Pricing and Services

What makes Haywood Books different?

As the self-publishing arm of a publisher that was set up and run for quarter of a century by its authors, we think it’s important to go the extra mile, and so we offer all of the below as standard in all of our publishing packages:

• A free editorial appraisal: When you sign up with us one of our editors will look over your manuscript, and you will receive a personalised A4 report with points to consider revising.
• A free cover design using our template: While we can work with you to develop a design based on your ideas, or even help you engage a professional trade designer, we have developed a striking typographical book cover template that you can use for free.
• A free beautiful typeset: You might have come across the term ‘typesetting’, the act (or art!) of making words look good on the page. We have developed a beautiful page layout, and we will typeset your book for you, so you can take advantage of our expertise.
• Free inclusion in our monthly indie bookseller newsletter: As publishers we write to a list of ~800–1,000 independent booksellers every month, advising them of our forthcoming titles. If you opt for the ‘print’ service below we will include a feature on your title for free (print-on-demand-only titles will also be included, although further down the email in a list of POD titles, since this is not a focus of bookseller ordering).
• Free submission to Amazon Look Inside and Google Preview: When you Google a book you’ll sometimes see a select few pages – this is Google Preview, and it helps with discoverability. Likewise, Amazon offer a ‘Look Inside’, which does the same thing. We do the work for you and submit these soon after publication. (Don’t worry – they limit this to around 20% of the book, so even if it looks like there’s lots of your book showing, the vast majority will be hidden.)
• Your book will be climate-positive: We are one of the world’s first climate-positive publishers, meaning that we actually remove more carbon from the environment than we emit (and not just through greenwashing policies), so you can rest assured that in getting your work out there your book is doing real good in the world. You can find out more about this here →

We also consider the below points the very minimum standard of book publishing, and so these are also included in all of our publishing packages:

• Legal deposit: All publishers are legally required to send a free copy to the legal deposit libraries. We will handle this on your behalf.
• Advance-information sheet (AI): One of the key ways in which publishers tell retailers about forthcoming titles is with AIs. These have all the information retailers need – blurb, biography, book categories, price, extent, format, etc., all in one place, along with key sales points (we will ask you to fill in a quick author questionnaire to help us identify the key points).
• Blurb and biography writing: We know it’s difficult to write about yourself and tell the world how good your book is, so we will work with you to shape your blurb and biography so that it’s just right for the book trade.
• Bibliographic data feed: This sounds complicated, but all it means is we will send out all the information retailers need about your book so that it will automatically pop up on websites like Waterstones, Blackwells, Amazon, etc., as if by magic! The information is also used by bookshops to find out about and order titles, so this will make your book order able by bookshops.
• ISBN registration: We will provide you with a free ISBN (International Standard Book Number – the barcode beginning 978 you see on the back of books). We will also register this with Nielsen, the ISBN agency, so that everything is shipshape and above board.

Which service is right for me?

Our pricing system is simple, and we offer two basic models for publication, with options for marketing add-ons for those with big ambitions.

Print-on-demand technology has revolutionised the way the book trade works, and bookshops do now regularly order books from print-on-demand wholesalers. In our experience, however, they are far more likely to order books from a distributor, since copies will arrive with them much quicker (as soon as next day vs. a week to ten days), and they receive a better cut of sales.

Our print-on-demand model is definitely a viable budget option, using market-leading on-demand wholesalers, but we would usually recommend holding stock if your budget allows.

* Prices based on a book of up to 65,000 words. If your book is longer than this it will cost more to print – we will be able to give you a better idea of pricing when you send us your MS. Likewise, if your book is very short we may be able to offer you a more advantageous rate.

Add-ons

eBooks

We will create and distribute an eBook edition of your title as an add-on to either of the above services for just £50.

If your budget does not stretch to either of the print-edition services above, you can opt for a standalone eBook edition for just £99. This includes a free template cover design, but none of the other services.

Marketing

If you really want to get your book out there, we will be able to help you promote it using various marketing channels. We can offer you a tailored quote for any of the below, and help you to pull together a bespoke marketing plan based on your budget.

• Editorial services: If you feel your book could use a professional edit or proofread (and we will make recommendations in our initial gratis report), we can offer more detailed reports, a full edit or proofread for typos.
• Blog tours: See your book featured and reviewed by social-media influencers on their channels.
• Extra copies: If you want extra copies printed so that you can give copies to everyone you know(!), we can extend the print run and send copies directly to you from our printer.
• Print media advertising: We can help you to book and place adverts in national print media.
• Social-media adverts: We can design and run social-media adverts on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) on your behalf.
• Review copies: We can print advance-reading copies and send out review copies on your behalf to journalists and reviewers (although we have no control over who reviews books – we’re happy to have an honest discussion with you about this).
• Book launch events: We can offer brief advice and best practices for free if you want to plan your own launch event, or we can help you to organise a book launch you can be proud of.

Royalties

All self-publishing companies will pay you for copies sold at certain intervals – our accounting is done twice a year, and royalty periods run 1st January to 31st July and 1st August to 31st December.

This means a report will be prepared, and all the money due to you for sales will be sent, as soon as practical after the royalty period ends (usually within a week).

Our commission for sales is amongst the lowest in the industry, and we take just 10% of the cover price (RRP) for sales.

Other charges

We seek to be entirely transparent, so we are up front with you about the charges that are involved in publishing your book from the outset.

If you opt for the print-on-demand service, we will absorb service fees for the first five years from publication. After this we must levy a fee of £20 a year to keep your book in print.

For either service we will absorb enhanced bibliographic fees (which means that you’ll see a full description and biography in places like Amazon and Waterstones rather than a blank box!) charged to us for the first two years. After this we will pass on fees, at £10 per year. We will be happy to make up to three bibliographic updates (for instance, adding subsequent publications to your biography) on your behalf each year without further charge.

If you opt for the ‘Print My Book’ option, a year after the date of publication we may need to pass on storage charges. Based on the past year’s sales we will work out your average monthly sales volume, and we allow you to hold a year’s worth of stock for free at our distributor (so if you sold 70 copies in your first year and 30 in the next year we would allow you to hold 100 copies for free the year after that). On any stock levels over this threshold we will charge a levy of 20p per book per year (so with the above illustration if you had 120 copies in stock we would charge you £4 to store your books).

If you opted for ‘Print My Book’ and your book is running low on stock we will try to give you some warning that it will soon be due for reprinting. When it’s run out of stock we will make up to 20 small corrections to the text for free, if you have a list of any typos of changes to be made. We will advise you if your list of corrections go over this threshold and, in this case, will offer a quote for correction. We will guide you through the reprint, offering you options for pricing and quantities. It is not possible to accurately estimate reprint costs from the outset, but expect the cost to be around 60–70% of the initial outlay.

If you opted for ‘Print My Book’, sales made to the book trade will be subject to discounts – booksellers get a discount, and sales reps and distributors take a cut. You can find out more about how the book trade works here, and of course we will be able to talk you through the ins and outs of this.

Prices are correct at the time of writing, but like any agreements, these must be subject to change, especially in a time of great economic upheaval. However, we undertake to give you as much warning as possible if we do need to make changes, and we will only pass on increases in prices that are passed on to us – we won’t invent mid-term fees!

Please note that we are VAT registered, so we must add VAT to our prices and fees. If you are VAT registered we will provide you with self-billing pro-forma invoices to make your VAT return more straightforward.