Unlike the hybrid model of publishing, where the publisher and author share the various costs of producing the final book, with self-publishing the author pays the entire cost and the publisher simply acts as the author's contractor and/or consultant in producing the book according to the author's exact wishes. In this model, all of the risk falls on the author; the publisher simply creates and sells the book, passing on all of the royalties usually for just a modest admin fee.

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Our Self-Publishing submission process is different to that for our Traditional and Hybrid Deals, as we will be taking no financial risk in publishing your book, although we may be taking some reputational risk if you want to use our imprint "Candlelight Press".

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1. You will need to send us by email:

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• A covering letter setting out your initial thoughts on your publishing requirements (e.g. proofreading or not, if you want a cover designing or if you have your own, et cetera). Don't worry too much about the contents of this, as we will arrange a video meeting with you once we've looked at your MS. Please also say what books, if any, you've had published before. If you are a new author and the MS you are sending is your first, please say so.

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• ​Your complete Manuscript ("MS") in Word format (.docx).

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2. We will run a software-based spelling/grammar check on your MS and see what issues, if any, come to light.

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3. We will arrange a video meeting with you to talk about the results of point 2 and we'll discuss whether you want to pay for editing, proofreading et cetera in view of what state your MS is in. This is entirely up to you, BUT we will not publish your book with our imprint if it has errors in the MS as this would damage our reputation and would be unfair to our other authors who rely on an imprint for credibility purposes when getting reviews and selling their books. If you want to carry on and publish your book with errors, we will do so on your instruction (as Self-Publishing is simply a service we are offering as a contactor) but it will be printed as a Self-Published book without any of our details in it. It will still be diligently typeset, formatted et cetera, but will obviously still contain any spelling/typographical/grammar errors.

 

4. Once we have had the discussion as per point 3, we will give you a price for what you want us to do and if you agree, we will produce your book according to your instructions (this might include setting it up for sale on Amazon, making a Kindle version, et cetera - whatever you tell us that you want basically).

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5. We will either, at your choice: (1) create new accounts (e.g. on Amazon) or (2) use our existing master accounts to publish and sell your book. If you opt for option 1, we will: set up your Amazon (or other) publishing account and publish your book, including keywords, and then simply hand over the login details and password to you so that you can enter your own bank details and receive your royalties (under this option you will then be responsible yourself for any further changes and maintaining the account, filling in your Tax forms et cetera); or, if you choose option 2, we will collect the book sale royalties on your behalf and remit them to you quarterly (under this option you won't need to worry about maintaining the account, filling in tax forms et cetera; please note we cannot offer this service to US nationals because of IRS rules), we currently charge £20 per remittance for this.

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Our turnaround times will vary according to how busy we are in terms of submissions, but we will try to reply to you within 2 weeks if we can.

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