Manual Printing
Manuals are important documents for any business or organization and you need to get them right. Whether you design and print a user guide, an instructional booklet, an onboarding handbook, an educational primer, a technical specification, a training workbook, or a service manual, it’s vital that the result is on-message both in terms of design, layout, functionality, and ease-of-use.
At QinPrinting, we believe your customers, clients, and employees deserve practical manuals whose quality and usefulness make their tasks easier, more effective, and a pleasure to carry out. With 25 years of success in the industry, an expert team, up-to-date design and printing technology, and a real commitment to customer service, we’re as proud of our industry-wide reputation as a practical manual printer as you are of your customers, hardworking staff, and other employees.
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Manual Instant Quote
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Custom Manual Printing Costs
At QinPrinting, we work closely with each organization to develop and print manuals, guides, and handbooks which not only present information and guidelines in a clear, easy-to-understand format that’s simple and intuitive to use, but that look great, too; showing your company’s commitment to your employees, clients, and customers. But of course, everyone must work within the constraints of a limited budget. That’s why we constantly analyze our work processes and supply chains to guarantee exceptional quality manuals at the best prices you’ll find anywhere in the industry.
So how much does it cost to print a manual with us? You can get an immediate estimate of the price of your manual from our at-a-glance pricing charts. Unlike run-of-the-mill offset printing services — which impose a strict MOQ (minimum order quantity) of 1,000 units or more—we offer a minimum order of just 100 copies of your manual and still with a competitive price tag. But you’ll see from the charts, the more manuals you order in a single run, the less each one costs.
Manual Printing Price Chart (5.5” x 8.5”)
All prices listed in USD
| Quantity | 100pcs | 500pcs | 1000pcs | 2000pcs | 5000pcs | 10000pcs | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Page count |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
|
64pp + 4pp |
$3.29
|
$329
|
$1.02
|
$512
|
$0.72
|
$715
|
$0.58
|
$1,166
|
$0.53
|
$2,672
|
$0.50
|
$5,041
|
|
80pp + 4pp |
$3.87
|
$387
|
$1.20
|
$598
|
$0.84
|
$837
|
$0.67
|
$1,340
|
$0.61
|
$3,041
|
$0.57
|
$5,672
|
|
120pp + 4pp |
$5.42
|
$542
|
$1.66
|
$828
|
$1.13
|
$1,130
|
$0.89
|
$1,774
|
$0.79
|
$3,972
|
$0.73
|
$7,329
|
|
256pp + 4pp |
$9.42
|
$942
|
$2.90
|
$1,448
|
$1.95
|
$1,948
|
$1.55
|
$3,090
|
$1.34
|
$6,720
|
$1.27
|
$12,722
|
- Please note that all prices are EXW our facility and do not include shipping costs.
- Cover: 250 gsm / 92 lb coated cover paper with matte lamination
- Interior: 105 gsm / 71 lb coated text paper, full color printing
- Wire-O binding
Manual Printing Price Chart (8.5” x 11”)
All prices listed in USD
| Quantity | 100pcs | 500pcs | 1000pcs | 2000pcs | 5000pcs | 10000pcs | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Page count |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
Unit |
Total |
|
16pp + 4pp |
$2.06
|
$206
|
$0.58
|
$288
|
$0.36
|
$358
|
$0.27
|
$535
|
$0.22
|
$1,113
|
$0.20
|
$2,038
|
|
24pp + 4pp |
$2.66
|
$266
|
$0.75
|
$373
|
$0.48
|
$480
|
$0.35
|
$707
|
$0.29
|
$1,471
|
$0.26
|
$2,644
|
|
32pp + 4pp |
$3.10
|
$310
|
$0.88
|
$439
|
$0.56
|
$561
|
$0.42
|
$845
|
$0.36
|
$1,781
|
$0.33
|
$3,278
|
- Please note that all prices are EXW our facility and do not include shipping costs.
- Cover: 200 gsm / 74 lb coated cover paper with matte lamination
- Interior: 128 gsm / 87 lb coated text paper, full color printing
- Saddle stitch
For a more precise quote, use our helpful online Printing Cost Calculator. Just navigate to the form, input in your specifications, and get an instant quote! If you have questions, get in touch and one of our enthusiastic printing team members — not a robot or a bored call center operator! — will be very pleased to help. We pride ourselves on personal service and individually tailored solutions for all the businesses and organizations we serve.
