To submit your book for this service please fill out our enquiry form
THREE E-BOOK SERVICES FROM £99 - £249
1) eBook to be downloaded from our website
2) Additional ebook loaded to Kindle
3) eBook
submitted to over 200 digital sales outlets worldwide
Authors OnLine has always offered an ebook as part of its publishing packages, Basic, Standard or Enhanced, as well as a 'Stand Alone' ebook service for £99 to download from our website and will continue to do so. If you have one of our packages we can also submit your ebook to Kindle for an extra £60 (see Kindle books below)
However we now offer a new service to add to the portfolio:
NEW FOR SUMMER 2012 - NOW YOU CAN SUBMIT YOUR E-BOOK TO DOZENS OF DIFFERENT WEBSITES TO BE SOLD ACROSS THE GLOBE ON MULTI-PLATFORMS, AS WELL AS SELLING YOUR E-BOOK VIA OUR WEBSITE
As well as producing a PDF format ebook to sell off our site, we can now submit your ebook for sale across over 200+ digital distribution channels, consisting of dozens of different websites including, Amazon Kindle, Apple, Barnes & Noble Nook, GoSpoken/Mobcast, Gardners, Kobo, and many others (212 as at April 2012), which are constantly being increased.
Please note we have a separate agreement regarding supplying Amazon Kindle, and it can be opted out of and treated separately if required, as many authors will have already submitted their books to this site, but may wish to use our service to provide all the other websites. There isn't however a reduction in price for opting out.
Download a complete list of retailers and wholesalers
HOW DOES IT WORK.
Instead of you loading your ebook to each individual website for sale, Authors OnLine have an central platform on to which we load a single copy of your ebook, which is then converted to various formats required for each ebook reader and also secured against piracy using digital rights management (DRM). The information regarding your ebook is then sent to various ebook websites including Amazon (Kindle*), Apple iTunes (iPad, iPhone), Barnes & Noble and over 60 other websites offering ebooks for sale and displayed on their websites. When one of these websites receives an order for your book, the order is relayed back to their central platform and the content delivered direct to the customer's ebook reader wrapped in a copy protection code [ DRM ] this prevents any copying of the Ebook to another user but allows the reader [ purchaser ] of the book to own the use of the ebook in perpetuity on their device only.
* See Kindle below if you want this as a separate service without your book being across multi-platforms and websites other than Amazon.
THE COST:
1) As a stand alone product
and/or as an addition to our BASIC SERVICE
The price for this service is £249 (+ VAT*), including formatting.
Note *VAT is chargeable only when using the stand alone ebook service. If you are using our other services at the same time and on the same invoice, which involves the production of a paperback or hardback book then VAT is zero rated (Don't blame us - talk to HMRC!).
N.B We reserve the right to charge additional setup costs in the case of ebooks containing large quantities of complicated images, diagrams and charts.
2) As an addition to the STANDARD SERVICE
The additional cost if you use our Standard Service will be £199
3) It's Free to ENHANCED SERVICE Authors!!!
If you use our Enhanced Service it will be included in the price.
Annual Fee
There is no annual fee and once the book is in circulation it can remain there for ever at no cost
Royalties
1) For ebooks sold directly off our website 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 (HM Customs and Excise consider E-book downloads to be a service, not a sale of a book.)
2) For ebooks submitted to digital distribution channels the amount we receive is 55% of the retail price after retailer deductions and any download fees [ only applicable to illustrated books or those books with a large File Size ] Net Price . We pay 60% of the monies received.
Protecting The Author's Rights
1) Books sold from our website - 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.
2) Books sold via distribution channels will contain full Digital Rights Management protecting them from being copied, pasted or passed on to another reader.
Time scale.
(Please note this is a general guide to time scale and not an guarantee, as we do not have control of, or even direct communication with, other companies websites.)
We aim to turn the book conversion around within 5 working days at which point we send to the author for approval , unless very complex in which case we will let you know straight away if we are having problems of any kind which may cause longer times to do the work. We can publish to Amazon within 32 hours, within 10 - 15 working days for Waterstones/W H Smith etc, needed for most retailers apart from Apple who take up to 4 weeks. Once a book is published we can supply two or more buy links for you to see your book, or buy from (if you want to test the system) - apart from the copy we send you for approval we can not supply you with free access to your book from other companies websites once the book is on sale.
N.B. Please also note that individual websites operate their own terms and conditions and reserve the right to refuse certain content, especially books containing material of a sexual, political or religious nature, so we can not guarantee that all books will automatically appear on all submitted websites.
Kindle Books as a separate service (£50 + VAT)
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!), the earlier models were 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 were not a lot of use for books with colour content. But it was easy to use and has some quite clever features. Now Kindle have brought out the Kindle Fire and the Kindle Touch thus updating their technology in line with mobile phones and iPads.
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 as a separate service to our multi-platform ebook service and the answer is, yes we do have a separate Kindle account with Amazon and you can sell under our publishing imprint, and quite a few of our authors do. However if you do so, our standard royalties will apply – see Royalties.
NB: We use the publishing industry standard software of ‘Adobe Indesign’ to format our books and there can be serious technical issues converting Indesign files into Kindle format – we do offer it as an additional item however, 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 (part of their master plan for World domination of the publishing industry). 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's 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
