What We Do For You
There are essentially eight steps we go through to help you publish your book: formatting, editing, producing, pricing, distributing, marketing, selling, and maintaining. The steps aren’t strictly one after the other, but tend to occur along with one another in roughly the order above. We will be with you every step of the way so that once you submit your manuscript to us, you can basically take a back seat, answer the occasional question, and cash your royalty checks.
Formatting involves completely reformatting your document in two ways: one for printed books—both paperbacks and hard covers if you want—and a separate format for eBooks. The printed books need to be appropriately sized for the books and they need to be slightly shifted so that the side closer to the spine has a slightly larger margin than the side on the outside of the book. This helps the words not disappear into the spine. Copyright information also needs to be added to the inside front cover. For the eBooks, these are a bit different since the reader chooses the font size and their preferred reading font. This makes page layout a bit more challenging as there are no “pages” per se. There are also issues with special characters, any equations, superscripts or subscripts, and footnotes. We create an ePub file and then we go in with Xcode and reprogram anything which doesn’t come through looking the way you want.
Editing is done alongside formatting. Anything we see that we feel needs to be explained, clarified, reworded, or even just spelled correctly. While we will tell you about anything we think could improve your book and while we will passionately argue our points, it is important for you to know that we feel strongly that you as the author always have the last word. We want to fulfill our authors’ visions and we feel authors know best what they are trying to create. Once the book is just how you like it, we will give you two proof copies: one side by side PDF showing what the reader will see as they turn the page of the book and see the next two pages side by side; and one GoogleBook which shows you how the eBooks will look.
Producing involves the actual creating of books. Now it’s time to get a cover on the book. Some authors have a particular picture they want on the cover. Other authors prefer us to source one. We add the title and the author, a short about the author and a short blurb to the back cover as well as an author’s photo and a bar code. If the book is big enough we put writing on the spine. We then work with printers around the world to get books into the hands of your readers wherever they may be and to minimize shipping costs. We have a number of eBook distributors as well to produce iBooks, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, GoogleBooks, and if there are particular local eBook venders you would like to carry your books, we will work with them as well.
Pricing involves looking at the costs (especially of printing and shipping paperbacks and hard covers) and setting appropriate price levels. I have some tools to let you estimate the market so that you get the best mix of number of readers and money earned (cheaper means more readers—for a while that means more money in your pocket, but eventually it means less). eBook pricing is not as dependent on costs, per se, but different distributors have a preferred range where they will pay you more. On Kindle, just to take one example, the author earns the same for a $9.99 sale as they do for a $19.98 sale. Why would anyone sell a book for $12.99 on Kindle? We will take you through the do’s and don’t’s, but in the end you will get to set the price (and change it later if you like).
Distributing involves getting your book into retailers: whether they are big ones like Amazon and Barnes & Nobel, or little ones like FishPond or the local Mom & Pop bookseller. We have relationships with many retailers and we are happy to work with more which are not on our list but which may be in your local area. Every author who requests one more retailer ultimately helps all our authors as other books may sell there as well.
Marketing generally starts when we have a pre-order date. We use social media, our newsletter, our website, and other methods depending on the book to get the word out. This is the time when you can post links to your social media as well and let folks you know tell their friends they know an author. Check with your local bookstores about doing book talks too. Some require a custom ISBN which we can provide at a low cost—so check with them well in advance as we will need to let our printers know early in the session. Any books you buy for promotional purposes, for book reviews or to sign and sell at book talks, we will get for you at our cost (we don’t make money on those). If you would like more aggressive marketing, we do work with a marketing company which does book reviews and paid ads and the like. There is a cost and a risk with this, and not all our authors go that route. We make nothing from the advertising side (except in increased sales). We also can run sales for you. Kindle will let us sell your book for free on days you select if we don’t sell it anywhere else electronically for three months, they also do countdown sales where a cheap price gradually increases over a few days. We can get you up to 250 coupon codes on iBooks for free copies as well. Each code has a 30 day timer on it and is gone even if it is not used. Through GoogleBooks, we can give free copies to anyone whose eMail address you have. Through Kobo, people can read your book for free and you still get paid. Kindle has something similar, but only if you don’t sell electronic copies elsewhere. These can all be used in different ways in promotions and marketing.
Selling is the easy part. As your books sell, we collect money from our distributors and send you a statement once a month. We start giving you money at the end of the first month in which you sold a book—in many cases before we get paid ourselves. We feel an author should have celebration money as soon as possible and not need to wait. After the initial check, you will get some money in each month that your book sells copies. We get paid by most of our distributors two months after the sale, so gradually we move our payments to you to that schedule.
Maintaining is the work we do once your book goes on sale. If you decide something should be changed on page 58 three weeks after we went to press, we’ll change it for you. We will make sure all electronic copies already sold and any new ones sold are updated, and we will make certain any new books printed are printed with your updates. We reserve the right to sell through our stock of printed books, however. If you want to change the price, we can do that too. Promotions don’t just happen when a book first comes out. We can run them for you anytime.
