Parker, who has also published Ten Common Print Selling Errors, said that printers often fell into the trap of selling purely on price because of the perception that that is all buyers are interested in.

"I think at the moment in the print industry there's quite a lot of expectation that buyers can just buy on price - let's face it, a lot of them do buy on price - but I don't see many print sales people actually putting up much resistance to that," he said.

"I had a great email the other day from a print salesman that said: 'things are very up and down at the moment but why don't you send me a price and I'll see if I can beat it' - so there's no negotiation going on there at all at that point, they're just selling on cheap pricing without trying to put up any resistance."

The book, which is available as an e-book for a launch price of £33 until 31 May, is intended as a guide for both printers and print buyers and covers negotiation from both sides of the table.

"It gives people the confidence and the right tactics to use in order to create a more flexible negotiation, which means that they're going to get beaten down by price far less by buyers and they will improve their print margins," said Parker.

"We go through seven stages of negotiating in the book - all the way from goal-setting to how to make the sure that the negotiation actually makes it into reality - a lot of books stop at the handshake, but I go on and tell people what else they have to do after the handshake to make sure that agreement actually happens.

"A deal's not a deal until it's actually delivered - how many times do people shake hands and then things don't actually happen, even after lengthy negotiations, which is then just a waste of everyone's time."

Parker added that a lack of awareness of how to negotiate was symptomatic of the print industry, where too many companies have become fixated on ways to reduce their prices rather than finding value-added ways to sell to their clients.

"I do a fair amount of face-to-face negotiation training and it's very rare that I don't get an email within one or two days saying: we've already covered the price of the course just by putting these techniques into action," said Parker.