Pre-press
There are several pages at the booksmith.ca web site that will detail what we can assist you with, and what our assistance will cost. The first bit's pretty extensive, and we're certain you'll be able to live with the second.
It very general terms, we can:
- Prepare your books for electronic publication, something to be discussed at this page.
- Submit your books to Amazon Kindle — something else to be discussed at this page.
- Collect royalties on your behalf and forward them to you — without pocketing huge piles of your cash. Please see our payment page for more about vulgar finance.
- Optionally assist you with getting your books printed, should you like the idea of non-electronic publishing as well. We have a separate page for printed books.
Getting your books ready to appear upon the book tablets of millions, and actually submitting them, is what we do best.
Text Preparation
Preparing your books for electronic publication breaks down into two areas, and you might well find that you want to perform these tasks yourself, or have a third party perform them for you.
We won't be offended if you don't choose us for this stage of the process.
Before your book appears on the reader tablets of millions, you'll need to:
- Get it copy-edited.
- Get it formatted.
Copy Editing: Most authors regard copy editors as a necessary evil at best, and as a species of overpaid tapeworms the rest of the time. Get past it — a good copy editor is every bit as much an essential part of publishing as authors are.
A copy editor will bring a fresh set of eyes to your manuscript — spotting spelling and grammatical errors, tightening up your prose and finding things that you might never spot, but which your readers will notice without half trying.
It's important to keep in mind, in reviewing a manuscript you wrote, that you wrote it. You understand what you're trying to express, and as such, you're unlikely to notice areas in which said expression isn't as clear to third parties as it could be. Someone who isn't you needs to read it.
You can't copy-edit your own work. Nobody can.
We can provide an expert copy editor to review your manuscript. Our copy-editing facilities are affordable, but no one is likely to describe them as "cheap." A thorough copy edit takes time, and copy editors who can rip through a manuscript in a couple of days for a few hundred dollars are the reason why most authors think they're tapeworms.
If you're a book publisher, or if you have previously had your manuscript professionally copy-edited — or if you just don't agree with any of the foregoing — you're free to ignore this section.
As a rough guide, our fee to copy-edit a 480-page novel manuscript presented in electronic form would be about $2000. Please contact us for a quote if you'd like booksmith.ca to copy edit your manuscript.
Formatting: In order to submit a manuscript to Kindle, it must be formatted — its text massaged to conform to the technical requirements of the Kindle tablet.
While several light years removed from rocket science, manuscript formatting is an important step in the electronic publishing process. Keep in mind that your readers are going to pay for your books — if they appear on the screens of your readers looking like salad, most of those readers are going to apply for refunds, and you won't be getting paid any time soon.
We can provide formatting for the Kindle tablet. Formatting for a basic text-only novel having up to one megabyte of raw text costs $19.99. If your book involves graphics, technical illustrations, formulae and other non-text elements, please contact us for a quote.
There are a number of third-party formatting services, and you're welcome to use one of them if you prefer.
Finally, you can learn to format your manuscript yourself — while there's unquestionably a learning curve involved, it's not unduly stressful if you're moderately technical.
Submitting your Manuscript
Submitting your manuscript involves uploading the correctly-formatted text and cover graphics to Kindle, and entering information such as the title of your book, its ISBN number, its search criteria, its cover blurb and so on into the Kindle upload page.
Our fee for uploading an electronic book is $19.99, submitted within 72 hours, or $29.99 if you need it submitted within three hours, during normal business hours.
If you need to resubmit your book or any of the information associated with it at a later time — to change the search criteria, for example, or because you ignored the whole copy editing issue and you discover to your horror that the author's name has been misspelled — you'll need to pay for a second set of submissions.