Frequently asked Questions

It means that we’re really fussy about what books we publish. We won’t publish anything that doesn’t meet mainstream standards of quality in terms of the writing, but we’ll publish niche books with a small readership that mainstream publishers won’t. Most of the books offered to us are not yet ready for publication, but if we see potential in the book, we will offer the author the chance to work with us to improve it until it meets mainstream publishing standards. We’re highly respected in the Indie community as a publisher who reliably publishes quality books and gives authors a fair deal.

Authors who wish to decide on their book’s readiness to publish themselves (rather than have our managing editor make that decision) can publish through our self-publishing imprint, Escarpment Publishing.

The difference between Alkira Publishing and Escarpment Publishing (EP) is that Alkira Publishing is a genuine hybrid publisher and EP is an assisted self-publishing service for authors who want total control over their final product.

Specifically:

• Alkira Publishing has a selection process similar to that of mainstream publishers including a requirement for the books to meet our editorial vision and be competitive in the general marketplace. EP, however, will publish niche books and books edited by other editorial teams.
• Alkira Publishing books are comprehensively edited (including a line edit) in accordance with our managing editor’s opinion, whereas EP books are edited in accordance with the authors opinon.
• With Escarpment Publishing, since we are assisting you to self-publish, you have full control over the final product, whereas for Alkira Publishing, though we make all decisions in consultation with the author, Alkira Publishing has the right to make the final decision on design and editing to make sure that the result is one that is in accordance with our editorial vision and industry standards and best practice.
• Because of the above two points, the author is not self-publishing with Alkira Publishing, but they are self-publishing with Escarpment Publishing.
• With Escarpment Publishing, you have more options for how you self-publish. You can get 100% royalties on both paperacks and ebooks if you wish to manage your own accounts with either Amazon’s KDPP or/and Ingram Spark. Further costs apply to set this up for you initially.
• EP publishes books that Alkira Publishing doesn’t, such as children’s books, family histories, expositional memoirs and general non-fiction.
• We promote Alkira Publishing books, but not EP books.
• EP is for authors who want total control over their product.

• We aren’t a self-publishing service; we’re a genuinely selective hybrid publisher with high standards. We only publish books that meet or exceed mainstream publishing standards of quality and fit with our publishing vision.
• We’re concerned about quality and we produce quality.
• We’re highly ethical. We’ll never rip you off, and we’ll never lie to you or mislead you.
• We’re an Alliance of Independent Authors’ partner which means we’re an ethical, reliable company that does good work. We stack up well in their research on author satisfaction for various services. See https://selfpublishingadvice.org/self-publishing-service-reviews/
• We nurture our authors writing career, teaching them about writing, editing, publishing, and book promotion as we take them through the publishing process. We share our project management system with them so they know exactly what is going on, what their role is and when everything will happen. We have documents that educate our authors on and guide them through the steps of book promotion.

The file upload date is the date that all the work on getting the editing and proofreading done and the cover design and interior design done is finished. We have two files at that point, in pdf form, one for the cover and one for the interior, and we upload these to the printer/distributor so they can get your book into stores. We set the books as pre-orders until their publication date, so they are available in stores for people to order, but they won’t received the book until publication day. At file upload point (or soon after) you will receive the ebook file for uploading to Amazon. 

Depends on the reviewer and whether they’ve heard of us or not. With us, because we’re a selective publisher, you’ll be able to submit to those reviewers who say they don’t review self-published books (and they’re often the reviewers with the most active blogs). Whether or not they review, however, is due to how well you write your request and whether the subject matter of the book interests them. 

All our books are available by order through all bookstores world wide, but physical book stores only stock indie published books on their shelves if the author convinces them to do so. You have to have a willing store owner and then sell them on the idea of stocking your paperback. If you tell them that your book is not self-published, however, but has been published by a selective indie publisher, they are likely to be more willing to stock it.

If they’re a reader who looks at who has published a book and either knows of us or looks us up, then yes. The fact that we’re highly selective should convince them that your book is quality. However, readers may not look at the publisher and just buy if the book interests them and the reviews are good. 

