To submit your book for this service please fill out our enquiry form
eBOOK ONLY (£99)
All our paperback and hardback books, unless requested otherwise are also published and sold as eBooks in protected Adobe Acrobat PDF format, to purchase and download from our own bookshop.
Authors not wishing to publish in hardcopy are welcome to publish in eBook format only. Price including formatting the manuscript is £99. If you have a cover image to use this can be incorporated. If one is not available our generic one will be applied.
Formats
Our eBooks at the moment are only sold off our website in Acrobat Reader Format (or, for some of our older titles, in Microsoft Reader Format).
eBook sizes
If it is for an e-book only service then there isn’t a standard size. The book will be read on a variety of screen sizes, so page size is irrelevant. If you submit it in say A4 size, then that is the size that will be used for your eBook.
If it is for an eBook that is in addition to a paperback or hardback version, then the eBook size we will produce will be the same size as the paperback/hardback. With the exception of the information on the title-verso page, the two versions will be identical.
There is no minimum or maximum page count, although large colour books may have to be reduced in picture quality to achieve a reasonably downloadable file size.
Royalties
We pay you 60% of the retail price after deduction of Credit or Debit Card Charges, which vary according to the type of card and issuing bank, and deduction of VAT (The Customs and Excise consider E-book downloads to be a service, not a sale of a book.)
Protecting The Author's Rights
Regarding protecting authors rights, we are often asked how we stop work being downloaded and then simply passed around the Internet. Firstly in our experience we have don't have any evidence that this happens to any great extent, and if it does then it is only amongst small groups. We take the attitude that it is no worse than buying a hard copy of a novel which is subsequently read by several members of the same circle of family and friends. We have tried encryption software but visitors were often reluctant to download and install the software to their computers. Once we dropped that idea sales quadrupled over night. So for the moment we have settled on a simpler approach. But we do constantly monitor the situation and notice that very few e-books sold from any Internet site are actually sold any differently. Its easier to flash a credit card for a few bucks than search the Internet for a free copy, it simply isn't worth the hassle!
We do however password protect the Acrobat files which stops copying and pasting, or altering of the text. Unless the author specifically requests otherwise, we do allow them to be printed by purchasers on a normal home or office printer to read off-line.
Kindle Books
Amazon’s Kindle, mainly thanks to their enormous marketing clout and market domination, has for the moment become the market leader in eBook readers. It’s actually a very good piece of kit (Our editor loves his!), but with surprising old fashioned technology such as a built in keyboard, rather than the more modern touch screen technology, and with a monochrome only screen. So it’s not a lot of use for books with colour content. But it’s easy to use and has some quite clever features. Its main drawback of course, if you can call it that, is that you have to purchase commercially via your Amazon account, although you can load your own files to it locally. But then would the reader visiting this site who doesn’t have an Amazon account please put his hand up!
We are often asked if we can produce Kindle formatted books and the answer is, yes we do have a Kindle account with Amazon and you can sell under our publishing imprint, and quite a few of our authors do. The cost is inclusive in the manufacture of a stand alone eBook if you so desire.) However if you do so, our standard royalties will apply – see Royalties.
(A Kindle book is not included in the price of other publishing packages, at the moment, for technical reasons. We use the publishing industry standard software of ‘Adobe Indesign’ to format our books and there are serious technical issues converting Indesign files into Kindle format – we do offer it as an additional item however, the cost of which is £50 + VAT, and we will probably have to revert to the original Word files supplied.)
Alternatively Amazon have actually designed the Kindle so that anyone can publish with them directly, completely cutting out the need for a publisher at all. They call it ‘Kindle Direct Publishing’. No need to split the royalties with us or anyone else whatsoever. Simply go to https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin? Create an account and upload your book. It not rocket science, but you do need a certain amount of technical knowledge and, Amazon being Amazon, like their own way and don’t comply with industry standards or formats. They say they can handle PDF for example, but we can tell you from experience they can be extremely difficult to format correctly, especially where pictures and diagrams are concerned. It’s quite good with good old MS Word though.
To submit your book for the eBook service, please fill out our enquiry form
