Sign Up
In contracting with us to prepare your book for uploading to Amazon, uploading your manuscripts and then managing your account, several discrete tasks will ultimately be performed by us on your behalf. You may or may not need all of them. For this reason, unless you choose our Novelist Account option, we’ve split them into separate pricing structures — and separate user agreements — such that you need only buy what you actually want.
Intellectual property — which is what your books are — carries with it a number of potential legal issues. To avoid the appearance of unwanted and irksome lawyers, we’ve structured the sign up process to make sure that all the parties involved know exactly what’s about to happen, and have agreed to the specific terms and conditions involved.
This does involve a modest amount of legalspeak and bad sentence structure, for which we’d like to apologize in advance.
In order to ensure that everything we and you agree to is correct and legally binding — for the protection of both you and ourselves — we’re about to ask you to sign a real paper agreement, rather than an electronic document, and either FAX or mail it to us.
The account document available at this page is intended for use by clients who wish to have us manage their books under one of our standard management plans. In the event that this doesn’t describe you and your books, please contact us — we’ll provide you with a quote to suit your requirements, and an appropriate agreement document.
The document available at this page is provided as a downloadable PDF file. You’ll need to download the Adobe Acrobat Reader if it’s not already installed on your system. If it’s not already installed on your system, you’ll probably also need to get the sprockets in your time machine oiled.
All the prices quoted herein are in US dollars. When you get paid, you’ll be paid in US dollars as well. No sales taxes are applicable as of this writing — please note that we may have to collect sales tax on some or all of our services in the future, as various governments seem to be waking up to the electronic economy as a fertile new tax grab.
At several places throughout this page, you’ll encounter reference to a hypothetical "novel-like manuscript." This refers to a book which includes nothing but text, as would a novel. Such a book would not include graphics, except for a graphic cover; typographical effects except for boldface text, italics and font size changes for chapter headings; formulae or any other non-text elements. If the books you’d like us to manage for you have elements other than simple text, please contact us for a quote.
Account Creation
Novelist Accounts: This one’s dead simple. If your book is a novel or novel-like manuscript, we’ll format your book, convert your cover graphic, upload your book to Kindle, manage Kindle's on-line forms and forward your royalties to you for one year, for $99.99. There are no other costs, and a Novelist Account can be renewed for subsequent years for $49.99 per year as of this writing. Please see the discussion of Novelist Accounts at the Getting Paid page for more about how these accounts work. This is a good choice if you have one book to publish with Kindle, and it looks more or less like a novel.
Author Accounts: We’ll charge you $49.99 when your account is created. This covers our forwarding you your royalties under the terms of the account for 365 calendar days after the account has been created. Graphics, formatting and upload costs are in addition to this fee. Please see the discussion of Author Accounts at the Getting Paid page for more about how these accounts work. This is a good choice if you have five or fewer books to publish with Kindle.
Publisher Accounts: There’s no startup fee to create a Publisher Account with booksmith.ca. This type of account costs $19.99 per month to administer, which covers our forwarding your royalties to you. Graphics, formatting and upload costs are in addition to this fee. Please see the discussion of Publisher Accounts at the Getting Paid page for more about how these accounts work. This is a good choice if you have more than five books to publish to Kindle, or if you anticipate adding a substantial number of books to your portfolio of Kindle titles over time.
We hasten to add that you don't have to be a publisher to open a Publisher Account — we had to call these accounts something.
Note that the account fees are payable whether you earn any royalties or not. On the other hand, they won’t get any larger even if your royalties stray into seven figures. In this latter case, your bank draft might be accompanied by a note of awe and congratulations from our bookkeeper.
The account management fees will be charged to your credit card prior to your account being administered and any accrued royalties being sent to you. Except as noted, we are unable to deduct this fee from your royalties.
Please download the Account Creation Agreement. Read it, make sure you’re comfortable agreeing to it, sign it, include the required credit card information and mail or FAX it back to us — the address and FAX number can be found near the bottom of the agreement.
