PUBLISH YOUR BOOK

Why APS Books? Because we love new books and hate that writers get low percentage royalties or feel they have to pay to be published…contact andrewsparkeauthor@gmail.com

– You write
– We do a final edit
– We provide cover art
– We publish print on demand hardcovers, paperbacks and eBooks
– We don’t charge for our input
– We do traditionally printed books too
– We both market your book
– You get 50% royalties

Does that sound fair? We’re a co-operative which aims to produce excellent books not exploit authors.

Among others, we already publish all the authors who have individual pages on this website as well as producing limited editions for private circulation by authors who aren’t seeking open availability of their work yet. We’re also happy just to organise book printing for 20 or more copies at affordable prices.

In the interests of transparency we practice open book accounting and all authors get copies of the sales statements from Amazon etc. And in the same spirit reproduced below is our standard draft contract which we are willing to consider amending to any new author’s reasonable requirements.


BEWARE PUBLISHING SHARKS

We get asked regularly about companies like Austin Macauley and when looking at any so-called publisher you should always do online due diligence.

Austin Macauley aren’t a scam as such. They offer a contribution contract by which the author pays a fee to have their book published and additional fees for marketing. That’s not illegal but it’s not traditional publishing in which the publisher pays the author. 

Companies like AM make their money not from book sales (most of the books they publish make minimal sales) but from author payments and selling books to authors.  Their approach is very professional insofar as they market themselves well to unsuspecting authors.
 
I’ve met 5 authors to date who’ve used AM. One felt that the book they produced was for him worth the money he paid them. The other four had a litany of complaints of poor editing, failure to rectify mistakes, non-existent sales, pressure to pay for more marketing etc. Two terminated their contract after making part payment and were pursued by AM with threats of legal action. In one case that went on for over 2 years. 
 
The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLI) in UK publish online a watchdog system. They give AM the worst – a red – rating based on poor service, complaint levels and fee demands. Googling AM and spending an hour reading through reviews will convince you that ALLI are right.
 
The questions I would ask AM is how they came to select your book and questions to catch them out in the lie they use that someone at AM has actually read your book and been impressed by it.  That’s because AM publish anybody who pays. Publishing with them to anybody who knows, places you amidst a sea of poor quality books which authors have paid to see in print. In many cases their books aren’t even available on Amazon in hard copy form and that’s by some margin the biggest book marketplace in the world. 
 
Unfortunately there are now hundreds of Austin Macauley type operations charging authors for services. They call themselves hybrid publishers but the mode of operation remains the same as the old vanity publishers – charging authors to publish their books. Some do more on the quality front than others to earn their fee but all exist to sell services rather than books. They are not publishers in any traditional sense.
 
My advice to any author is if you want to spend thousands on your book is to buy advertising yourself online and in traditional magazines. At least you’d be more likely to get some sales out of that of either your self-published or indie-published work.
 


David Wake of New St Authors in a charming rant about the shortcomings of traditional publishers reckoned that the only outlet for the following genres is Indie Publishing:

Near-future SF. (Traditional publishing is too inefficient.)
Novellas. (Too short, even if you could get twice as many on the shelf.)
Poetry. (No market for them, apparently.)
Local interest books. (All decisions made at head office.)
Books in more than one genre. (Where do I put this? Ah, yes, the returns bin.)
Books the marketing department doesn’t know how to market.
Books by authors, whose previous two books in the trilogy sold well, but not in the J. K. Rowling or E. L. James league.
Books that you really, really want, but you’ve been busy and missed the three month window of opportunity and they’ve all been returned to the publisher on a sale-or-return basis and have now been pulped.

And then there are all the predatory publishing houses which exist primarily to sell services to authors rather than making money by selling books. Our own rant about that is among the blogs on our home page.

Which means there’s plenty of opportunity for a different publishing endeavour like APS Books.

Indie Publishing: The Journey Made Easy is an overview of the skills an indie writer and publisher needs to develop: “For anyone contemplating self-publishing a book for the first time, I can highly recommend Andrew Sparke’s book ‘Indie Publishing – the Journey Made Easy.’ This ebook covers everything that the author needs to know about self-publishing as well as how to become a professional, self-publishing entity. The ‘journey’ takes the self-publisher through the essential steps and stages involved in formatting a manuscript for upload to various platforms such as Kindle and Smashwords, through to how to use social media and other means to market the final product. Having gone through the process myself, I use Andrew’s book as reference material; however, it is equally valuable to the first-time e-author.” (David Muir Five star Amazon review)

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