1. The short version
- No returns or exchanges on printed books. Each one is custom made, so we cannot accept a return or swap a finished book because you changed your mind.
- Cancel before printing starts and you pay nothing. Cancel from the Orders tab in the app. Once your book is on press, it cannot be cancelled.
- If a book arrives damaged or misprinted, we fix it. Report it within 60 days of delivery and we reprint it at no cost to you, or refund it where a reprint will not do.
- If it never arrives, we make it right. Tell us and we will reprint or refund the order.
- Return postage is never yours to pay. If we need the book back, we send a prepaid label.
2. Made to order: no returns or exchanges
Your book does not exist until you order it. The cover fabric, the foil, the title, the page count, and every photograph inside are set by you, printed once, and bound by hand. A finished book cannot be resold, donated, or restocked, and it contains pictures of your family that nobody else should ever hold.
For that reason, all sales of printed books are final once the book has been printed. We do not accept returns, exchanges, or change-of-mind refunds on a book you have received. This is the standard practice for personalized and custom-made goods, and it does not affect the remedies below for a book that arrives damaged, misprinted, or not at all, or any right you have under the law where you live.
Please use the preview in the app before you order. It shows every spread of the book that will be printed, and it is the moment to fix a title, change a photo, or correct a date.
3. Changing or cancelling an order
How much can still change depends on how far along your book is at the printer. Printing begins soon after you order, so these windows are short — contact us as early as you can.
Cancelling
You can cancel from the Orders tab in the app while the printer has not yet started work, and you are charged nothing. Once your book has gone to press it cannot be cancelled, because the paper, the cover, and the binding have already been committed to your book alone. We ask the printer at the moment you tap cancel, and their answer is the one that decides it — so a cancel can be refused even while the app still shows the order as waiting. If your order included gift copies, a cancellation applies to the whole order: copies cannot be cancelled individually.
Changing an order
Changes after checkout are not automatic — email support@smalldays.com and we will ask the printer. We confirm the change with you by email before anything is sent on, and we cannot promise a change that the printer has already passed the point of making:
- Delivery address
- Before the parcel is handed to the carrier
- Finish
- Before printing starts
- Number of copies
- Before printing starts
- Cover type
- Before printing starts
The photos and words inside a book cannot be changed after checkout at all. The book is sent to the printer as a finished file the moment you order.
4. If something is wrong with your book
Open the Orders tab in the app, find the order, and report an issue. You have 60 days from the day your book was delivered to tell us. Where a carrier never recorded a delivery, the 60 days run from the day the book shipped. These are the problems you can report:
- Arrived damaged
- Print quality problem (streaks, marks, blur we did not cause)
- Binding, cover or spine defect
- Colours or paper not as expected
- Pages missing, duplicated or out of order
- Wrong product / size / cover received
- Never arrived
Anything else that is not right has a place in that same form, and you can always write to us instead.
For most of these we ask for photographs — up to 6 of them — showing what you received. Photographs are how we and our printing partner tell a press fault from a shipping fault, so a clear picture of the damaged page, spine, or parcel is the fastest route to a reprint.
Our usual remedy is a reprint, printed and shipped to you at no cost. Where a reprint will not put things right — the occasion has passed, or the same fault would recur — we refund the order instead. We will tell you which we are doing and why. If the printer asks for the faulty book back, we send you a prepaid return label; return postage is never charged to you.
5. What counts as a printing defect
A defect is something our printer did wrong: streaks, smears, or banding across a page; pages missing, duplicated, or bound out of order; a cover, spine, or stitch that has failed; foil that did not take; the wrong size or cover delivered; or damage in transit. All of these we reprint.
Some variation is part of making a real object and is not a defect. Books are printed on uncoated paper, wrapped in woven fabric, and stamped with metal foil, and each of those processes carries small differences from one copy to the next: slight shifts in color between print runs, the weave and shade of a linen cover, the depth of a foil impression, a millimeter of trim or hinge variation.
Color on paper never matches color on a screen. Your phone shows a photo as bright, backlit light; a printed page shows it as ink absorbed into paper. Printed photos read a little softer and warmer than the preview, and dark images in particular print deeper than they look on screen. That difference is normal and is not grounds for a reprint on its own — but if the color on your book looks genuinely wrong rather than simply different, report it and we will look at it with the printer.
6. Photos, text, and addresses you provide
The printer prints the file we send, and that file is built from what you chose in the app. We cannot reprint or refund a book for a choice made before checkout, including:
- A photo that was blurred, dark, grainy, or low resolution in your own library. We print the photographs you chose, at the size you placed them.
- A crop, zoom, or position you set in the editor, or a photo you would rather had been a different one.
- A spelling, name, date, or dedication typed into the book, including the cover title.
- A delivery address entered incorrectly, or a parcel sent to an address you no longer use. We can change an address before the parcel is dispatched — see section 3 — but once it has shipped we cannot recover it.
None of this is us declining to help. Write to support@smalldays.com and tell us what happened; we read every message and we would rather hear about a book you are unhappy with than not.
7. If your book never arrives
Once a parcel is handed to the carrier, delivery timing is in the carrier's hands. Tracking marked delivered is not the same as a book in your hands, and we treat a book that did not arrive as our problem to solve, not yours to chase.
Report it from the Orders tab, or email support@smalldays.com. No photographs are needed. We will check with the carrier and the printer and then reprint the order or refund it. Please give a parcel a few days past its estimated date before reporting it — carriers do sometimes scan a delivery early — and check with anyone else at the address.
8. How refunds are paid
Refunds go back to the card or payment method used for the order, through our payment processor. We cannot send a refund anywhere else. Once we issue it, the money usually appears within five to ten business days, depending on your bank.
An order cancelled before printing is refunded in full, including the shipping and tax you paid. A refund of a whole order after it has shipped is likewise refunded in full. Where we refund part of an order — one book out of several, for example — we tell you the amount before we issue it.
9. Your legal rights
Nothing in this policy limits rights you have under the consumer law that applies where you live, including rights relating to goods that are faulty, not as described, or not fit for purpose. Where the law gives you a remedy greater than the one described here, the law wins.
Custom-made and personalized goods are commonly excluded from change-of-mind cancellation rights, which is the basis for section 2. The remedies in sections 4 and 7 apply regardless.
This policy sits alongside our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. It applies to printed books ordered from Alabaster Digital LLC, doing business as Smalldays. We may update it when our products or printing partners change; the date at the top identifies the latest revision, and the policy in force when you ordered is the one that applies to your order.
10. Contact us
Email support@smalldays.com and a real person will read it. We reply within two business days. If your message is about an order, including the order number from your confirmation email gets us to an answer faster. Our Support page answers the most common questions.