Print Catalogs Without a Minimum Print Run

For most of gallery history, a print catalog was a statement of institutional confidence. You committed to a print run — usually five hundred copies minimum — before the show opened. You paid a designer. You paid the printer. You stored the surplus. You guessed wrong about demand about half the time, ending up with either a supply shortage at the opening or three hundred catalogs in a storage room that nobody wants.

On-demand printing changed this calculation entirely.

The on-demand model

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and its competitors allow you to produce a print-quality paperback or hardcover with no minimum print run, no upfront cost, and no inventory. A collector orders the catalog. It is printed and shipped within two days. You receive a royalty on each copy sold. If the show ends and no one orders the catalog for three years, you pay nothing. If the show becomes a retrospective turning point and a thousand people want the catalog, you print a thousand.

The catch was always production. Designing a gallery catalog to print standards — correct CMYK colours, proper bleed, high-resolution images, ISBN registration, spine width calculation — requires either a professional designer or significant InDesign expertise. For a small gallery running one person with a laptop, this was the barrier.

What Galexivo’s catalog tool does

The catalog tool in Galexivo takes your existing exhibition data — the artworks, the photographs, the artist biography, the curator’s note you wrote in the exhibition editor — and produces a print-ready PDF.

You choose a layout. The current layouts are: full-bleed image per page with caption on the facing page, two works per spread, and text-heavy critical essay format with works at the back. You set the cover image. You write (or let Studio AI draft) an introduction. You sequence the works by dragging them in the editor. You click Export PDF.

The PDF that comes out is correctly sized for KDP’s 8.5 × 11 format, with the correct bleed and crop marks, the correct colour profile, and a generated ISBN barcode if you have registered an ISBN. You upload it to KDP and set a price. Within 72 hours, the catalog is available for purchase worldwide.

What this means in practice

A gallery in Leeds recently told us about their experience with a group show of five artists. The gallery had never produced a print catalog before — the economics had never made sense. With Galexivo, the catalog took about four hours to produce, including photography review and the introduction. They priced it at £22. Over the following eight months, they sold sixty-one copies. The total revenue was £1,340. After KDP’s cut and Galexivo’s royalty calculation, the gallery netted £580. Not life-changing money, but the kind of revenue that simply did not exist before.

More importantly: the catalog became a sales tool. Two of the sixty-one buyers contacted the gallery about works from the show. One purchased.

The things the tool does not do

The catalog tool produces the interior PDF and cover template. It does not register your ISBN for you — you need to create a free account at your national ISBN agency. It does not upload to KDP for you — you do that in KDP’s interface. And it cannot photograph your works — you still need to provide high-resolution images (minimum 300 DPI at print size).

If your photographs are phone photos taken in mixed light with a cluttered background, the catalog will reflect that. The tool handles the layout; the content is yours.

How to start

Every Galexivo account includes the catalog tool. If you have an active exhibition with at least three works, open the Catalogs section in your admin, select the exhibition, and follow the setup wizard. The export button appears once you have set a cover and a title.

If you have not registered an ISBN, you do not need one to test the tool — KDP allows catalog-without-ISBN publications. You can add one later.