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Publishing, Editing, and Ghostwriting Services I can ghostwrite you book for a very modest fee. It takes from four to six months, depending on the book's length. It will cost far less than you would guess. A recent book, ghostwritten and published by us, is bringing in more each month than the "author" paid for our services! If your book is pretty much written, and just needs editing/updating, the cost will be minimal. After I ghostwrite your book, I can publish your book as a Lightning Source Print on Demand (POD) book (making you the publisher so you have full control with no garage full of books - yes no inventory!). Lightning Source (LSI) is part of Ingram, the largest distributor of books. The setup on LSI is $75 for both text and cover. From then on the money comes to you. Even though your book is with LSI, I can also do a Kindle version. Amazon can do the same on CreateSpace, however, your discount is 55%, whereas on LSI you can have a discount of 20%. With LSI you will make nearly double the profit off your book. Also with Amazon's CreateSpace your book would only be on Amazon USA. With LSI it is on all Amazon sites, Barnes & Noble, and dozens of other sites. Your print book can also be published as an ebook You can also have your book converted to an ebook format for sales on a number of sites. Your book can be converted to Nook, Kindle, iPad, Sony, or Adobe PDF. An Adobe PDF version of your book could be distributed with DRM (Digital Rights Management - so it can't be copied or printed) by Lightning Source. You can charge any price you want for this format. LSI will pay 67.5% of the list. Amazon Kindle's normal pricing is $2.99 to $9.99 for the maximum royalty of 70%. Above (or below) that, Amazon pays 35% of list. Apple iPad pays 70% of list (even on a discounted price). Nook pays 50% of list (even on a discounted price). Note: The above percentages are of list price. If the seller discounts, you still get the percentage of list. What about Bookbaby.com? Your book can be converted to these formats (for a fee) by Bookbaby. However, there's potentially a disadvantage, which is that B&N Nook sales via Bookbbaby usually seem to be discounted by around 20% ...meaning Amazon will price-match. So you should consider carefully whether it's worth distributing to B&N via Bookbaby, since (depending on pricing) the loss of profit at Amazon due to Nook sales for a strong seller can far outweigh the additional profits through B&N. The biggest advantage of using Bookbaby may be for non-US publishers, since Bookbaby aggregates payments through Paypal, which is much better than having to pay a local bank to convert multiple USD cheques. Also, Bookbaby does not pay royalties, so is not required to impose US tax withholding on foreign payments. What about finding a major publisher Of course, you can try to find an agent, or a major publisher for your book. We can help with that, too. However, this is a long shot. The good news is that POD titles have been picked up by major publishers. Please contact me directly with any questions, thank you! Our experiences with Escape from Paradise and other books Our own book, printed by LSI, Escape from Paradise, sells about 50 copies a month from Amazon with about 5 coming from Amazon UK and 2 coming from The Book Depository (free shipping worldwide) The list price for Escape from Paradise is $19.95, and we make $8.85 per copy (even though the book has been out since 2002.) Escape from Paradise is also available as an ebook in Adobe format. (We do conversions in-house to Adobe format). Here is an example of a book I did recently on CreateSpace. It is one of my favorites - The Mysterious Stranger, by Mark Twain. Since the copyright expired, anyone can publish the book. It wasn't the best choice as there are other copies out there. I plan, however, to transfer it to Lightning Source, and the book will be on all Amazon countries, Barnes&Noble. With CreateSpace the book will only be on Amazon USA, which is good enough for a unique book. Here's the cover -
I was able to do the cover on-line using CreateSpace. Since the graphics had to be 300dpi, I had to change the resolution from the normal Internet 72dpi. If you have to do this, send the graphic to me, as it is tricky. The resulting cover image is 300dpi, tiff, not jpeg, and CMYK (for printing) instead of RGB. All very easy in Photoshop. IDKPress How to set the right discount for your book Several years ago, I was well into working on my first book and had to make a decision -- Should I spend a couple of years researching traditional publishers, formatting my manuscript for submission, and sending it in to one publisher after another, or should I spend that two years researching self-publishing and go that route? The decision was difficult, because I had one of the best agents in he business handling our book, Escape from Paradise. As good as Sonia Land was, even if a major publisher picked up Escape from Paradise, it could be a couple of years before the book would be published. I decided to take the risk and go for self-publishing. This was back in 2002 when self-publishing and print-on-demand (POD) was in its infancy. To typeset the book, I bought a very expensive and comples program - Adobe InDesign. Fortunately, I have a son who is a real computer whiz. He mastered InDesign in no time and did a beautiful job of setting up the book. What InDesign does is, once the book is set up, it creates a PDF file of the book which is ready for the printing presses. Using InDesign, I managed to do the cover, which