How it works
The best start is to let it introduce itself
The Albury BookShelf is a revolutionary publishing platform that allows our customers to take control of their titles, financially, aesthetically and territorially. Each BookShelf is the front end to a lot of background research into what our clients want from us. This means that, yes, it’s pretty, but it’s also hugely powerful.
Every BookShelf is a powerful publishing tool - on the outside it looks just like a normal shop, but behind the curtains you'll have access to publishing tools which give you complete control over how your books are sold from their listing, right down to printing and delivery.
You can set your own prices on a global scale in up to five different currencies, and then, if you need to, you can restrict or allow sales based on territories and rights sold.You can choose which formats your books are sold in and link this to a Print-On-Demand printer, so every time your book is ordered, it's printed and sent directly to your customer.You can even provide direct ebook downloads to your customers, which will be compatible with all major e-readers.Then, an automatic accounting module will create customised reports at the click of a button - allowing you to see exactly what book is being sold and where to.These functions, which are complimented by the BookShelf's diverse customisation options, are just some of the great features that make up the Albury BookShelf - to find out more Contact Us.
By signing up to the Albury BookShelf, each book that you put up onto the store is allocated an ISBN and registered with Nielsen Bookscan. This ensures that each of your titles gain a listing in the catalogues of major book retailers, including Amazon and Waterstones.
If you would like to further the reach of your book into other marketplaces, we can give the book to our Foreign Sales Teams who hope to sell rights and co-editions, both in the UK and abroad.
What we don’t do is specifically market books for sale, unless you ask us to. We have links with a range of really brilliant book marketers who can target your audience directly, no matter how specific or niche it may be.
When a customer wants to buy your book, there are a number of ways you can use your BookShelf to make this happen. You can incorporate the BookShelf within your own website or blog, and you can also link to it directly from your social media profiles on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Each customer is then able to select which format they would like for their book from options including hardback, paperback and Ebook - all of course depending on what you make available.
Then, through some ridiculously complicated XML code, our software tells the printer to print exactly what your customer has just ordered. Once our printer receives the code it springs into action, prints and binds the book, and sends it directly to whoever ordered it. If someone other than an individual orders your book (i.e. Amazon, your local Waterstones, or, in fact, any bookshop throughout the world), then the process is the same, although the bookshop will obviously take their cut. Do bear that in mind though when considering the likely revenues.
For now this mechanism is limited to single-copy Print-on-Demand, but we're building a crowd sourcing platform too - one which enables people to club together and build small print runs, thus saving on price.
Well, that's a multi-faceted question, so here are some answers.
- To set up your book = nominal.
Sign up to one of our packages here. - To buy your book = you decide. You can set the retail price, or we can. As each book is printed singly for whatever market buys it, there's not much point in only putting a British price of £5.99 price on the book if someone in America is buying it. You can have differing prices for differing territories, which means that you're not obliged to use current exchange rates, plus you have the flexibility to be able to alter any of your prices at any time.
- To print the book = it depends. But only on the paperweight, the binding and the number of pages. There is also a nominal administrative cost that we have to pay the printer. Postage and packing is generally paid by the customer, so, if you price your book at, say, £5.99, then the net receipts for a standard paperback are likely to be around £2-3 for each book sold.*
*Compare this to the traditional publishing model. They would sell a book at an average of 55% discount, so for a £5.99 book, they would get £2.70. You would then receive up to 10% of this, in other words 27p per copy sold. To extend this analogy, you would have to sell 10 books by the old method for every book sold using the Albury model.
One small and significant point is accounting. We aim to be able to pay you on a monthly basis, so, provided your book has sold a copy, you will receive what is owed to you almost straight away. And remember, there are no advances to consider, so every copy sold equates to revenue.
If you're not happy with what we're doing, then you can cancel the whole deal giving us 30 days notice, although we'll continue listing the title for a further 6 months to clear orders. And please remember, we legally have to honour any subsidiary rights deals (disk and royalty deals etc.), as they last for the term agreed with the third party. Of course, you'll continue to get paid for any income from these deals for as long as it comes in.
If you decide to give us the rights to sell your eBooks (and you don't have to, you can keep them if you want), then we can make digital, fixed layout versions, which are ideal for picture books, and we can create re-flowable ePubs for fiction titles, or, you can provide your own. We will then make them available for sale through all the same sales channels that the printed book can be found on. The significant difference to printed books is in the lack of print costs. So aside from the fulfillment cost, you set the price and keep even more of the money on any sale made. We support ePub3, MOBI and even PDF and our eBooks are available on all major platforms.
Put simply, that's not what we do. You keep the rights to merchandising, film, TV, radio, stage and everything else above and in between. We're not primarily a sales operation, so we're not going to promise anything we are unlikely to fulfill. But of course, we'll let you know if anyone approaches us, and we can certainly help with any advice or contracts.
You can either sign up or write and tell us. Then, one of our team here can talk you through everything, and supply you with a draft contract, one that we've got down to two sides of A4 (that, was a huge effort and fight with lawyers…). You'll need to know which territories are available and what price you would like to start selling at. Once you agree, we can help you create the books, load them up onto the store, put the files that are needed onto the printer's servers, and before you know it you’ll be ready to go!
Just tell us what you want and we will marry up the other half. We have links to many of the top illustrators, but we also research and discover new and upcoming talent. Whatever your budget, we will find the illustrator you’re looking for.
Of course you can, it’s your book after all. We want everyone to be happy with what's on offer.
If it's been previously published by someone else, then we'll need to know that the rights are cleared and the date of reversion. After that, we can publish your book like any other.
Hopefully few and far between, because we’re sure that Albury represents the best platform to publish your books that’s out there! But the obvious one, is that we ask you to be realistic about sales. Unless we do a separate rights or co-edition deal for you, the books will not benefit from a salesman trying to get them into major bookstores. For this, you need either to do your own marketing or engage us to arrange it on your behalf.