1.

Tell us about your book and your plans for it – why you have written it, who it’s for, whether you hope to sell it commercially etc. We’ll need to see the MS (text) to advise you further.

2.

If you would like us to write the book for you, we will start by discussing your requirements in detail, preferably face to face (Our ghostwriting service).

3.

If you have written or are writing the book yourself, we will invite you to send us the text, or part of it if it is not complete. We will of course treat it in confidence. See submitting your manuscript.

4.

We will give you a price for checking and editing the text as necessary, followed by a cost for designing, printing and publishing it. Usually we will come back to you with some figures within 24 hours. Our costings will be firm, unless you later add more material or make major changes. We will quote approximate prices for printing if we do not yet know how long the book is going to be or how many illustrations etc it will have.

5.

When you are happy with our proposal, we will send you a contract letter (two copies) setting out the service we agree to supply, the expected timescale and the costs. We will ask you to sign and return one copy with your first payment, which is usually the editorial fee or a proportion of it.

6.

We will start work on receipt of the signed letter and first payment. If appropriate, and if you wish, we may send some of the early edited pages back to you to show you how we are approaching the text before continuing.

7.

On completion, we will send you the edited manuscript for your approval. You are free to make any changes or corrections you require (if they involve substantial additions of new material which requires editing, your amendments may incur extra cost). We will suggest a title (if you don’t already have a good one), chapter headings, cover text etc at this stage, and invite you to add any further elements we feel are necessary, such as a foreword or acknowledgments. The balance of the editorial fee will be due on completion of the edited text.

8.

Once you’re happy with the text, we will design the cover (we may start the design while the text is in preparation). We will then email you (or post to you if you prefer) our designs for the cover and the typesetting of the text. We will ask you to read the typeset text carefully and mark any corrections on an author change sheet, which we will usually email to you. We will not charge for correcting any minor errors you find, but we will usually need to make a charge if you make other changes at this stage.

9.

When you’re happy with the design and typesetting, we will print a loose proof (like a book, but with loose pages) and send it to you for your approval.

10.

Once you have signed off the proof, we will print as many copies of your book as you require (there is no minimum quantity) at the price we have quoted. We will also print copies for legal deposition at the statutory libraries (British Library etc) and to fulfil orders we receive ourselves.

When your book is published

On publication we will include your book in the Nielsen book trade web-based information system, allowing it to be ordered from any bookseller, and it will be listed on line at various bookselling websites in addition to memoirsbooks.co.uk and memoirspublishing.co.uk. It will also be made available in various electronic formats, eg Kindle. Books ordered through third-party agencies such as Amazon, Waterstones etc will usually be printed on demand – you don’t need to get involved.

Buying copies of your book
When ordering copies of your book, please note that there may be a marked difference in quality between books supplied by ourselves and print-on-demand copies ordered from internet retailers, as a result of their formula approach to printing, economic factors and fast turnround. To avoid disappointment, we strongly advise our authors either to order a supply of books from Memoirs for resale, or to direct all sales enquiries to Memoirs.

ISBN numbers
Your book doesn’t exist in the outside world without an ISBN number, so we give one to every book we publish, along with a barcode. A new ISBN is issued if the book is revised or updated, and paperback and hardback versions require separate numbers.

Royalties
When we sell copies of your book we will pay you as author all profits from every copy we sell, once our costs have been deducted. Royalty rates vary considerably according to the sales channel. Full details will be given on each royalty statement. We will make a royalty return to you every six months, normally as of June 30 and December 31.

Copyright
You will be credited as the sole author of the book. The text will remain your copyright and Memoirs Books will undertake no further use or reproduction of it without your agreement. Our design and artwork for the book will remain the copyright of Memoirs Books and may not be reproduced by anyone, including yourself as our client, without our agreement. Permission will not unreasonably be withheld. You are free to publish or broadcast the edited text or any part of it in any form without our agreement, though we would ask you to consult us before doing so.

back to top .................................................................................................................................................................................