Stock Our Books, Get Your Own, How the Discounts Work

Two things we do separately are cheaper together.

We supply coloring books, activity books and journals to shops that don’t normally sell books. And we produce custom titles branded to a single business. If you’re doing both, the branded title costs 35% or 50% less, depending on what you’re willing to commit to.

This post is the detail on that trade. If you only want one or the other, those have their own pages: stocking our catalogue and a branded book with no strings.

The three prices

Format	Standard	Events commitment	Consignment commitment
Coloring book, activity book or journal	€600	€390	€300
Novella, to 50,000 words	€1,200	€780	€600
Each additional 18,000 words	+€150	+€97.50	+€75

Both discounts run for nine months from the day your finished book is delivered.

Nine months is deliberate. It covers a full seasonal cycle, because a new product tested over one quiet month tells neither of us anything useful. The discount is us investing in the title’s chances alongside you, and the commitment is what makes that worth doing.

Option one: the events commitment, 35% off

You host a colouring session, a reading, or a comparable event once in each quarter of the nine months. On your premises, or as a branded appearance somewhere else, a library, a market, a community centre.

Tinge World gets name and logo recognition at each one: on the promotion, on signage, and in any social posts about it. We supply that material.

That’s the whole obligation. No consignment, no weekly reporting, no unannounced visits. You keep buying catalogue stock on ordinary purchased terms, exactly as any other shop does.

If you’re already the kind of business that runs events, this is close to free money. If you’re not, four events across nine months is still a manageable ask, and we help organise them.

One rule at events: participants colour in a sample book, never on photocopies. We don’t permit reproduction of any page by any means, at events or anywhere else, and it’s the one term we terminate over without discussion. A loose photocopy is worth nothing and teaches your customer the book is worth nothing either.

Option two: the consignment commitment, 50% off

You run a full consignment arrangement for the nine months. That means:

• No stock to buy. You pay nothing upfront for catalogue titles and settle only for what sells

• You’re responsible for the stock. Anything missing, damaged or unaccounted for is charged at unit cost plus 60%

• Weekly settlement. Every seven days, for what sold in the previous seven, with a short sales report

• An agreed display. We work it out with your premises rather than handing you a specification, and we supply any cases, holders or signage needed, which stay our property

• Staff who know the products. We provide the material; keeping the team familiar with it is yours

• Unannounced visits. No schedule, deliberately. A display arranged in advance tells neither of us anything

• An event each quarter, as above

• You sell postage stamps. We’re expanding into postcards, and stamp approval also means standards we’d otherwise verify have already been assessed

Consignment stock is capped at €150 to start, reviewed at six months, and available in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany only, the arrangement depends on our being able to reach you.

Which to take

Take the events commitment if you already buy stock comfortably, or if weekly admin sounds worse than four afternoons of hosting. It’s the lighter obligation by a distance.

Take the consignment commitment if cash flow matters more than autonomy, or if you’d genuinely rather we were involved. It saves you €90 on a coloring book and removes stock outlay entirely, but the weekly settlement is real work and the visits are real visits.

If neither appeals, pay the standard price and owe us nothing. That’s a perfectly good answer and we’d rather you chose it than resent an arrangement you didn’t want.

What the branded title earns you

This is why the discount matters more than it looks.

On your own branded title you’re in the creator’s position, not the stockist’s. You buy at unit cost plus 20%, our share only, and keep everything above it.

	Catalogue title	Your branded title
Floor price	€18.45	€18.45
You pay	€14.51	€10.58
You keep per copy	€3.94	€7.87

Double, on a book with your name on the cover.

At €300 with the consignment discount, that clears in 39 copies. At €390 with the events discount, 50 copies. At full price, 77.

Branded stock is always purchased, never consigned. It doesn’t count against the €150 cap.

The angle most shops miss: a book about the people who already like you

Everything above assumes the branded book sells to whoever happens to walk in. The shops that do best with this don’t leave it to chance, they build the book around a group that already has a reason to want it, so the audience exists before the ink dries.

If you sponsor something, you have that group already.

A café sponsoring an amateur cycling club. A route book with the club’s own jerseys on the cover, the local climbs mapped, the members’ names in the back. Every rider wants one. So does every rider’s partner, and the club treasurer wants forty for the end-of-season dinner.

A pub backing a darts side or a Sunday league team. Team-branded activity book, fixtures inside, in-jokes the squad will recognise. That’s not a book you have to sell, it’s a book people ask you for.

A garden centre with an allotment society. Botanical colouring pages of what actually grows on that site, planting calendar in the back, the society’s crest on the cover.

A brewery with a tap room crowd. A regulars’ book. Members are already wearing your merchandise; this is the version that lasts.

A salon or studio with a loyal client base. Your own artists’ work, your own style, a book only your clients can get.

Running clubs, rowing clubs, motorcycle clubs, choirs, amateur dramatics, walking groups, trade associations, alumni networks, allotment committees, any organised group of adults with a shared identity works the same way. The tighter the group, the better it works.