Common Manual Sizes
The size of your printed manual typically depends on your content, page count, layout, orientation, and materials. But there are obvious practical limits in most real-world situations.
- The standard 8.5” x 11” format is practical if you need to mail your manuals out, for example.
- Larger sizes—up to 7” x 12”—may be useful if your manual includes complex and detailed diagrams.
- Likewise, a 5.5” x 8.5” pocket-sized manual may be best.
At QinPrinting, we’re happy to create custom manuals in any size or format you wish. Only remember that extensive customization leads to higher costs and potentially slower turnaround times if there’s a lot more pre-press work and setup to do. But for certain applications, the increased investment could be worthwhile.
Manual Printing Paper Options
Manuals can have a very broad range of content from text to diagrams to full-color or black-and-white photographs and any combination of all these elements. While most include text, the images, diagrams, and photographs are often the focus and key means of communication in most practical manuals.
So, we recommend printing on gloss or matte art paper to get the best results if your manual includes a lot of photography. Gloss and matte both have ideal surfaces for vibrant printing that will reproduce your photographs with faithful color, contrast, and detail. Gloss paper is often best for manuals with full-color spreads and less text, whereas for manuals with more text, matte paper may be best. Matte paper still gives excellent quality color or black-and-white photo reproduction but keeps the text easier to read.
If your manual is the kind which relies heavily on line-drawn diagrams, it’s vital that the line printing is crisp and clear. You may print your diagrams in black on white or color. And if it’s important that the user can write on the surface of the pages, the most important quality that the interior paper must have is absorbency. If it’s too shiny, the ink from a pen or the marks from a pencil won’t stick. If it’s too fibrous, the ink may run and soak through.
At QinPrinting, we recommend white offset paper for most text or diagram-based manuals. Offset paper — also known as uncoated wood-free paper or UWF — has the lignin extracted during the pulping process. The result is a natural-looking, absorbent white paper with a good balance of strength, opacity, and brightness, which makes it ideal for text, line drawings, and writing on. We measure paper thickness by weight. For a manual, the paper should be at least 100 gsm / 68 lb; but 120 gsm / 80 lb or even 140 gsm / 95 lb would be better to avoid the print bleeding through to the other side.
For the cover, we suggest coated gloss or matte art paper. If you’ll print only on the outside of the cover, then only one side need be coated. If you want to print on the inside cover, too, then you’ll need paper with both sides coated. Coated paper is more durable and resistant than offset and so it helps protect the interior. It also makes your cover design bolder and more attractive. We recommend 250 to 300 gsm / 168 to 200 lb gloss or matte coated art paper for your manual covers.
You’ll need at least two paper specifications for your manuals: one for the interior pages and one for the cover. While most manuals are not bound in hardcovers, certain industries—such as the automotive industry—favor hardcover binding. In that case, you may also wish to include end papers, which may be the same paper as the interior, or you can choose something different; a heavier, colored or textured paper, for example.
Paper Options for Manuals
Sewn perfect binding—a style of paperback which can lay flat with the pages open without breaking the spine—is a popular choice for high-quality manuals that will need to be used “hands-free” and endure repeated consultation. This binding style needs the spine to be at least 3 mm thick. The other most popular bindings for manuals are spiral bound and saddle stitched. We’ll explain what they are below. Hardcover binding is another option, especially for a professional, high-end look and feel and commonly chosen for automotive and engineering manuals, for example. Here’s a helpful list of the most popular paper types:
Cover Paper
- 200 gsm / 74 lb gloss cover paper
- 250 gsm / 92 lb gloss cover paper
- 300 gsm / 111 lb gloss cover paper
- 350 gsm / 129 lb gloss cover paper
- 200 gsm / 74 lb matte cover paper
- 250 gsm / 92 lb matte cover paper
- 300 gsm / 111 lb matte cover paper
Interior Paper
- 105 gsm / 71 lb coated text paper
- 128 gsm / 86 lb coated text paper
- 157 gsm / 106 lb coated text paper
- 200 gsm / 135 lb coated text paper
- 80 gsm / 54 lb uncoated text paper
- 100 gsm / 68 lb uncoated text paper
- 120 gsm / 81 lb uncoated text paper
- 140 gsm / 95 lb uncoated text paper
Hardcover Paper
- 157 gsm / 58 lb coated cover paper wrapped on 2 mm grey board
- 157 gsm / 58 lb coated cover paper wrapped on 2.5 mm grey board
- 157 gsm / 58 lb coated cover paper wrapped on 3 mm grey board
- Other paper, cloth, vinyl, or imitation leather wrapped on grey board
Bindings for Manuals
While manual may vary widely in shape and size, the choice of binding is very important for reasons because it needs to be attractive, practical, and durable. Here’s a helpful explanation of the most common, professional-looking manual binding options. You can open all the following bindings flat.
