Haywood Books

How the Book Trade Works

This is only intended as a whistle-stop tour of the trade, and there’s certainly a lot more to say! But here’s a general overview of what happens, from the moment you sign up with us to the moment someone buys your book in a bookshop.

  1. You send us your manuscript: After signing up with us, you send us your draft manuscript. One of our editors will have a look through (since this is free it must necessarily be a quick look) and get an A4 report back to you with some thoughts on areas for improvement, as well as any editorial suggestions.
  2. Editorial: This is where you address any edits needed – either on your own, or with an editor. Make sure you check out our ‘Preparing Your Manuscript‘ guide for some pointers on things to sort out, to save you time in the back-and-forth.
  3. Meanwhile – bibliographic: In the mean time we will work with you to produce a cover, blurb and biography, and we will get this information fed out in our data feeds, and will register your ISBN with Nielsen. This means that your book will start popping up in various places – you’ll soon see it on Amazon, as well as Waterstones, Blackwells, and in time W.H. Smith and others.
  4. Typesetting: When you have a final manuscript you’re happy with, you’ll send this to us for typesetting. We will then produce a professionally typeset PDF of the inside of the book and the cover, and we will send these to you. These are called soft proofs. You then look through these, just in case there are any issues.
  5. Proofreading: While this is optional, if you’re having a professional proofread done, this is when you send it to them (or us). When the proofs are returned we take in corrections and send the soft proofs back to you for sign-off.
  6. Printing: This is when we confirm specs and send your book off to print (and/or set it up for global print-on-demand distribution). Books are usually ready for POD order in 48 hours or so, and printed copies usually reach our warehouse within a fortnight.
  7. Bookshop orders: When a bookseller discovers your book – either because you’ve told them about it, or we have, they place an order. They do this in several ways – either placing an order directly with our distributor in London (a warehouse with your books in) or, if your book is POD, through a POD wholesaler. The way they find out details about the book is usually via Nielsen, the ISBN agency, because our bibliographic data feeds send out all of the relevant information, so the bookshop can see the extent (pages), the price, the format (hardback, paperback), etc. (We send out this information for free, which means your book will be orderable by bookshops as soon as it’s in print.)
  8. Sale!: When the bookshop orders copies, depending on the method of order it will be with them either next day or within ten days, and then your book will finally reach its reader!

About trade sales (to bookshops and retailers)

Because bookshops need to make money too, they don’t buy your book from us at the RRP. They get a discount – this usually ranges between 35% and 50%, depending on the size of the bookshop and the volume of sales (this is usually fairly standard, and is handled by our sales reps).

If the bookshop orders directly, they get in touch with our sales people, who process the order. The book is then sent out from our distributor directly to the bookshop.

More often than not, however, the bookshop will order via a wholesaler, who gets a slightly bigger percentage (normally 50–55% discount), but if the book is in stock with the wholesaler it can lead to better orders, since they can then get the book to the bookshop the next working day.

A few notes

  • Publication date: At first you might be surprised that when we start talking we suggest a publication date that seems ages away – but there’s a very good reason. While in theory it’s possible to push out books the next month, to give your book the best chance of being stocked in a bookshop you’ll need to allow a bit longer – the minimum suggested time is around six months, which gives you time to do some marketing!
  • Running behind schedule: If you suddenly realise you’re running late and we need to change the publication date, don’t worry – this is normal, and we can sort this out for you.
  • Online retailers and Amazon: Things are slightly complicated when you sell print books to some big online retailers – you will see a lot of other self-publishing companies who tell you they happily sign away a 60% discount. We don’t think it’s fair to give online sellers such an unfair advantage over indie bookshops, the lifeblood of the book trade – or you – so we supply Amazon via a wholesaler instead. This does mean that Amazon might display your book as ‘unavailable’ at first, but this usually reverts to ‘in stock’ a week or two after publication.
  • Sales and distribution deductions: If you opt for Print My Book, at the end of your royalty period we will let you know what sales have gone through our distributor (these are trade sales, i.e. to retailers). Our distributor tallies up the sales volume, and both they and our sales reps take a cut before it reaches us – after all, they deserve paying too! (We will factor in these costs in our initial agreement with you.)