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Feeling a little overwhelmed with everything or lost? Hopefully this is a helpful starting point or else feel welcome to drop us an email and say hi!
Overview
Publishing
We recognise this is obviously an area of importance for authors and it is something we are proud to be able to support. Our websites have the capacity to connect with most print-on-demand and 3PL providers, we can also create inbuilt systems to give you a sales platform if you have stockpiled large print runs and are personally fulfilling orders from an at-home “warehouse.”
Author e-Commerce websites on a maintenance package have free access to our own eco-friendly print-on-demand system (free access to an account and product listings, the cost of book printing and shipping is non-inclusive). See “Print On Demand” below.
We also have a team experienced from end to end within the publishing industry so if you need additional support with areas like editing or cover designs, we can certainly help too.
Webhosting
Technically our systems are compatible with external hosting but we are so proud of our green hosting that currently we exclusively limiting our systems to our own hosting. Note our prices do not include domain name registrations.
Our standard and premium hosting plans provide strong security and maintenance practices to provide you with everything you need. We do offer a basic hosting plan without maintenance for our economic clients but it is not an option we encourage.
Storage Space refers to the amount of information saved onto your website. More detailed or content-heavy sites will require more storage space.
Bandwidth refers to the amount of information passing from your site to your site users. The more traffic your site has, the more they interact with your site and the more information your site is sending, the more bandwidth you will need.
Domain Names
These can be purchased from us or from other providers. We do not mind you using an external domain name however our system requirements have set performance metrics so please confirm with us that your chosen provider is compatible with our system before you buy it.
If purchased through us, we buy these wholesale and on-sell them to you at cost given we make our money in other areas of the business rather than this specifically compared to a business specialising in domain names.
Content
Our prices are inclusive of copy-editing however copywriting is an additional charge so we suggest you either start planning what content you want on your site or consider the up-charge in your budgeting.
We do not currently have any capacity to offer photography services but we do offer graphic design which is an additional fee.
Websites
Landing Page: A single page website, normally with minimal content and designed to communicate a clear, simple message of one idea with a strong Call-To-Action (CTA)
Basic Multi-Page: A multi-page website with a rather Spartan design. Headers and footers can be coloured or images, with the page itself being an unbroken flat page that could contain images, videos and/or text.
Premium: These websites (such as ours) have more advanced design elements, features and layouts.
eCommerce: Set up with trusted payment processing facilities, a shopping cart and check out page to sell directly through the site. Products need to be uploaded and priced and we offer guidebooks on this topic or offer inventory admin for an additional fee. Note that eCommerce sites tend to be quite thirsty on webhosting.
Marketing
Frankly this is a topic in and of itself so we will try to keep this brief here but keep your eyes peeled for some of our resources on the topic.
Not all authors need external, professional help and those who do might not always see a return on their investment so it’s a bit of a Catch-22. The important thing to know is without any marketing, you are screaming into the void as the number of self-published books grows exponentially, drowning out smaller-platform authors.
We suggest you start with determine your author brand (or brands if you use pennames and write across genres), run basic market research on customer demographics and genre expectations and start building your platform as soon as possible (rather than waiting until post-publishing) by focusing on a content marketing strategy such as 1-2 social media platforms or a blog.
Audiobooks
Audiobooks have been a growing trend in the publishing industry over the last few years and saw a dramatic uptick during and after the global COVID lockdowns.
All of our packages deliver high quality, industry-spec audio in multiple formats for you to use across distribution channels along with distribution advice.
If you want to narrate your own audiobook (or have a convenient narrating friend do so), we require an audio sample to determine the quality of the recording before we can provide a quote. After that and once you finish the recording, you send this to our audio engineers who edit the audio for you, prepare your file formats and return these to you.
If you want us to narrate it for you, we will send you auditions of several voice actors for you to choose from, record it inhouse on our end, then loop in our audio engineers and repeat the process above.
Dramatised audiobooks include multiple narrators as well as sound effects and includes our audio engineers recording sound effects for the project before splicing them into the audio in post-edit.
Print-on-Demand/POD
Print-on-Demand or “POD” is a concept where book files are sent to modern, high-tech printing facilities that can print a single book before changing printing files (compared to offset printing).
It is common to find POD providers who’s printing system is connected to an order fulfilment and distribution system which means when you put orders in with your printer, they print the books for you, package them, then send them to you (or your client if you set their address as the shipping location). Some POD providers can integrate into point-of-sale systems (such as e-Commerce) that see a customer purchasing from the point-of-sale system which automatically sends a print file to the POD provider who prints the book, packages it and ships it the client.
This has not only been able to offset the risk of large print runs for aspiring authors, it dramatically reduces the amount of wastage in the industry as unsold copies of large print runs are often “pulped.”
We have scaled to have our own internal POD system which is a feature of our maintained e-Commerce sites. For those who opt in, we will set it up for you and assign you a dedicated account manager who will ensure your books are uploaded correctly. For e-Commerce sites who aren’t on a maintenance package, there is a small fee for this service.
Note: Price Of Book Printing And Shipping Is Additional.