How long a personalised book takes: order to delivery

It isn't one single wait but two stretches that behave completely differently. The first is automatic and measured in minutes; the second is production and delivery, measured in working days.

A handy rule: from the date you want the book in your hands, count back depending on the format you need. For a printed book, count working days, not calendar days — weekends don't count.

The surest way to miss a date is to count forwards from the order. Count backwards from the day the book needs to be in your hands.

Almost every delay comes down to one of four causes — and three of them can be avoided.

With an ordinary online shop, the goods sit in a warehouse and the wait is just about how quickly they're found, packed and handed to the courier. A personalised book isn't in a warehouse and couldn't be: when you order, it hasn't even been written, let alone printed. Between payment and shipping there's the production of one single copy — printing the sheets, binding, trimming, checking.

That has two consequences worth planning for. First, the clock starts when you order the print, not when you set up the book: your review sits in between, and that can take ten minutes or three days. Second, you can't speed up what you could with stock items — express shipping only shortens the trip to you, not the production.

A digital book has none of this, which is exactly why it makes a great last-minute rescue: print it at home, send the 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 rarely happens, and the system usually sorts it out itself: stalled generation restarts automatically without you even noticing. If the loader on the finished-book page has been spinning for more than a few dozen minutes, don't pay again — your payment is fine and the book can be regenerated at no extra cost; just get in touch.

The same goes for an email that never arrived. The book is always in your account under My books, even if the message landed in spam or a promotions folder. If you created the book without signing up, it links to your account on its own as soon as you register in the same browser.

For the parcel, both the tracking link in the email and the status in your account work. If the book arrives damaged or with a printing fault, it's handled as a claim right next to the book in your account — adding a photo is the fastest way.

The biggest time-saver is getting the photo ready in advance. A sharp portrait of one person in daylight goes through 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 one — a group shot 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 has to be run again. The order 'polish the text first, then audio' saves you a round.

And third: if the book is a gift to be printed, order the print straight after your review, not the day before you hand it over. What's worth checking before printing and what it costs is covered in the price overview; how the whole process works from the start is explained in the introduction to personalised books.