amounts to two pages (front and back cover) and the spine. My kid set up 476 pages. With the two PDF files - one for the cover, and one for the books interior (called the book block), I had a local printer run off 50 copies. I called these review copies, and sent them out to a number of reviewers. With only one or two exceptions, the reviewers sold the books I had sent them to second hand dealers, and they appeared for sale on the Internet. I made a rule never to send out review copies - it's a joke and not worth it. Next, I submitted the book (the two PDFs) to Lightning Source (LSI). Unfortunately, the print quality of the photographs in the book did not come out to well with LSI. This is because they were using the IBM InfoPrint printer. Back then, IBM was lousy at printing. So I submitted the book to a second printer - Digitz. They used a laser-type printer, and the photographs came out very well. The Digitz copies were the ones I gave out personally. The LSI copies went out to Amazon, and various online outfits and to booksellers. Over time, Digitz changed its name to BookSurge, and BookSurge was bought by Amazon and became CreateSpace. Because of that, the copies of Escape from Paradise that were sold on Amazon USA were printed by CreateSpace - and those for the rest of the world went out from LSI. Since CreateSpace took 55% of the price of the book, I was making only about $2.50 a copy. Foolishly, I went on like that for a couple of years. I even let LSI take 55% as I thought that it was what everyone did. I finally woke up to the fact that, just by going into my LSI account, I could lower LSI's take (after the printing charge) to 20%. I canceled CreateSpace, and had all my books printed by LSI - and made about three times more on each sale. They told me that lowering the discount to 20% would kill my bookstore sales. False. The bookstores just marked up the price so they made a profit. You see, I had set up my ISBN number with no price attached. That gave me all the flexibility the bookstores needed. Don't set a fixed price on your book! After months and months of research interspersed with learning to build this website and other websites to promote my wares, I came across some things you might want to use if you self publish. InDesign is not on the list as it is too expensive. Software: Book Design Wizard This program is for easy text formatting (toggles the table of contents to the chapters and automatically updates page numbers for the table of contents; sets up the proper mirror margins; and the alternating even/odd headers, plus a lot more). However, you can do exactly the same in Microsoft Word, which is what I do now. About $40 http://www.bookdesignwizard.com Book Cover Pro A cover design program -- formats the cover (front, back, spine) properly for any size book. Very easy to learn, but I do it in Adobe Acrobat Pro. about $80. Publishing Sources: CreateSpace Create Space is a subsidiary of Amazon for self-publishing books, cd's, and dvd's. There are NO set up fees at all. Very cheap printing costs. Your book goes instantly to Amazon and they have a real simple way for you to set up your cover - online. Here is one of my CreateSpace covers.
Lightning Source After making sure a book is exactly as I want it, I spend around $80 total to put it through the hoops with Lightning Source. You have to sign up as a publishing company (but that can consist of just you), and they accept the same files as CreateSpace. With LSI, the cover is the problem - unless you want to buy and learn InDesign. Of course there are guys you can pay to do a cover. The one I use is Ian McKenzie (paragraphics100@yahoo.ca) About $70 http://www.lightningsource.com Putting your files into a PDF: All files have to be submitted in pdf form. I use the Adobe Acrobat Pro, but there is a lot of free stuf out there. CreateSpace (and other publishers) will give you a free ISBN. Don't take it, because you will not own it. You will have big problems if you want to switch to another printer. Don't buy ISBN numbers from anybody, as it will still not be yours. Buy only from Bowker - it's the only way. http://www.bowker.com/index.php/supportfaq-isbn The other thing you need, and it's free, is a Library of Congress Number. It's easy - just go to their website. http://lcweb.loc.gov/loc/infopub/publish.html The Library of Congress number has to be obtained before your book is even printed, because it goes on your copyright page. Publishing rights and royalties If you want us to be the publisher of your book. Here are the basic charges and royalties. These prices do not include internal graphics and are subject to change depending on individual cases. Rights granted to IDKPress: Location rights, worldwide, in any language, in any medium. These are the rights granted to IDKPress by the author(s). However, the author(s) remains the primary rights holder, and the copyright is in the name of the author(s). Rights returned to author(s) by IDKPRESS: On request, after 10 years from publication date. Author(s) royalties: Five to 10% of list price on agreement with the author(s). Rights split: 50% of net receipts. (This applies when IDKPress sells subsidiary rights to other publishers to reprint transmit, adapt, and movie rights, etc.) Payment schedule: Payment is on a yearly basis—on sales from January 1 to December 31, payments will be sent by April 1. In certain instances, IDKPress may elect to pay more frequently. Author(s) copies: 10 copies of publishers print edition on each binding Author can buy additional copies of publishers cost including shipping with prepayment. |