Vanity publishing is the name given to self-publishing service providers who give authors the impression that they’re getting a mainstream publishing deal, but, unlike mainstream publishing, they have no selection process and the author pays for publication. Authors generally pay high fees (many thousands of dollars), are often pressurised or manipulated into signing a deal, and receive a book that falls far short of industry standards, particularly in terms of editing. The publisher may also retain a relatively high percentage of income from sales and often offer marketing packages that sound good, but offer little of real value and raise unrealistic expectations.

In other words, they’re not what they appear to be.

In contrast, Alkira Publishing:

• makes our author-funded model clear
• has a genuine selection process – we refuse to add to the glut of poor quality books in the market place
• charges reasonable rates
• never lies about the quality of a book or pressurises an author in order to get them to sign an agreement
• has a high standard of editing and produces books that meet or exceed the standards of traditional publishers
• gives 90% of the royalties given to us to the authors

We’re so honest that we’ll tell you the bad stuff as well as the good, so you can make a truly informed decision as to whether or not we’re the right publisher for you. We pride ourselves on being honest and trustworthy and on producing books of which an author can be truly proud.

Ingram Spark /Lightning Source.

There are four Lightning Source/ Ingram Spark print facilities in the USA: one located in California, two in Tennessee, and another in Pennsylvania. They also have printing facilities in the UK, Australia and the United Arab Emirates.

Print on demand (POD) means that the printer prints your book only when a bookstore orders it in. Read more about it here: Ihttps://www.ingramspark.com/blog/misconceptions-about-print-on-demand-pod

Print books printed with Ingram Spark are distributed worldwide by Ingram, the world’s largest book distributor. It will appear on Amazon, B & N and, a few weeks later, on most other online retailers. It will also be available for customers to order it from any bookstore world wide. It will not automatically appear on the shelves of a physical bookstore as a store has to order the book in from the distributor.

Ebooks will be available on whatever platform you choose for distribution. Upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing and your book will be available on Amazon for Kindles, and if you want your ebook available in other major ebook retailers, then upload it to Draft2Digital.

Also see below: Why is my book not showing up in an online store?

Our books include a copyright page to make ownership clear. In Australia works are automatically protected by law as soon as they are published, and we deposit our publications with the National Library of Australia and the NSW state library to make sure that publication is registered. US authors may also wish to register copyright with copyright.gov

Yes, our paperbacks will be available for pre-order for the following reasons:

•  It allows authors to order paperbacks before the publication date and have them on hand for their launches;
• It gives us time to check the physical paperback and make changes if necessary before the book is up for sale;
• It allows the author to send print copies to reviewers who request them;
• A few pre-order sales avoids an ‘Out of Stock’ sign on Amazon.
• It allows pre-publication promotion with a direct link to where readers can buy immediately. For authors with few followers, this maximises sales. Otherwise an interested buyer will probably forget about the book.

Alternatively, the product page on Alkira Publishing’s (AP) website can be used as the link in pre-publicity. There, readers can sign up for our mailing list and will receive an email on the publication date to remind them to buy it. So if an author really doesn’t want a pre-order for their paperback, we can skip it. The author just needs to let us know.

Ebook pre-orders depend on when the author decides to set the ebook up for publishing on the ebook distribution platforms. If they click “publish” at the same time or after the paperback publication date, there’s no pre-order period.

The reason some authors say that pre-orders aren’t a good idea is because pre-order sales on Amazon don’t count towards pushing the book up the Amazon sales rankings on its first day of sale. Authors whose books have a chance of ranking well may choose not to have a pre-order period. For a book to rank well, authors have to be able to mobilise several hundreds of sales in the first few days – either by having lots of engaged fans on their email list who will all buy in the first few days and/or by undertaking paid advertising from a variety of places that spans the first week.

Ebook (KDP): The Kindle ebook is published under your own Amazon KDP account. This means you control the categories, keywords, description, pricing, and any future changes. Alkira provides the professionally designed ebook files (cover and interior) for you to upload, but we don’t have access to your account and can’t make adjustments on your behalf.

Paperback (IngramSpark): The paperback is published under Alkira’s IngramSpark account. Alkira manages the categories, keywords, description, and pricing for the paperback edition. Authors do not have access to our IngramSpark dashboard. If you’d like us to make changes to the paperback’s metadata after publication, we’re happy to do so, but please note that these changes are billed at our standard hourly rate, as they are outside the scope of the publishing package.

