pixel

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) from Our Authors

We understand that publishing a book can be overwhelming and exciting, and you are bound to have questions about this whole process. We hope to answer those questions to the best of our ability. Some of those questions come from all of our debut authors, and we’ve compiled our answers to those questions here. This page is constantly being updated with more questions and answers, so please check back often and contact us if your questions still have not been answered.

Author FAQs

a

How do I get my book to be carried in bookstores?

Brick and mortar stores tend to order books for their shelves only once there is proven demand for the book in their area or by their patrons. The same applies to libraries. (With multiple millions of books published every year, no bookstore could ever keep up with shelving every book published. So they keep their finger on the pulse to see what their customers want, and order those.)
The best way to get books in stores is to have people flocking to stores to ask for the book. If a customer wants it, a store will often order it for them. If multiple customers flock to the same store and ask for the same book, that store will likely stock the book. This is where a strong platform, a good publicity push, and a solid marketing plan for your preorder campaign come into play. The more buzz you can create, the easier this will be.
The second best way (and most common) to get the physical books into stores will be going to local stores and seeing if they have a local author program where you can sell on consignment.
The third best option is to visit those stores, bringing the title (sell) sheet and a physical copy with you, and asking to speak to a manager about stocking your book. When they can see it, hold it, feel it, flip through it, etc. they are more likely to place a small order, somewhere between 5-20 books for an independent bookstore and somewhere in the range of 200+ for a Barnes and Noble or other large chain, if they think it will sell.
Those orders will come through the distributor, be processed as sales, and then hopefully those copies sell from the shelf. However, more often than not, one or two copies will sell and then 3-18 copies will be returned to the distributor. This charge is funneled back to you in the form of Returns on your royalty statements, and is often the cost of the book because the bookstore wants their money plus shipping costs back.
One other alternative method of getting books in stores is to host an event at the store, a signing or a reading or a talk of some sort that will draw in an audience. The store can then manage inventory for you, they benefit by getting new shoppers into the store, and you benefit by selling books. But this does require advance planning, because store events can take 1-3 months to plan and prepare for.
a

When should I expect to see my first royalties?

Statements are generated quarterly. We post royalties when we receive payment for sales. These payments can lag as much as 3-4 months from the time of the sale.

Because we do not receive statements from our distributors until the middle of the month following the sales, this means that you will receive your quarterly statements by the end of the month following the quarter. Royalties are paid for any balance of $25.00 or greater.

1st Quarter: We pay royalties in January for income we received in October, November, and December for sales made in July, August, and September.
2nd Quarter: We pay royalties in April for income we received in January, February, and March for sales made in October, November, and December.
3rd Quarter: We pay royalties in July for income we received in April, May, and June for sales made in January, February, and March.
4th Quarter: We pay royalties in October for income we received in July, August, and September for sales made in April, May, and June.

Your heading of your statement consists of:
• The date the statement is generated
• For the period since .
• A tag line – that will usually say something like 2nd Quarter Royalty or it could contain a bit of news we want to share.

The breakdown within the statement will have three columns: date, description, and amount. The description will have two lines for each item posted.

The first line will have the description of the royalty month/year received for month of sale (e.g. Royalty June 2017 for March).
The second line will have a number of items sold and the name of the book title. (e.g. 25 Book Title for paperback books or 25 Book Title ebooks for ebook sales).
The statements reflect three types of transactions: sales, returns, and holdback. Sales are just that, your royalty portion of the sales. Returns take money from your account for books returned.
The distributors hold back is a percentage of each sale to help cover the cost of returns. We pass this holdback along to you for sales in any volume. When the distributor releases their holdback money to us, we credit this money to your account and you will see a holdback refund posted.
Because returns can be significant (the industry standard is 30% of all sales), an author’s account can sometimes go into a negative balance. We do not expect you to pay that amount. If the holdback amount does not cover all returns, the difference will be reduced by future sales.

a

When will my book come out?

In the height of excitement, it can be tempting to get wrapped up in the emotions of your forthcoming book. This can make it disappointing to hear that your book won’t have a final publication date until editorial work is complete, or to hear that our publication timeline takes over a year to complete.

In the current publishing climate where much of the information out there about publishing comes from well-intentioned educators for the self-publishing (or author-publisher) spaces, you may find dramatically conflicting information about how long it actually takes to produce a book and what stages are necessary to produce a professionally published book.

