sales trajectory. We also assumed that the marketing campaign would generate more organic word-of-mouth than it did. The campaign was fine; it just didn’t create the multiplier effect we’d counted on. Lesson learned: be honest about what you know and what you’re hoping for, and don’t let hope drive your print run number.

On the flip side, I’ve also experienced the pain of under-printing. We published a title that we expected to be a modest performer, printed 2,000 copies, and then watched in disbelief as a prominent podcast featured the author and the book went from selling 20 copies a day to 200 copies a day overnight. We sold out within a week. The reprint took three weeks. During those three weeks, the book was unavailable on Amazon, unavailable in most bookstores, and we missed what was probably $15,000 to $20,000 in sales. Some of those readers came back when we restocked; many didn’t.

The Data We Wish We Had

The publishing industry is, frankly, not great at data. Compared to other industries, we make major financial decisions with remarkably little information. A tech company launching a new product has user testing, beta feedback, analytics, and market research to guide its decisions. A publisher launching a new book has… pre-orders, comparable titles, and gut feeling.

There’s a service called BookScan, run by NPD Group, that tracks point-of-sale data from most major book retailers in the United States. It’s useful, but it only captures an estimated 75 to 80 percent of print sales and doesn’t cover e-book sales, library sales, or many independent bookstores. So when we look at BookScan data for a comparable title and see that it sold 5,000 copies in its first year, the actual number might be 6,000 to 7,000, but we don’t know for sure.

Other data points we’d love to have but don’t include: how many people saw our marketing and were interested but didn’t pre-order; how many bookstore browsers picked up the book, read the jacket, and put it back; how many people added the book to a wish list and plan to buy it later. This kind of intent data exists in the digital advertising world but barely exists in publishing. We’re essentially flying by instruments that were designed for a simpler era.

How Small Publishers Differ from Big Ones

The Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan) have advantages in the print run game that small publishers like us don’t. They have dedicated sales teams that visit bookstores and present upcoming titles months in advance, gathering orders that give them a solid baseline for print run decisions. They have long-standing relationships with printers that give them better per-unit pricing and faster turnaround on reprints. And they have deeper financial cushions that let them absorb the occasional overprint without it threatening their solvency.

A small publisher printing 3,000 copies of a book has a lot more riding on that decision than a large publisher printing 30,000. Our margins are thinner, our cash reserves are smaller, and a single significant overprint can affect our ability to fund the next season’s titles. This makes us more cautious by necessity, which sometimes means we miss upside potential. It’s a constant balancing act between prudence and ambition.

On the positive side, small publishers can make decisions faster. When we see strong early signals, we can authorize a reprint within hours. A large publisher might need to route that decision through multiple layers of approval. Speed matters when you’re trying to keep a hot book in stock, and this is one area where being small works to our advantage.

The Emotional Side

I want to acknowledge something that publishers don’t talk about much: the emotional weight of print run decisions. When an author has spent years writing a book and has trusted us to publish it, the print run number carries a symbolic significance that goes beyond economics. A large print run signals confidence. A small one can feel like a vote of no confidence, even when it’s the smart financial decision.

I’ve had uncomfortable conversations with authors who felt that our print run was too small, who interpreted our caution as a lack of faith in their work. These conversations are hard, because the author isn’t wrong to care, and our caution isn’t wrong either. The best I can do is be transparent about how we made the decision, what data we used, and how we plan to manage inventory going forward. Most authors, once they understand the economics, appreciate the honesty.

The truth is that a successful book often goes through multiple printings, and there’s something exciting about that. When we call an author to say “We’re going back to press,” it’s a celebration. It means the book is connecting with readers, and we need more copies to meet demand. Some of the best moments I’ve had in publishing have been making those calls. The first print run is a guess. The second print run is evidence.

For anyone curious about how these decisions play out across different types of books, take a look at our catalog. Each title, from Echoes of Iron to Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, has its own story of how we landed on the right number, and sometimes how we had to adjust along the way.