You can get 100% royalties if you choose the assisted self-publishing option through Escarpment Publishing (not with AP) and are prepared to manage your account with the printer/distributor yourself after we’ve set it up for you. We do this by publishing the book on your own publisher account at either Amazon or Ingram Spark  instead of publishing it through our account at Ingram Spark. This means that we are not involved at all in royalty payments. You get them directly from Amazon or Ingram Spark.

Because you’d be publishing the book on your account, you would be self-publishing, so we wouldn’t provide an ISBN, but you can get a free ISBN from KDPP.

If you wish to choose this option, you must let us know before we draw up the publishing agreement for Escarpment Publishing, and you will need to pay our hourly rate for our time in setting up the accounts if you can’t do it yourself.

Important to note:

• The Independent Booksellers Association won’t list books published through Amazon.
• One advantage of publishing through KDPP is that your book will never have an ‘Out of Stock’ sign on Amazon.
• The wholesale discount on Amazon is set at 40%. That means the net income per book is 5 -10% less (depending on the marketplace) than the book we publish for you. You will only be getting an extra 5% on each book sold in most marketplaces, not 15%.
• You’re on your own with Amazon. We can’t assist you if anything goes wrong.
• If you choose this option, we will not advertise your book for you apart from the initial announcements.

Your publishing agreement is non-exclusive, meaning you have full control over copyright and can publish another copy of your book anywhere you wish even while our version is still available.

If you or your new publisher requre the book we’ve published to be unpublished/cancelled and removed from distribution, we can do that.

However, please note that we and our distributor have no control over how bookstores manage their stock and website listings, and stores may contnue to list the book indefinitely, even though it is no longer available.

• Many retailers may still keep your title(s) listed, but this does not mean they are available to purchase.
• It can take many months, sometimes years for a retailer to remove the ‘available’ status from their website or remove the listing entirely.
• If stores have any books in stock, those copies will remain available for sale until sold.
• Third party sellers may also list your book.
• If you have orders in process, those must clear out before your title will be cancelled in full.
• Your cover and interior files will be deleted from Ingram Spark’s system and they will become inaccessible after 180 days.

Though AP’s contract gives us the right to make the final decision on a cover, our cover designer works closely with our authors to create a cover they’re happy with and that also meets industry standards and will compete well in the marketplace.

On many devices ebook interior design won’t look exactly like your paperback. This is because ereading devices automatically default to whatever format settings have been selected for that device. Readers can change format settings such as the font, the font size, and the spacing between lines, so although our ebooks are formatted to look as much like the paperback interior as possible, the settings on the ereading device will override some of our formatting.

Some ereading devices have the option to set ‘Publisher Font’, and only if that option is available and selected on the device, will the book be sure to look like the paperback interior. In most other instances, the heading font (for instance) will not appear the same as for the paperback.

Ereaders don’t have set pages, so what appears as one page in the paperback could be half a page or 4 pages depending on how the reader sets the font size. We don’t use drop caps in our ebook files because they often don’t display true to the formatting, so we change the drop caps to a large initial letter. Headers and footers can also be problematic in ebooks, so we don’t use them. This makes sure that the book will look good on all ereading devices. Simple formatting works best in ebooks.

Because there are so many different kinds of ereading devices and software, you can’t fully determine how any particular ereading device will display an ebook. We check our ebooks on Kindle Previewer and Adobe Digital Editions as well as on an actual Kindle ereader.

No we don’t do that because they are problematic and unnecessary. Adding headers, footers and page numbers to the ebook file can lead to those elements appearing in the middle of the text on some ereaders, depending on how the reader adjusts the text’s font and point size, and hence the number of words on a page.

Only a fixed-format style ebook can have headers and footers that display properly on a page. However, such ebooks have limitations for the reader – see ‘the problem with fixed-format files’ in the next section.

We advise our authors to leave photos and illustrations out of their ebooks unless they are absolutely necessary, as with a children’s picture book. Why? Because:

Ebooks with images are best formatted as a fixed format ebook rather than the usual reflowable text ebook in order for the images to sit properly on an ebook ‘page’. Fixed format ebooks are sold specifically for reading on LCD screens on computers and tablets. They are not designed for reading on e-ink ereaders such as Kobo, Nook and Kindle ereaders.