Our publishing process can be found here. Many of these stages take a month or more to complete. Some stages require as many as six months of lead time in order to meet industry standards, such as submitting your fully formatted, fully edited book for professional trade reviews. Because of this, your book is not likely to release less than a year after your contract is signed, and if there are any delays in production—from editor availability to material delays at our printers to a timely return of requested materials and documents during the onboarding process—the whole process will be held up until we can get back on track. We do what we can to avoid these delays, but there are many moving parts that must work in harmony for a book to be released on time. We can give a much more accurate timeline once developmental editing and copyediting are complete, as those are the processes that often take the longest.

a

I want to run a price drop or free book marketing campaign for my ebook. How do I do that?

We are pleased to partner with you to run ebook discounts and free book offerings and giveaways to help you reach more readers and get new reviews.

There are a few different ways this can happen.

  1. We apply for the campaign with scheduled retailer discounts and promotions through our distributor. This is the most common and simplest method.
  2. You communicate your plans at least three weeks in advance of the requested price drop so that we can coordinate price drops with our distributor. This will allow us to ensure your book’s price is dropped with ample time before your mailing goes out.
    • If you are actively applying for BookBub featured deals, please let our marketing team know so that we can withhold your book from other discounted ebook submissions to give you the best chance at landing a BookBub deal according to their criteria.

Marketing flows most smoothly when our authors wait to schedule discounted ebook marketing after the price drop is confirmed, as it is much easier to schedule marketing than it is to coordinate these price drops with our distributor and all of the online retailers where your book is sold.

We are happy to set up this marketing on your behalf. Please contact Jori Hanna for more information about how that works.

If you choose to set up the marketing yourself once a price drop has been confirmed, please be sure you are signing up for bargain ebook mailings rather than free ebook mailings. Companies such as Bargain Booksy, Fussy Librarian, eReader News Today, eReaderIQ and more tend to have multiple lists—some for books being offered for free and some for books being offered at a reduced price. If your book is discounted and you sign up for a free book email blast, your additional price drop may not be accommodated by our distributor due to the required one month of lead time to ensure everything goes through smoothly.

If you have any additional questions about this, please contact Jori Hanna.

a

I’ve just gotten the rights back to one of my old books. Will you publish it?

This must be evaluated on a case by case basis. In general terms, we are interested in assessing it to see if it is right for our house if you are already one of our established authors. Please contact Teri Rider to discuss this for your book.

a

What is the point of running Giveaways on Goodreads?

Goodreads Giveaways are not a price drop campaign. Because of this, Goodreads Giveaways should not be viewed as a method to drive sales or as a method to get reviews. So what is the point of them?
The purpose of Goodreads Giveaways is to drive significant exposure to your book and to grow your list of interested readers. They do this very well.
At their core, these giveaways are a sweepstakes drawing in which Goodreads users can enter to win a copy of your book. In order to enter, they must agree to the Giveaway terms and conditions. Those terms include that they must add the book to their “Want to Read” shelf, therefore indicating to Goodreads that they are interested in the book and want to hear about further updates for that book.
Goodreads tracks what books are trending by three main “shelves” on their site. Want to Read, Currently Reading, and Read. If a book is added to 4000 users shelves in a short period of time, that gets Goodreads‘ attention. If that trends upwards to 10k, 12k, 20k, 40k, etc, that book is now “trending.”
Additionally, every time a user (we’ll call them Alice) adds a book to their shelves, it updates their newsfeed for their friends. And those friends may also receive an email (depending on their notification preferences) about Alice’s activity. Humans are nosy by nature. If there is a bookshelf in a room, we will go look at the books to learn about our host. The same applies online. Goodreads knows this. Goodreads is built around this inherent desire to connect with others around the books we read.
Listing a giveaway will have your book included in the Goodreads giveaway page. Anyone interested will enter, add the book to their shelves, and then wait to see if they win. Whenever they enter, their friends can see your book and may add it to their own shelves as well or enter to win. This has a snowballing effect to reach far more people than you could reach outside of your contact circles in a short amount of time. You will inevitably reach a point when your friends, family, and colleagues have all had a chance to buy your book. All of the marketing opportunities you do from that point forward—giveaways, price drop campaigns, BookBub and Facebook ads—should be aimed at reaching people who don’t already know you. This drives interest. This drives engagement. This does not necessarily mean (in fact, in most cases, it will not mean) that those interested users will go buy a copy. That doesn’t mean it’s useless. It means the success metric wasn’t sales. The success metric for a giveaway is number of entries.
This brings me to the second very important piece of Goodreads Giveaways: they work best when you run them multiple times.
Goodreads did a study on how their platform was used to create the success of The Silent Patient by Alex Michealides. This is a thriller that has been seen by nearly everyone, even if you don’t know the name of the book or the author off the top of your head. This debut author has stayed on the New York Times Bestseller list for multiple years because his marketing team ran a giveaway on Goodreads every few months for over a year leading up to his book’s release. By the time the book was actually available to purchase and be read, there were millions of Goodreads users who had already expressed interest. That turned into millions of people hearing about the book on release day (from Goodreads), inclusion in various lists the Goodreads Editors put together, and the book by an unknown author becoming an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller. (You can read that study here.)
Goodreads Giveaways are an incredibly powerful marketing tool and we are pleased to offer them to you as part of our marketing options. Please contact Jori to see about setting one up.
a

