I’ve never done this and I wouldn’t for two reasons:
1. If the client prints the files and something goes wrong, they might blame you, not themselves or the printer. That’s a terrible situation to be in where you get the blame, you can’t control it, and you’re not even getting paid to fix it.
2. As you do more album/book design you’ll discover that the profit is in the product, not the service. This is because you can scale a product, but you can’t scale for time. An example will help: If you charge an hourly rate for five hours of design time at $100/hour and have a $100 markup on the book, then you’ll make $600 on the project. But if you do an amazing job and the client loves our work and wants to give a copy to her sister and her eight grandkids, then you can sell 10 copies of the book and make a profit of $1500 ($500 for time and $1,000 on 10 books). Remember, when it comes to books and albums your profit should come from the product.
If you give away digital layouts then you’re maximizing your risk and minimizing your profit. That’s not a good business model!
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