Formatting involves completely reformatting your document in two ways: one for printed books—both paperbacks and hard covers if you want—and a separate format for eBooks. The printed books need to be appropriately sized for the books and they need to be slightly shifted so that the side closer to the spine has a slightly larger margin than the side on the outside of the book. This helps the words not disappear into the spine. Copyright information also needs to be added to the inside front cover. For the eBooks, these are a bit different since the reader chooses the font size and their preferred reading font. This makes page layout a bit more challenging as there are no “pages” per se. There are also issues with special characters, any equations, superscripts or subscripts, and footnotes. We create an ePub file and then we go in with Xcode and reprogram anything which doesn’t come through looking the way you want.
Editing is done alongside formatting. Anything we see that we feel needs to be explained, clarified, reworded, or even just spelled correctly. While we will tell you about anything we think could improve your book and while we will passionately argue our points, it is important for you to know that we feel strongly that you as the author always have the last word. We want to fulfill our authors’ visions and we feel authors know best what they are trying to create. Once the book is just how you like it, we will give you two proof copies: one side by side PDF showing what the reader will see as they turn the page of the book and see the next two pages side by side; and one GoogleBook which shows you how the eBooks will look.
Producing involves the actual creating of books. Now it’s time to get a cover on the book. Some authors have a particular picture they want on the cover. Other authors prefer us to source one. We add the title and the author, a short about the author and a short blurb to the back cover as well as an author’s photo and a bar code. If the book is big enough we put writing on the spine. We then work with printers around the world to get books into the hands of your readers wherever they may be and to minimize shipping costs. We have a number of eBook distributors as well to produce iBooks, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, GoogleBooks, and if there are particular local eBook venders you would like to carry your books, we will work with them as well.
Pricing involves looking at the costs (especially of printing and shipping paperbacks and hard covers) and setting appropriate price levels. I have some tools to let you estimate the market so that you get the best mix of number of readers and money earned (cheaper means more readers—for a while that means more money in your pocket, but eventually it means less). eBook pricing is not as dependent on costs, per se, but different distributors have a preferred range where they will pay you more. On Kindle, just to take one example, the author earns the same for a $9.99 sale as they do for a $19.98 sale. Why would anyone sell a book for $12.99 on Kindle? We will take you through the do’s and don’t’s, but in the end you will get to set the price (and change it later if you like).
Distributing involves getting your book into retailers: whether they are big ones like Amazon and Barnes & Nobel, or little ones like FishPond or the local Mom & Pop bookseller. We have relationships with many retailers and we are happy to work with more which are not on our list but which may be in your local area. Every author who requests one more retailer ultimately helps all our authors as other books may sell there as well.
Marketing generally starts when we have a pre-order date. We use social media, our newsletter, our website, and other methods depending on the book to get the word out. This is the time when you can post links to your social media as well and let folks you know tell their friends they know an author. Check with your local bookstores about doing book talks too. Some require a custom ISBN which we can provide at a low cost—so check with them well in advance as we will need to let our printers know early in the session. Any books you buy for promotional purposes, for book reviews or to sign and sell at book talks, we will get for you at our cost (we don’t make money on those). If you would like more aggressive marketing, we do work with a marketing company which does book reviews and paid ads and the like. There is a cost and a risk with this, and not all our authors go that route. We make nothing from the advertising side (except in increased sales). We also can run sales for you. Kindle will let us sell your book for free on days you select if we don’t sell it anywhere else electronically for three months, they also do countdown sales where a cheap price gradually increases over a few days. We can get you up to 250 coupon codes on iBooks for free copies as well. Each code has a 30 day timer on it and is gone even if it is not used. Through GoogleBooks, we can give free copies to anyone whose eMail address you have. Through Kobo, people can read your book for free and you still get paid. Kindle has something similar, but only if you don’t sell electronic copies elsewhere. These can all be used in different ways in promotions and marketing.
Selling is the easy part. As your books sell, we collect money from our distributors and send you a statement once a month. We start giving you money at the end of the first month in which you sold a book—in many cases before we get paid ourselves. We feel an author should have celebration money as soon as possible and not need to wait. After the initial check, you will get some money in each month that your book sells copies. We get paid by most of our distributors two months after the sale, so gradually we move our payments to you to that schedule.
Maintaining is the work we do once your book goes on sale. If you decide something should be changed on page 58 three weeks after we went to press, we’ll change it for you. We will make sure all electronic copies already sold and any new ones sold are updated, and we will make certain any new books printed are printed with your updates. We reserve the right to sell through our stock of printed books, however. If you want to change the price, we can do that too. Promotions don’t just happen when a book first comes out. We can run them for you anytime.