PUBLISHING

Pitchpole Books Pitchpole (v.): (nautical) to capsize stern over bow on being hit by a steep wave

PARTNERSHIP PUBLISHING

We specialise in partnership publishing which puts us somewhere between a traditional publishing house and a printer. We don't take all the financial risks accepted by traditional publishers -- and we don't pay advances to authors. On the other hand we are more than printers: we would like whatever we are associated with to be of good literary quality -- in all ways.

So we work with authors, whether they are planning on public sales or just want to make a book for private distribution, as partners.You send us a complete electronic copy of your work, including any photographs, diagrams and tables and we'll look at it to see how much work is required to get it into publishable form -- both paper and electronic -- and quote you a price. The closer the manuscript you send is to being ready for publication, the lower the price will be. This is why we call it Partnership Publishing.

Getting a poorly-presented manuscript into a form for publication to the standard we expect is a time-consuming process and can cost several hundred pounds. We therefore advise you to have a close look at our guidelines and apply the Layout advice in our Author Guide before you submit anything. It should save you money and will improve your prospects even if you decide to go with another publisher.

If you tell us you would like to publish commercially, we will an assessment of the commercial potential we think the work has, decide how much effort we are prepared to put at risk and offer you a price for preparing it for publication. If we think you are the next J K Rowling (we haven't found her yet), we'll bear some of the cost and the price will be reduced and we'll recover costs through a surcharge on sales.

We may, of course, decide that the manuscript is not for us at all.

If you have only a paper manuscript and no electronic copy, contact us by email with a brief description of what you have and what you would like to do with it. We will let you know if we can help. Similarly, if you own the rights to a previously published book that you would like republished the contact us by email.

Whatever you do, make sure you have copies of everything you send us.

To keep costs down we have standardised on a paperback format which is about 15 cm wide and 23 cm high (6"x9") with a glossy cover. We find that this size makes an impressive book and is suitable for most types of publication. Other formats are possible but more expensive. If you would like something different let us know. While the cover is in colour we do not currently handle anything other than black and white internal materials whether text, diagrams or photographs. If over 70 pages long the book will be perfect bound --like most paperbacks on the market -- but slimmer books have to be stitched.

Custom cover design is expensive but we do have some stock designs available. We will offer you a choice of some of these when we tell you the price. If you have ideas or photographs you would like us to use please tell us when you submit the manuscript and we'll factor that in to our response.

So, if you are interested and you have looked at the Author Guide sections on copyright, unacceptable content and layout, email us at geoff@pitchpole.co.uk :

a full copy of the manuscript with all the diagrams and photographs in place in either Word or OpenOffice format

your best electronic versions of all the diagrams and photographs in jpg or png format

tell us whether you plan to sell it to the public or distribute it privately

if you plan to sell it commercially, give us some idea of what you think the market is

make any suggestions you wish about the cover. If you have images you would like to use for it please email them -- they should be at least 1000px in their longest dimension -- and we'll see what we can do.

tell us which formats you wish to publish in. We handle three: paperback, prc for the Amazon Kindle and epub to read on most other ereaders.

We will reply, usually within two weeks, telling you what we can do and how much it will cost you. We will also tell you how much individual copies of the book will cost and how to obtain them. If you wish, we can make some basic arrangements for commercial distribution. What we won't usually do is help publicise your book. That part of the partnership is down to you.

How long does it all take? Well, of course, it depends on how much we have to do for you and how busy we are. But, if all goes well and the cover is fairly straightforward, we usually need about two or three weeks from agreeing to take the work on to sending you the pdf file with the print version for checking. As soon as you return it and we have made any adjustments, we would expect to have a printed proof for you for final approval in another week or so. After that you can order any number of copies for delivery in another one to two weeks. So if all went well, you might go from manuscript to copies of your book in as little as four weeks.

When do I pay? We expect 50% of our fee at the point we agree to do the work. The remainder is to be paid on receipt of the printed proof copy. If you require changes at this stage there will probably be extra charges -- unless they are corrections of our errors. We will make separate arrangements for the purchase of final copies.