You cannot read a fixed format ebook on an ordinary Kindle, only reflowable text format, which is not designed to include images. If you do incliude images in a relowable text format ebook, you have the following problems:

Problems with images and illustrations in ebooks that can be read on e-ink ereaders

Images can’t be enlarged on e-ink ereaders and so they may be hard to see. They also only appear in black and white. In the usual reflowable ebook format, they may also appear as just one small photo on an otherwise blank page., or with half a sentence or one word.

This quote from an Amazon reviewer explains the reader’s frustration with images in ebooks:
‘My Kindle’s screen is 6 inches (measured diagonally), and I found all of the screen captures, examples and exercises extremely difficult to read, even with a magnifying glass. The screen shots are simply too small, and there’s no way to increase their size on my Kindle. After viewing several exercises with various magnifying glasses and lenses, I eventually skipped them.’

Also images make the files very large, and Amazon charge you to download large files. Every time someone buys and downloads an ebook with a large file size, such as when photos are included, Amazon deducts a fee from what they pay you. This means that your book will need to be priced higher than a book with no or few photos.

In addition, formatting images for an ebook is a time consuming business, and so it will add to your costs. The more images, the higher the cost.

Our advice

Given the issues above, if images aren’t necessary in order to understand the story, we advise not including them in ebooks you want to sell to readers reading on e-ink readers, such as Kindles, Kobos and Nooks. You could have the images available on your website instead – perhaps in a downloadable pdf in exchange for email list sign up.

If your book won’t make sense without the images and there are a lot of them, then we advise either only publishing a paperback or publishing the ebook in a fixed-format file suitable only for tablets (a designation which includes iPads and Kindle Fires) and computers. This will, however, limit your market, as the book will not be able to be read on an ordinary Kindle.

This happens when you’re trying to read a fixed format ebook (see above) on an e-ink reader and you don’t have the Kindle app on any device. Fixed format ebooks will work on Kindle Fire tablets and Kindle reading apps for iPad, iPhone, Android phones, Android tablets, PC and Mac. They are not available on Kindle e-Ink readers. Download the Kindle App onto your tablet , computer or phone to read them.

If you have the app somewhere, Amazon will ask you to choose which device you want to read the book on.

If you want the book to be able to be read on all Kindle devices then we can remove the images and make a reflowable format ebook.

Kindle Select is when you agree to make your ebooks only available as a Kindle book on Amazon for periods of 3 months at a time. When you set up your ebook on Kindle Direct Publishing, you click a box saying that you want to enrol the book in Kindle Select, and that makes it available in Kindle Unlimited (KU) to KU library members. We recommended that you keep your ebook in Kindle Select (just on Amazon) for the first 3-6 months, after that if the book is selling well, then you can take the book out of Kindle Select and upload it to Draft2Digital who will then distribute the ebook to the other major ebook sellers.

The advantages of Kindle Select is that the book is free to KU readers, you get paid per page read, you can run free promotions and get 70% royalty on 99c promotions. The disadvantage is that your ebook can only be bought at Amazon and read on a Kindle or Kindle app. For new authors, having it free to KU members for a few months is a good idea as it’s more likely that your book will find readers and it gives you time to get used to managing your ebook sales and running promotions before spending time setting up your ebook elsewhere. For authors with established followings, making your ebook available in a wider variety of stores (going wide) is recommended.  

Our books are distributed worldwide via Ingram Distributors which means that they can appear in brick and mortar stores if the store orders it in from Ingram in the same way they order any book in. The titles appear in a catalogue of Ingram books, so if a store manager browses the catalogue and likes the sound of your book, they can order it in and stock it on their shelves. That’s how the system works to get a book on a physical shelf. However, the big mainstream publishers pay bookstore chains for shelf space, and so those stores simply stock their books. The managers may not ever look at the catalogue, and even if they do, since there are an enormous number of books in it, the likelihood of them choosing a book by an unknown author is quite small. Independent bookstores are more likely to look past the mainstream offerings, but in practice, books only get in a physical store if someone talks to the manager and convinces them to stock it.