We use this binding style for numerous manuals that we print. We collate the interior pages into sets called “signatures”, which are then sewn together and fixed into a wrap-around cover made of heavier art paper or lightweight card stock. For manuals with a moderate page count, this is a practical option.
To saddle stitch your manual, we fold the printed interior sheets and stack them inside the cover sheet before stapling them together down the curved edge. This binding is only possible with a page count divisible by four. The highest practical page count for saddle stitch binding is 48.
This binding is another popular choice for manuals because of its practicality and flexibility. We punch or drill holes into the pages down one side and then bind them with a plastic coil which spirals through the holes. We crimp the coil at both ends so the pages don’t come loose. You can turn the pages of a spiral-bound manual through 360° and also lay the open manual completely flat. We can laminate the pages to make them extra-resistant to UV light, fingerprints, and spillages. For a tough manual that needs to work hard either in a workshop, laboratory, or outdoors, this is a great option.
In this binding, we organize the interior pages into signatures which are then printed, cut, and sewn, before we glue them into a hard casing covered by a printed sheet which forms the cover. This binding is the most durable and professional-looking.
Whichever binding style you choose, we know that as a busy professional running a business, you already have a lot on your plate, so we like to make it easy for you to design your manual with the option to choose one of our ready-made design templates. And ask us for paper samples, too. We’ll be happy to drop them to you in the mail at no added cost.
Manual Design and Artwork Tips
It’s important that both you and your designer or design team understand how to prepare your manual’s files for printing. You’ll need to consider and set up bleed zones, safety areas, trim lines, and borders, for example, and make sure that the resolution and the color space are correct. With that in mind, here are a few useful tips to help you when you’re getting your design files “print-ready”.
Export your files as vectors in PDF format for the best results. Our recommended software options for yearbook design are Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign. These will also allow you to convert your color space from RGB to CMYK which you will need to do for offset printing.
If you can’t deliver vectors — say, if you’re exporting bitmaps from Photoshop — then make sure the resolution is at least 300 DPI. With vectors, you needn’t worry about resolution, but all other images must have a high definition to tolerate resizing without becoming fuzzy and “pixilated”.
You’ll need to add a “bleed zone” of 3 mm around all your pages. A bleed is an extended zone at the periphery of a photo or image, which falls outside the area that your finished page will cover. Once we’ve printed your pages, we’ll cut them to the exact size needed for your chosen manual format. This “bit extra” gets cut off and makes sure that the finished image fills the page with none of it being lost.
Inside your bleed zone, don’t forget to mark the “trim lines”. These should be green and will define the final dimensions of the finished page. Make sure that any necessary elements of your images stop at least 10 mm short of the trim line.
For a spiral bound manual, leave an added margin of at least 6 mm on the edge that we’ll bind the manual to allow for the holes.
If you’re working with a professional designer to create your print files, they should know already what’s needed to make everything “print ready”. But if you’re working with design software yourself—we recommend Adobe Illustrator or InDesign—these are the vital tips to remember before you submit your files to us for printing. The responsibility for sending “print ready” files rests with you, but please don’t sweat it if you’re new to all this! We’ll be happy to “hold your hand” through the process, explain what’s needed, liaise with your designer as required, and manually check everything ourselves to make sure it all goes smoothly and you end up with a perfect print of your manual.
To learn more about preparing your photographs, diagrams, text, and layout for printing, please check out our Pre-press Artwork information page.
Let’s Talk!
If you’re shouldering the responsibility for your company’s manual design and printing—and you’d like to deliver a high-quality professional manual and at an unbeatable price—we should talk. Get in touch today—either by telephone, email, Skype, or our simple contact form—to chat through your needs or to ask for a no-obligation quote. We can’t wait to help you make your manual one of the most impressive and practical yet.