How long a custom book takes: from order to delivery

It isn't one deadline but two stretches that behave completely differently. The first is automatic and measured in minutes; the second is production and shipping, measured in business days.

A practical rule of thumb: from the date you want the book in your hands, subtract the time it needs in the form you want. For a printed book, count business days, not calendar days — weekends don't count.

The surest way to miss a date is to count forward from the order. Count backwards from the day the book needs to be in someone's hands.

Almost every delay has one of four causes — and three of them can be avoided.

With a regular online store, the goods sit in a warehouse and the timeline is only about how quickly they're found, packed and handed to the carrier. A custom book doesn't sit in a warehouse and can't: at the moment you order it, it hasn't even been written, let alone printed. So between payment and shipping there is the production of one single copy — printing the sheets, binding, trimming, checking.

That has two consequences worth planning for. First, the timeline counts from when you order the print, not from when you set up the book: your review sits in between, and it can take ten minutes or three days. Second, a custom book can't be sped up the way stock items can — express shipping shortens only the trip to you, not the production.

A digital book doesn't have this problem at all, which is exactly why it works as a last-minute rescue: you can print it at home, send it as a link or hand it over on a tablet, and the printed version follows a few days later as a second wave of the same gift.

It happens rarely, and the system usually takes care of it by itself: a stuck generation restarts automatically without you even noticing. If the loader on the finished-book page stays put for more than a few tens of minutes, that's no reason to pay again — your payment is fine and the book can be generated again at no extra cost, just write to us.

The same goes for an e-mail that never arrived. The book is always in your account under My books, even if the message landed in spam or the promotions tab. If you created the book without registering, it is added to your account automatically as soon as you sign up in the same browser.

For the parcel, both the tracking link from the e-mail and the status in your account work. If the book arrives damaged or with a printing error, it's handled as a claim directly next to the book in your account — with a photo it goes fastest.

Preparing the photo in advance saves the most time. A sharp portrait of one person in daylight works the first time; a photo against a window or with two children in it means the hero gets redrawn. For a book with several characters, have a separate photo of each of them ready — a group photo of the whole family can't be used.

The second thing is to decide on the audiobook early. It's narrated from the book's current text, so if you edit the text after starting it, it needs to be started again. The order "polish the text first, then the audio" saves one round.

And third: if the book is meant as a printed gift, order the print right after your review, not the day before you hand it over. What's worth checking before printing and what it all costs is summed up in the price overview; how the whole process looks from the beginning is described in the introduction to custom books.