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Offset printing seduces authors with a low per-copy price that only appears when you order hundreds or thousands of copies at once — and the bill arrives before a single book sells. The honest question is not 'what is the cheapest per-copy price' but 'how many copies must I sell to get my money back'. That break-even number combines your fixed costs (editing, cover, formatting, proofs, marketing), your list price and the per-copy print cost that grows with page count. This calculator runs the full arithmetic and returns the exact run size where an offset order stops losing money — and, just as usefully, shows when print-on-demand is the wiser first move.
Offset printing gets cheaper per copy the more you print — but you pay for all of them up front. Enter your fixed costs, price and page count to find the exact run size where a print run stops losing money.
Everything you spend before the first sale that does not scale with copies: editing, cover design, interior formatting, ISBN and barcode, proof copies and the marketing budget for launch. Miss the marketing line and your break-even is fiction.
Yes — whenever your honest break-even exceeds a realistic first-year sales figure, or when you have no distribution channel for hundreds of copies. POD's per-copy cost is higher and margin thinner, but the risk is zero and the book is never out of stock.
Most self-published debuts sell in the low hundreds of copies in their first year, with a long tail afterwards. That is why a 2,000-copy offset order is the classic over-order — the maths rarely supports it before demand is proven.
Every tool answers instantly from our own knowledge and calculators — no AI wait, no account. Want the deeper, personalised version? Each has a $2.95 full report.