Foil Covers Help?

[MKAdams]

I'm looking at publishing an RPG.  I want a 5.5 x 8.5 book, black, with silver foil printing on the cover, with a textured paper.

Essentially, I want something that looks like this.

Anyone know how to find out how to price something like that?

[Eero Tuovinen]

How about asking a printer about it? They don't really get customers any other way, so they have a high incentive to answer when somebody asks for a price quote on a work. You don't even need to know the technical terms for what you want, just describe it in an exact manner and include photographs of similar work. That picture doesn't help much in picking the paper, but perhaps you have others.

If I understand you correctly in that you only want a textured paper on the cover (instead of the whole book), then that might be doable at a digital printer. Depends on the printer, though, and their readiness for doing that kind of work, so really the only way to find out how much it costs or if it's possible is to ask around. Don't ask from just one or two places, either; the prices on that kind of stuff are sure to swing around completely randomly based on the local set-up and skill set of any given printer.

[MKAdams]

How about asking a printer about it?

Can you do that?  It's been driving me crazy trying to price things, since everyone wants you to request a quote, and I don't want to talk to some business owner and get the hard sell and be pressured by salesman tactics when I'm just trying to get ballpark figures on how much this might cost if I decided to go this way.

Getting a quote when you aren't really intending to buy anything, you're just kind of curious because maybe someday you might think about maybe doing something, just seems really...I dunno.  Rude.  Like I'm wasting their time.  And then, you know, they'll want to sell me stuff and will hassle me.

I kind of hate how freaking hard it is to figure this stuff out.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Well - keeping in mind that I really only know about how printers operate in Finland - in my experience asking the printer about it is the only way to get reliable, current information. This being the case printers tend to understand even when I call/write them about the subject completely clueless. What would their options about it be? They could ignore me or refuse me knowledge, but is that a way to survive in a very competitive business environment? Is that the way to get me to print anything at all? Not here, at least, it's not! For me the largest problem with printers is that they sometimes promise to do things they actually can't do, not that they aren't happy to calculate prices for different work options - after all, the potential customer is most likely to order a work from a place where he's already asked a quote from, so calculating those price quotes is the most efficient marketing the printer could ever hope to be doing.

So yeah, unless it's completely different in your country, I suggest asking a printer or six about it. And if they try to sell you on something or are otherwise rude, hang up on them - assuming that you live in a free country, just asking about prices does not entitle the printer to your time or money. In my experience printers are well aware of this and are courteous and helpful to potential customers.

And I agree that it's annoying to have to work up a complete quote request when you just want to find out how much the weight of paper affects the cost of doing a print run, but that's how printers operate. I guess they've decided long ago that trying to explain the pricing system to the customer would just lead to misunderstandings and misexpectations, so it's better to just answer to completely defined project descriptions, not vague questions about parts of it. This doesn't mean that you can't have options in your quote request - it's quite commonplace for me to ask the printer about the same work in color and grayscale, in saddle-stitch or perfect binding, in 150 pages and in 250 pages - in general, just list all the variants you are interested in, and let the printer calculate how they each affect the price of the whole work. With enough quotes like that you will, in time, come to have some sense of what different things cost. I used to try to get a cost breakdown from printers after a work had been successfully finished, but I don't think some printers even know how to make one, and the rest don't apparently want to reveal their internal cost structure, or something like that.