A Book With Your Shop’s Name On It

Most branded merchandise is forgettable. A pen with your logo goes in a drawer. A tote bag hauls groceries and is never thought about again. A stress ball gets squeezed twice.

A book is different. Someone spends hours inside it, at a kitchen table, on a sofa, on a train, and your name is on the cover the entire time. No other branded object gets that kind of attention, at any price.

We’ll make you one. A coloring book, activity book, journal, novella or full novel, branded to your business and built around what you actually do, patterns and colourways for a wool shop, flash designs for a tattoo studio, botanicals for a garden centre, cocktails for a bar, walking routes for a hotel.

It’s a real book, not a promotional item

This is the part that separates it from branded merchandise.

Every title we produce for you receives a US-registered ISBN through our Bowker registration and a listing in the trade directory. That means it exists in the international book trade as a published work. It can be catalogued, ordered, referenced and resold. It has a barcode that scans.

You decide whether it appears in the Tinge World catalogue. If you’d rather it were exclusive to your premises, we keep it out entirely, and then nobody else can stock it, because nobody else has it.

No obligation to stock anything else

You do not have to become a Book Nook. You don’t have to carry our other titles, take part in our programmes, or commit to anything ongoing.

At full price, this is a straightforward commission. You pay, we produce, the book is yours to sell.

The only requirement is the last step of production: the final proof, plus ten copies. We ask for that because a book that gets made and never printed serves nobody, not you, not the artist who drew it, and not us. Ten copies is the smallest run that puts the thing into actual hands and tells you whether it works.

After that, order as many or as few as you like, whenever you like.

What it costs

Format	Price
Coloring book, activity book or journal	€600
Novella, to 50,000 words	€1,200
Each additional 18,000 words	+€150

That covers the whole job: concept development against your brief, artwork, layout, print specification, cover build, the ISBN, and the trade directory registration.

Discounts of 35% and 50% are available if you’re willing to commit to hosting quarterly events or to a consignment stocking arrangement, that’s covered in our post for Book Nook stockists. Everything on this page is the no-strings version.

What you make on it

You buy your own branded stock at unit cost plus 20% and keep everything above that.

On a book retailing at €18.45 with a unit cost of €8.61, you pay €10.58 and keep €7.87 a copy.

A €600 branded coloring book clears at 77 copies sold. Everything after that is margin you share with nobody.

For a shop with steady footfall, 77 copies is a season. For a hotel with a gift counter, less.

And you set the price

Worth knowing, because it’s the opposite of what a Dutch publisher can offer you.

The Netherlands operates a fixed book price law, the wet op de vaste boekenprijs. Where it applies, the publisher sets the retail price and no retailer may deviate from it, up or down. Germany’s Buchpreisbindung works the same way.

Language is what decides it. The Dutch law binds books containing Dutch or Frisian text; a book written entirely in another language falls outside it, and the law states plainly that where it was published makes no difference. Our ISBNs are US-registered through Bowker, but that is registry housekeeping rather than the mechanism, a book with no ISBN at all would still be caught if it were in Dutch.

So the price on your branded book is yours to decide and yours to change. Charge more in a premium location. Bundle it with a gift set. Run a different figure at a Christmas market than on your counter in February. Put a signed edition at a signed-edition price.

If you want the book in Dutch

We produce in English by default, and that is the version with pricing freedom.

We will produce in Dutch if that is what your customers need, but you should understand what changes. A Dutch-language title with real prose in it falls under the fixed book price law: we would have to register it with the Commissariaat voor de Media, set a fixed price, and neither of us could then deviate from that price. No promotions, no premium pricing, no bundling below the set figure.

Two things soften that. A book that is largely wordless, a colouring or activity book, falls outside the law on a separate test regardless of language, so a Dutch-language colouring book is generally still free. And a one-off print run commissioned by a single buyer may sit outside it too.

The short version: wordless in any language is fine, and prose in English is fine. Dutch prose is the one combination that costs you flexibility. Tell us what you need and we’ll tell you plainly which side of that line it falls on.

How long it takes

Coloring books, activity books and journals: two to four weeks from signed-off brief to finished book.

Novellas and novels: we’ll agree a date. Subject matter affects the schedule more than word count does, some topics research and write quickly and others genuinely don’t. We’d rather give you a real date than a flattering one.

Who this actually suits

It isn’t only for shops.

Retailers with a specific trade and a customer base that identifies with it, wool, tattoo, garden, craft, cycling, brewing.

Hotels, B&Bs and holiday lets, where a branded book in the room is both an amenity and a gift-shop line. Local walks, local wildlife, local history.

Cafés and bars with a regular crowd and a strong identity.

Businesses with a story worth telling, a brewery, a distillery, a family firm with a hundred years behind it. That’s the novella end of the range.

Anyone who has been quoted for branded merchandise and found it dispiriting. A book costs

less than a decent run of printed hoodies and lasts considerably longer.

The artwork, and using it elsewhere

You own your brand, your trade marks and anything you supply. That doesn’t change.

We own the artwork, layout and text we create, and license it to you for the book.

If you want that artwork on other things, mugs, t-shirts, tote bags, prints, cards, signage, ask us to make them. We’re open to requests, and where a run is worth doing there are discounts on the products themselves. It’s usually cheaper than commissioning artwork separately, because the files and the production contacts already exist.

If you’d rather hold the rights yourself, they’re available to buy. Tell us the scope, which artwork, which products, how long, exclusive or not, and we’ll quote. It’s negotiable and it isn’t on a rate card, because no two requests are alike.

One thing to know about the content

Our house style is adult. The humour in our catalogue is adult and several titles are pointedly sarcastic.

Your branded book is built to your brief, so it will be whatever you specify within that, but we don’t produce children’s titles, and we won’t take on a brief aimed at under-18s. If that’s what you need, we’re not the right studio for it.

Getting started

Tell us what your business does, who your customers are, and roughly what you have in mind. We’ll come back with a proposed concept, a format, and a date.

The brief gets signed off before anything is produced, so you know exactly what’s being made before you commit.

Want a book with your name on it? Tell us about your business and what you’d like it to be.

[Talk to us about a branded title]

Also worth reading: stocking our catalogue titles and how to get 35% or 50% off a branded book.