Copy Editing
As was discussed in detail in the pre-press document of our web page, we feel that no book is ready for polite company until it has been through a thorough, professional copy edit. You’re free to disagree with this.
In the event that you’d like us to copy-edit your book, please contact us for a formal quote and an agreement document. Every copy-edit is unique. As a rough estimate, a thorough copy-edit of a novel-like manuscript costs $2000.00. Copy editing is provided subject to our available resources — if you need your manuscript copy-edited in a hurry, we'll be happy to provide you with an estimate of when we can get it done.
Having us copy-edit your book is by no means mandatory — if you’ve had it copy-edited by someone else or if you genuinely feel that copy-editing is a crutch for weak minds, feel free to ignore this section entirely.
Formatting
If you’ve signed up for a Novelist Account, you can skip this section. The price of a Novelist Account includes all formatting costs.
Your manuscript will need to be formatted to be submitted to Kindle.
You do not have to have us format your manuscript. You can do it yourself, or you can engage a third party formatting service.
We should point out that while formatting a book seems relatively unadventurous, it’s somewhat sneaky and underhanded in practice. Handling things like special characters, tablet-specific HTML and coding elements which do and do not work correctly on a book tablet takes some experience. In formatting a book, we can bring to bear upon it both a fairly sophisticated custom-written formatting application to handle special coding, and a lot of scars and bruises.
If you choose to have someone other than us format your manuscript, we ask that you understand that we will simply upload what you provide us with, without doing any sanity checking or other oversight of its contents whatsoever.
The cost for us to format a novel-like manuscript having 500 or fewer pages is $19.99. More complex books will usually involve more complex formatting, and as such, a few more bucks.
We guarantee our formatting — if upon our uploading your manuscript to Kindle there proves to be a formatting error, we’ll fix it and re-upload the corrected manuscript at no cost to you.
Please contact us to arrange to have your manuscript formatted. We'll provide you with a specific quote, to avoid any later sticker shock, and some guidelines to assist you in minimizing your costs and the time required to get your book ready to rock. We'll be happy to review you book prior to formatting it, to let you know what we'll charge to format it. There's no cost or obligation for a review.
Cover Graphics
If you’ve signed up for a Novelist Account, you can skip this section. The price of a Novelist Account includes all graphic costs.
Electronic books still require traditional covers. The cover graphic for your book will appear in its on-line advertising — at the Amazon web page — and in the uploaded tablet file itself.
In submitting a book to Amazon Kindle, you will need two distinct cover graphic files, as follows:
- A graphic having the dimensions 450 by 550 pixels rendered in eight levels of gray. This will be the cover graphic as it appears on the book tablets of your readers. This graphic must be stored in the PNG format. The name of the file should be the name of your book, for example, Legacy.PNG.
- A graphic having a vertical dimension of at least 1200 pixels, in full color. This will be the cover graphic that appears at the Amazon web page. This graphic must be stored in the the JPG format. The name of the file should be the ISBN number of your book, with no spaces or dashes, for example, 9781895268164.JPG.
If you already have a cover designed for your book, you can just manipulate your existing art to comply with the above specifications. We recommend Graphic Workshop Professional to handle this. This assumes that your original cover art is available as a high-resolution raster image.
In the event that your original cover art is an actual printed book, and you find yourself possessed of a scanner, be aware that scanning said book might not leave you with a particularly attractive digital graphic. You might want to hang onto something solid before you read the next bit.
If you look closely at the cover of your book — possibly with the assistance of a magnifying glass — you’ll notice that what appear to be solid areas of color are actually formed by very small dots. This is called a "screen," or a "halftone." A digital graphic is also a matrix of colored dots, called a "raster." When two dissimilar matrices of dots get together, for example, when you scan a halftone into a raster image, the two patterns interfere, creating a third pattern, called a “moiré.” A moiré will appear as a series of regular color blobs that weren’t in your original printed cover.
Graphic artists with a lot of technology and PostIt notes stuck to their monitors can often refine the process of scanning a cover to minimize the appearance of moiré patterns, but they can never be wholly eliminated. This is why scanning your cover should always be regarded as less desirable than working with a digital rendering.
