The simple answer is: Efficiency. We simply have some very solid processes and practices in place which reduce our costs both in overhead and labor. That's the primary way to bring costs down, after all. In addition, we keep tighter profit margins than the others. We cost less because we aren't funneling bucketfuls of YOUR money to the top few people.

This depends on a few factors, but most important is what we need to do with your book, or what you want us to do. Obviously a book that we receive handwritten on notebook paper will take longer to get to Amazon than one that comes in with a cover already made, the text completely edited, and a firm idea of all the dimensions and formatting choices.

If you use our pricing guidelines your royalty will be 20% of the book cost (for a paperback - e-pubs are 30%). This can be changed by you in a couple of ways - either through our "Full Royalty" program, or through our option to set your own price. You will find that our 20% is one of the highest in the industry.

In Greek mythology, Cadmus was the founder and first king of Thebes; more relevantly, he is credited with bringing the first alphabet to the Greeks - thus given them the art of WRITING!

Quite frankly, because it doesn't sell anything. Other publishers tend to put them on their sites simply because authors think they'll sell books there. But the truth is, that's not where people go to buy books - they go to Amazon. Barnes and Noble. Even Goodreads. We focus our efforts where it matters.

As long as you want it to be. Once set up, there is no ongoing fee for it to remain in print and available. You can take it out of print at any time if you choose, but otherwise it is there for good.

The key thing that leads to misunderstanding is wording – the difference between how royalties are calculated. In our case, you do not receive 20% of the PROFITS, you receive 20% of the COVER PRICE. Some places may claim to pay 100% royalties, or 100% royalties from the profits, for example, but those are strictly what money is left over after all the expenses, including cost to print, shipping, taxes, anything the publisher takes out for themselves, retailer discount, etc. This makes it very hard to pin down exactly what you, the author, would be making. In addition, it doesn’t say what has to be taken out before you get yours – which also allows them to claim that the 20 cents they pay you per copy is everything counted as profit (because they can technically include paying themselves before counting profit).

So, as mentioned, profit is how much money is left after all other costs: retailer (i.e. Amazon, Walmart, etc) cut (often 50% of the cover price!), print cost, shipping, taxes. What is left from all that is profit. So, on a $10 book, $5 will go to whoever sold it (Amazon, for example), $2.25 may go to the printer for the actual cost of printing it, then $0.70 for taxes, shipping, etc. That leaves about $2 of profit on the sale of the book. We try to price the book so that you will get 20% of the cover price. If this were your book, you would get that $2 profit (that last spare nickle is what we use to pay for the maintenance on the account: handling your royalties, ensuring that the book continues to be available without issues, etc). This means that while you are receiving 20% of the cover price in royalties, you are – at the same time – typically receiving about 90% of the profit in royalties. We do it based on cover price to avoid having to recalculate for minor cost fluctuations. For example, printing costs recently went up by about 6%. Fortunately, those were absorbed by us. We did not have to reduce royalties to the authors on all the books we print because even though the actual total profit on the book was reduced, we were able (in almost all cases) to keep the cover price the same, which means they still got the same amount (whereas if it was calculated based on the profits, their royalties would have also dropped a little bit).

We do not claim exclusive rights to your book. In fact, you still retain all rights. So you can shop it around the big publishing houses, or agents, or wherever you wish to take it. Indeed, we encourage it! Sometimes the best first step to signing on with a large publishing house is to go through a "Publishing Services Provider" (a more technical name for what we do here) so you can show them how well your book actually sells.