Why this changes the numbers

A counter title sells to strangers on impulse. An affinity title sells to people who are already invested, and it sells in quantity to one buyer.

A club that orders forty copies for a dinner or a season launch is a single conversation. At €7.87 a copy on your own branded title, that one order is €315, most of a €390 events-discount title cleared in an afternoon.

And a club can run it as a fundraiser themselves. You supply at your cost, they sell at the floor price or above, and the difference funds their kit. You’ve moved forty copies, they’ve raised money, and both your names are on the cover of something people keep.

The jubileum, specifically

If a group you sponsor has an anniversary coming, 25 years, 50, 100, that is the single best opening this whole approach has.

Dutch and German clubs mark a jubileum properly. There is usually a committee, a budget line, and a genuine problem: nobody knows what to commission that isn’t another plaque or another framed photograph. A bound book with the club’s history, its grounds, its kit and its members in it, carrying a real ISBN and a trade directory listing, is a considerably better answer, and it is the one product in our range where the buyer arrives already convinced.

If you are the sponsor, you can underwrite it and have your name on the cover of the thing the club keeps for the next twenty-five years. That is worth more than a season of shirt advertising and it costs less.

Anniversaries are planned a year out, so the conversation to have is the one happening now about next year. We’ve written about this separately: a jubileum book for a club or association.

One boundary worth knowing

This works with adult groups. It doesn’t work with youth teams, school sides or anything aimed at under-18s, our titles are adult and we don’t produce for children, so a junior squad isn’t a route we can support. The senior side, the supporters’ club, the veterans’ team and the committee all are.

And you set the price on all of it

Worth spelling out, because if you’ve stocked Dutch-language books you’ll know the opposite.

The Netherlands has a fixed book price law, the wet op de vaste boekenprijs. Where it applies, the publisher sets the retail price and the shop cannot deviate. Not down, not up. Germany does the same for German-language titles.

The test is language, not where the book comes from. Books containing Dutch or Frisian text are bound; books written entirely in another language are not, and the law is explicit that place of publication is irrelevant. Our titles are in English, which is what puts them outside it.

The US-registered ISBNs are registry housekeeping, a book with no ISBN would still be caught if it were in Dutch.

So every title we supply you, catalogue or branded, carries a floor price and you may sell at or above it. Charge a premium in a tourist location. Bundle at Christmas. Price a signed copy where a signed copy belongs. Anything above the floor is yours on top of your margin.

Ask a Dutch publisher offering something comparable in Dutch whether you can do that. The answer is no, and it isn’t up to them.

If you want your branded title in Dutch, say so early. Dutch prose brings the book under the fixed price law and takes that flexibility away. A largely wordless colouring or activity book stays outside it in any language, so most branded briefs aren’t affected, but a Dutch-language novella is, and that’s a conversation worth having before we start rather than after.

Discounts don’t stack

One rule that saves confusion later: you pick a discount, you don’t combine them.

The events commitment and the consignment commitment are alternatives. Taking both doesn’t get you 85% off. Nor does a branded discount combine with a wholesale tier, a promotional rate, or anything else we might be running, the best applicable discount applies, and only that one.

A note on Belgium and Germany

We supply and run consignment in all three markets, and we’re not going to pretend the rules are identical.

Belgium operates the Gereglementeerde Boekenprijs, which allows a bookseller up to 10% off in the first six months and then frees the price entirely, and it excludes foreign-language titles anyway. Germany’s Buchpreisbindung binds German-language titles and is stricter than either.

None of it touches English-language books, which is most of what we do. But if you trade across a border, sell into more than one of these markets, or want branded content in a local language, tell us and we’ll work through it with you properly. It’s a short conversation and it’s better had before you commit than after.

If the commitment isn’t kept

Worth being direct about this, because it’s the one part with teeth.

The discount is payment for the commitment. If the commitment isn’t performed for the nine months, the difference between what you paid and the standard price becomes payable as a debt, credited pro rata for whole months actually served. It’s due on demand, it survives termination of the agreement, and we will pursue it through the Dutch courts if we have to.

That isn’t a threat, it’s arithmetic. You’d have had the discount without providing what it was given for.

Nine months of hosting one event a quarter is not a heavy ask. If it feels like one, take the standard price, no commitment, nothing owed, no hard feelings.

Timescales

Coloring books, activity books and journals: two to four weeks from signed-off brief to finished book. The nine-month clock starts on delivery, not on commission.

Novellas and novels: agreed case by case. Subject affects the schedule more than length does.

Getting started

Tell us about your shop, the trade, the customers, the footfall, and anything you sponsor or any group you’re tied to. We’ll propose a shelf of catalogue titles and a concept for a branded one, and you can take either, both, or neither.

The brief is signed off before anything is produced, and which commitment you’re taking is recorded in writing before you pay.

Interested in both? Tell us about your shop and what you’d want your own title to be.

[Talk to us about stocking and a branded title]

Also worth reading: what our artists earn and selling independently.