It will probably come as no huge surprise that we can assist you with creating suitable cover graphics for your book, should you feel yourself to be ill-disposed to manipulating the graphics involved yourself. Our work in this respect can range from simply resizing an existing high-resolution cover image file down to suit the requirements for a Kindle upload — an undertaking for which we charge $19.99 — right on up to designing a cover from scratch. Prices for the latter will vary with the amount of work involved.
Please contact us for a quote if you need us to address your cover graphic issues.
Uploading
If you’ve signed up for a Novelist Account, you can skip this section. The price of a Novelist Account includes all uploading costs.
Once your manuscript has been formatted — by us, by you or by a third-party formatting service — we can upload it to Kindle.
To have us upload a manuscript to Kindle, please complete the Kindle Upload Form. The form will collect the relevant information about your book, such as its author, ISBN number, cover blurb and search criteria, and provide you with the details of getting your manuscript to us.
Manuscript uploads cost $19.99, and can take up to three business days. If you’re in a raging hurry, we can usually upload your manuscript within three hours during normal business hours — the cost for a rush upload is $29.99. Please note that we have no control over the time Amazon takes to publish an uploaded book.
Unless we provide you with a free upload to correct an error in our copy-editing or formatting of your manuscript, the foregoing fees apply to each upload. This includes uploads to correct minor errors — you might want to have another look at the discussion of copy editing earlier in this page.
PayPal
Paying us for our services and subsequently having us transfer your royalties to you can be handled using traditional financial devices — specifically credit cards and bank drafts sent by mail. However, this being the new millennium, both of these functions can be handled faster, at less expense and with more security using electronic funds transfers through PayPal.
A PayPal account will allow us to transfer money to you instantaneously, and receive payments from you for our services just as quickly. PayPal’s dispute resolution function will let you do business with us at no risk to you or your bank account.
You can set up a PayPal account for free at www.paypal.com. In most countries, transferring money between your PayPal account and your conventional bank account is also free. PayPal does charge a modest fee for transferring funds between PayPal accounts.
Unlike credit cards, using a PayPal account doesn’t involve you disclosing anything that could be used to make unauthorized charges, if it were compromised by a third party. In using a PayPal account to pay us, you’ll be sending us money, rather than telling us how to charge your credit card.
Needless to say, we prefer PayPal to plastic.
Please note that if you’ll be signing up for a Publisher Account, which involves monthly payments, you’ll need to set up a recurring payment from your PayPal account to ensure that the account fees are paid on time.
Credit Cards
If you choose not to use PayPal, credit cards constitute one of the most reliable and cost-effective ways for us to get paid for a basic booksmith.ca account. Like PayPal, they impose minimum costs on us, and as such, we’ve been able to avoid imposing significant additional costs on the services represented by this type of account.
If you want to buy great honking truckloads of our services, we’ll be happy to discuss alternate payment terms — please contact us.
Regrettably, credit card fraud is a pervasive issue in the electronic economy. Many vendors address it by building a "fraud factor" into their pricing. In effect, they make all their customers pay extra to cover any fraud that occurs. In our efforts to keep the cost of booksmith.ca’s services down to a manageable level of hugeness, we’ve chosen to minimize the fraud we encounter.
It’s arguably impractical to have all our clients drive up to our offices beside beautiful Lake Huron and present their credit cards in person, so we’ve done what the credit card companies consider to be the next best thing. In those instances wherein we're required to do so by our bank, we’ll ask you for a clear copy of the front and back of your credit card, along with your signed agreement to what we propose to charge to it. This typically happens if we undertake to charge substantial amounts of money to a credit card — those of our clients dealing with a small number of books can almost certainly ignore the foregoing paragraph.
Your credit card information will be kept on file.
You can update your credit card information at any time by mailing or FAXing us a Credit Card Update document with your new card information. Please be sure to do so whenever you’re issued a new card.
Needless to say, we won’t charge anything to your card that isn’t clearly explained in the account documents you provide to us, and agreed to by yourself. We’d also like to point out that all credit card information supplied to us is maintained in a large, nasty safe that’s kept locked at all times, and we’ll shake the hand of any villain who figures out how to get into it.