Some of our authors have their books in local bookstores, but they visited the managers and convinced them that it would be worth their while to stock their books. This is most possible where the shop owner wants to support local authors and the author has established a local following so the store owner knows they can expect some sales. 

The only sure way to get your book into all the big chain stores is to get a mainstream publishing deal with one of the big 4 publishers – not an easy task – and even then, they give it 3 months and if it doesn’t sell well in that time, it disappears from the shelves and never returns.  At least with our print-on-demand system, the book will always be available. 

That’s the truth of it. Anyone who tells you differently to this is misleading you.

First, please note that though Amazon.com and B&N will list the book within a couple of weeks, it can take up to 6 weeks after the file upload date for an online store to show your book on the shelves. Smaller stores may not list it at all. As for ebooks, they will only appear on Amazon (assuming you have uploaded it there) unless you also upload it to Draft2Digital.

If your print book isn’t showing up in a major online store after 6 weeks, then read the following is from my Ingram rep explaining how their distribution system works. The bottom line is that when this happens, the most we can do in this situation is ask Ingram to rebroadcast your book’s data to them.

IngramSpark makes titles available to wholesale distribution channels, who then make titles available to retailers and libraries. Through this relationship, we send title data feeds and title availability status to these wholesale distribution channels. Each retailer independently determines whether to list a title and how to display that title’s availability on their website. We are pleased that most retailers reflect an “In Stock / Available” status for your print-on-demand titles, which is an accurate representation of the immediate availability of your title. 

Ultimately, how Amazon (and other stores) list a title and the availability status on their website is up to them. Amazon uses a proprietary algorithm to help with purchasing decisions. In choosing to stock titles or even show products as available on their sites, Amazon considers many pieces of information about your book. Every retailer has its own method for determining what the availability status of a title is on their website and, as a retailer, they are free to do so. 

Factors in deciding to stock a book may include the wholesale discount offered, whether a book is returnable, product page views, and past sales history. Even print-on-demand books may not show an ‘in stock’ message at Amazon. 

Your book is always virtually “in stock” and available for order from IngramSpark. Occasionally, however, channels may list a title as “temporarily unavailable”, available within a certain time frame, or “out of stock.” Every retailer has their own method for determining what the availability status of a title is on their website and, as a retailer, they are free to do so. It is important to remember that although a website may list your title as unavailable, customers can still order your book. Any orders we receive are printed within 1-2 business days of receiving the order. 

We strive to provide retail channels timely updates with current information so they have the potential to show available IngramSpark titles as “in stock” to their customers. With this in mind, we recommend that you refer your readers to the retail partners who show your title with immediate availability. 

Offering an industry-standard wholesale discount of 53-55% and a returnable status for a book can sometimes improve the availability messaging. 

(NB. We set the wholesale discount at 40% to maximise author royalties. We can raise it on request, but we will also have to raise the cost of your book to make sure you earn some royalties. That will affect your royalty on all books in the country, not just one store. There is no guarantee that a store will then list your title or mark it as in stock, but it may help. We do not accept returns as they are shredded and therefore a waste of resources.)

You can read more about title availability here.
 
If a title is listed as unavailable for ordering on a retailer’s website, we can rebroadcasted the metadata feed we send through the distribution channels. Occasionally this resolves the issue, but we are unable to provide any guarantees, as most availability messages are determined by, among others; a retailer’s systems, ordering strategies, alternate vendors, etc.
IngramSpark makes titles available to wholesale distribution channels, who then make titles available to retailers. Retailers manage the metadata they choose to display on their websites, and it is completely within their remit to not action our request.

To find the cost for author copies see the Ingram Spark book cost and shipping calculator, and add the USD$30 order fee. This order fee is not charged on an initial proof copy if the author requests it.

Print on demand books are more costly to print per book than books printed by off-set printing, which is what mainstream publishers do, (it usually requires a minimum run of 2000 books), and so your books will be a little more expensive to print than a mainstream book. Offset publishing, however, requires a large upfront investment and you have to store the books.

We set a recommended retail price (RRP) and then the book stores decide what they will charge based on that. They can charge more or less as they wish. We have no control over what they charge, but they have to pay us our set price whether they charge more or less. The outlets that usually best reflect our RRP are Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Other stores routinely add more to the price. There is nothing we can do about the prices they set.