My ebook has been discounted to a dollar or less… How is this a good thing?

Every month we submit our books for inclusion in discounted ebook features through major retailers like Amazon Kindle, Rakuten Kobo, and Apple iBooks. These are often collections of books that share a common theme (such as New Year, New You Nonfiction in January or Chills and Thrills books for October).

This is a highly competitive promotional opportunity. Inclusion in these features is limited to only the books that these retailers select. If they have chosen your book, it is because your book fits the niche they’re looking to fill, has positive reviews and good recent sales numbers to get their attention.

Many authors get caught up in the financial side of things when ebooks get discounted, worrying about the royalties they’re missing out on by not selling the book at full price. This is a valid concern. We want to assure you that we are not selling the book at a loss, even at a $0.99 ebook. You will still receive royalties on copies sold, though admittedly the percentage will be taken out of the discounted price.

Consider the appeal of massive discounts on items during Black Friday. Consider your own shopping habits for a moment, and put yourself in the mind of a consumer. How likely are you to spend $50 on an air fryer? If you’ve been researching and looking for one, you may be likely to purchase that. But on Black Friday, when the price is slashed to $25, the odds that you’ll actually buy that air fryer over the closest comparable product at $30 jumps considerably.

The same is true of book buyers. Readers love a discount. Including your ebook in these retailer features does a few things:

  1. It makes readers who already know about the book but who haven’t bought it yet significantly more likely to follow through and buy. This means any of your friends, family, or colleagues will be much more likely to purchase your book if they’ve been putting it off for any reason.
  2. It creates “news” around the book and gives you another reason to talk about it. If you’ve fallen into audience fatigue and you’re worried your followers won’t want to hear about your book any more lest they unfollow you, you get to bring them good news they’ll be excited about. Everyone loves a chance to save money.
  3. A price drop creates eligibility for additional marketing. There are a large number of marketing opportunities that open up to you only when your book is discounted. Some things, like Facebook ads or BookBub ads can be done whenever you want. Other things, like inclusion in Bargain Booksy or Fussy Librarian, can only occur when your book is a bargain for their readers. Each email blast typically reaches 5-50,000 people. If you sign up for inclusion in as many email blasts as you can, you’re likely to hit bestseller rankings on Amazon because you’ll be reaching 100,000+ readers when your book is discounted. You cannot get that exposure any other way.
  4. The retailers will feature your book in a set apart “deals” category of the store. This will get you in front of shoppers who only look for discounted books, people who are usually voracious readers and who often will review your book after they read it. These are the people who’s friends come to them for advice on which book to read next. If your book was never discounted, you would never reach these readers.
    • On Amazon, your book will be featured among 100-600 others on average. This is still a highly saturated market, so any additional marketing you do will help you climb in the rankings and help you appear higher in the default searches for deals in your genre.
    • On Kobo, you are likely to be featured among closer to 100 other books.
    • Apple’s lists are far more exclusive, showcasing 20-50 books at a time.

These features are highly beneficial and when authors engage and put more money into the marketing of these price drops, we routinely see books climb to the tops of Amazon categories to become bestsellers, we see higher review numbers, and we see more readers which leads to more benefits over time.

Onboarding Questions

a

When should I expect to see my first royalties?

Statements are generated quarterly. We post royalties when we receive payment for sales. These payments can lag as much as 3-4 months from the time of the sale.

Because we do not receive statements from our distributors until the middle of the month following the sales, this means that you will receive your quarterly statements by the end of the month following the quarter. Royalties are paid for any balance of $25.00 or greater.