We will never contact you by e-mail, telephone, snail-mail or any other medium and ask you to tell us your complete credit card number, or any other related information. We may contact you by telephone and ask you to read us the last four digits on your credit card for verification purposes.
If you see a charge to your credit card from us that you don’t understand, please contact us before you contact your bank. Simply querying a charge with your bank will initiate what the credit card companies refer to as a "dispute resolution." They’ll charge us for processing it, and as is detailed in the Account Creation document referenced earlier in this page, all such charges will be passed along to you unless it turns out that we genuinely charged your card incorrectly and without your permission — something we never do.
In the event that we are unable to successfully charge your credit card for the services you have contracted us to provide, the services in question won’t happen until the problem with your card is resolved. If your credit card account proves inaccessible, we reserve the right to pay ourselves from your outstanding royalties.
You can close your booksmith.ca account at any time by providing us with written notice, as discussed in the Account Creation document. Should you do so, we’ll contact you by telephone to confirm your intentions — one of the few occasions wherein we’ll ask you to confirm your identity by reading us the last four digits of your credit card — and then close your account. You’ll be charged a final account administration fee to forward you any outstanding royalties. Thereafter, nothing further will be charged to your credit card.
Content
We’re not censors, and unless what you’ve written is likely to seriously offend someone; attract the attention of lawyers; or get people hurt, killed or arrested, we don’t care what’s in your books.
This being the new millennium, however, our lawyers would have screamed loudly enough to be heard in Patagonia if we hadn’t addressed the issue of suitable content. There’s a more detailed discussion of it in the Account Creation Agreement.
The following are some of the things we’d ask you to be concerned about regarding the content of the books you ask us to upload.
- Adult content: If your books make reference to sex among consenting adults — even if it includes leather underwear, aerosol whipped cream and feather boas — no one is likely to object to it. If it involves anything sexual having to do with minors, don’t click on anything on this page, and forget you ever heard of us. In addition, please note that we do not deal with overt pornography or erotica. Pornography is hard to define, but we all know it when we see it.
- Criminal activities: If your books depict criminals — even very evil criminals — they’re just books. If your books discuss how to be a criminal — that is, if they include detailed instructions for cracking safes, selling illegal drugs or stealing cars, for example — they’re accessories to crime. Click on BACK now.
- Terrorism: We don’t have a problem with books that depict or discuss terrorists. Books which in our opinion are manuals for terrorists belong elsewhere — preferably in a deep, dark hole, next to their authors.
- Discriminatory, racist, sexist or hate-related: Books which discuss these issues, or which portray characters with these characteristics, are unlikely to be a problem. Books which concern themselves primarily with promulgating discriminatory, racist, sexist or hate-related content should keep looking.
- Copyright infringement: You need to have written your book in its entirety, or have explicit written permission from the authors or creators of any aspects of your book which you did not write yourself to use their work. We won’t handle books which in our opinion may constitute plagiary, copyright infringement or the theft of intellectual property.
In addition to our terms and conditions regarding the content of the manuscripts we upload on your behalf, you will be agreeing to the terms and conditions of Amazon Kindle. We urge you to familiarize yourself with it:
As is noted in detail in the Account Creation Agreement document, booksmith.ca reserves the right to refuse to upload any content which it deems unsuitable, and to remove from distribution any content which it deems to be unsuitable or which Amazon objects to. In the event that your books are removed due to content issues, no refunds for copy editing, formatting, uploading or account maintenance will be provided.
While we advocate the continuance of protection for free speech and unfettered expression, we feel strongly that these basic rights carry with them the responsibility to use them appropriately. A book that instructs its readers how to build bombs isn’t an exercise in free speech.
On a more pragmatic note, a book that calls down the wrath of lawyers, secret service agents, government task forces and other parties with deep pockets and blood in their collective eye isn’t free speech either — it’s litigation-bait, and we’ve never aspired to the role of a fish-hook.