Amazon prices change with time, sometimes they charge more than RRP, sometimes less, but we get the same royalty regardless.

Amazon prices in different countries can also look different depending on whether you are looking at the store in your country or one in another country. Likewise, if you look at the UK store from the US, for instance, you may see an ‘out of stock’ sign, whereas someone viewing it from the UK might see it as in stock.

AP doesn’t deal with the bookstores. We deal with Lightning Source/Ingram Spark, the printer and distributor, and they only tell us from which countries the sales are made, not which bookstores.

However, since you set up the ebook yourself, you will be able to see how many ebooks you sell on Amazon by going into your KDP account.

That depends on genre and how well you market your book. Popular genres like thrillers, mystery and romance sell better than other genres. Fantasy and science fiction need to deliver exactly what fans want in order to sell well – strong plots, lots of action and heroic characters. Metaphysical and visionary fiction sales are relatively small. Books that are a mixture of genres are harder to sell.

We don’t manage our author’s ebook sales, so I can’t give figures on that, but in paperback sales, we have authors who have sold only about 30 in their first year and others have sold 1000. Authors whose books sell well have written in a popular genre and put effort into marketing.

But the inconvenient truth is that most books don’t sell many copies.
‘Book sales follow a power law distribution, meaning that a tiny number of books sell a ton, while most don’t sell many copies. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 new books are published in the U.S. each year, and the median book sells around 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 over its lifetime. Data from 2020 revealed that only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. Just 2% of books sold more than 5,000 copies.’ https://ryanlanz.com/2024/01/31/who-else-wants-to-know-how-many-copies-novels-actually-sell/

Most of our books are sold in the USA. And although we receive no breakdown by store, most of them are likely to come from Amazon. But you have to actively market your book to get the sales. Amazon and other book stores don’t market your book at all. It’s just up there, and readers won’t see it unless you advertise it in some fashion. The more sales and the more good reviews you get, the more your book will be seen and the more sales you get, but you have to actively market to get those initial sales.

The best way to maximise income is to sell your book at local events where you sell direct to readers. Authors usually manage to sell 40 books at a book launch or author talk, and get twice as much or more selling direct as they do through shop sales.

That’s depends on:

• Your actual costs (which vary depending on how much editing the book needed);
• What time frame we’re talking about;
• The book’s genre;
• Whether or not you have other books published and how well they sold;
• How successful the book is in terms of fulfilling the requirements of the genre;
• How large your network of friends – both online and off – is and whether or not they are likely to be enthusiastic in helping word get out about your book:
• Whether or not the book has a theme of interest to a community of which you are part and how big that community is;
• how much marketing you do and how well you do it.

I advise authors to think of their publishing as a hobby, and approach it as a keen golfer approaches their golfing equipment. They want professional-level clubs and shoes and are prepared to pay a lot of money for them, but they don’t expect to get their money back on them if they sell them at some point. The point of buying top-of-the line equipment is not to make money; it’s to help the golfer play their best game. For an author, the point of engaging our services is to produce a professional product of which the author can be proud – one they know their friends and work colleagues won’t cringe over. If they cover costs and make money, that’s the icing on the cake. In both golf and publishing, it helps to have a professional product, but it’s how you play the game that determines how high you score.

The way to make money as an indie author is to keep producing books, find a niche that works for you and build up a following of people who are always keen to read your next book. But building a following takes time. Many authors can’t be bothered with the work required for marketing and so don’t concern themselves at all with how many books they sell. Even so, some of those same authors have made back their money or are well on the way to it, especially if they keep writing new books in the same genre. Best not to have expectations, then you won’t be disappointed or feel under pressure to put a lot of effort or money into marketing if you’re not inspired to do so.

Once the ebook is out, it’s possible for people to pirate it, or they could buy a paperback and scan it, and we cannot stop that happening. The general agreement about pirating amongst the Alliance of Independent Author members is that trying to stop pirating is a waste of time and that the best way to handle it is to be pleased that they think it’s worth pirating and people are reading it. If people can actually download your book – rather than being sent on a wild goose chase that throws all kinds of scam offers at them, which is what those websites usually are – the people downloading from pirate sites are never going to buy your book anyway.