1st Quarter: We pay royalties in January for income we received in October, November, and December for sales made in July, August, and September.
2nd Quarter: We pay royalties in April for income we received in January, February, and March for sales made in October, November, and December.
3rd Quarter: We pay royalties in July for income we received in April, May, and June for sales made in January, February, and March.
4th Quarter: We pay royalties in October for income we received in July, August, and September for sales made in April, May, and June.

Your heading of your statement consists of:
• The date the statement is generated
• For the period since .
• A tag line – that will usually say something like 2nd Quarter Royalty or it could contain a bit of news we want to share.

The breakdown within the statement will have three columns: date, description, and amount. The description will have two lines for each item posted.

The first line will have the description of the royalty month/year received for month of sale (e.g. Royalty June 2017 for March).
The second line will have a number of items sold and the name of the book title. (e.g. 25 Book Title for paperback books or 25 Book Title ebooks for ebook sales).
The statements reflect three types of transactions: sales, returns, and holdback. Sales are just that, your royalty portion of the sales. Returns take money from your account for books returned.
The distributors hold back is a percentage of each sale to help cover the cost of returns. We pass this holdback along to you for sales in any volume. When the distributor releases their holdback money to us, we credit this money to your account and you will see a holdback refund posted.
Because returns can be significant (the industry standard is 30% of all sales), an author’s account can sometimes go into a negative balance. We do not expect you to pay that amount. If the holdback amount does not cover all returns, the difference will be reduced by future sales.

a

What is a comparable title? Why do I need it? How do I find it?

In the book industry, “comparable titles,” or “comp titles,” are one of the most important tools book buyers use in determining whether or not to purchase your book. The comp titles let them know who they’ve read that is “like you.” So it’s important that your comp titles are truly relevant to your intended audience. For our purposes, we need 4-5 comparable titles from you.

These books share similarities to your book in character arcs, plotline, themes, or pacing. We are not looking for a book that is exactly like your book. We are looking for a collection of books that go with your book on the shelf for one reason or another. Think of a few authors you aimed to emulate (My book is perfect for you if you like the writing of….). Or think of a few books you’ve really enjoyed because they had similar themes (My book deals with themes of love and loss similar to those themes explored in…). Consider movies or TV shows you’ve enjoyed as well. These can’t be used by bookstores, but they can be valuable in consumer marketing strategies. (If you loved Now You See Me and White Collar, this book is for you.)

You do not need to read every comparable title you list. You just have to find the similarities and differences between your book and those books already published.

Bookstores, libraries, and Goodreads are great places to find comparable titles. Once you find one you think matches pretty well, you can also Google “books like The Hunger Games” and Google’s algorithm will find even more for you.

For more information on this, we recommend watching this YouTube video.

a

What do you mean by “Social Media Links?”

Part of building an author platform is being available to your readers and building a community around your work and your content. Social media is one of the most accessible ways for you to find and communicate with your audience. In order for your audience to find you, it can be beneficial to have other sources directing your readers to your social media accounts. You do this online through sharing links from one web page to another.

A link, at it’s core, is a URL or web address for your page on any given social media. They often follow similar patterns, but the most straightforward method to finding and sharing your social media links is to log into the social media platform through a web browser, navigate to your public facing page, select everything in the address bar, copy the text (command + C on a Mac, Control + C on a PC, or right click + copy using your mouse), and then paste that text into a Word Document or other text editor (command + V on a Mac, Control + V on a PC, or right click + paste using your mouse).

In the end, you should see something similar to the following web addresses/URLs. These are the links we need in order to send interested readers to your social media accounts:

www.facebook.com/torchflamebooks

www.instagram.com/torchflamebooks

www.youtube.com/@readtorchflamebooks

www.linkedin.com/company/torchflamebooks/ OR www.linkedin.com/in/j-j-hanna/

Most of the time, these links will be the name of the website (facebook.com) slash your username (torchflamebooks). Some, like TikTok and YouTube, also include an @ symbol in the URL.

a

Why do I need to send you my social media links?

Until accounts are well established, it can be extremely difficult to find the correct account. Many people on Facebook have similar names. Without profile pictures added and without direct names, it can be impossible to find you when your accounts are new. By having you provide accurate links, it ensures we are sending your followers to the correct account so that they can, in fact, follow you and not a stranger four states over.

a

Why must I be present on social media?

When was the last time you went to a publishing house’s website or social media to find a new book to read?

We do our very best to be discoverable online and to create content that will resonate with our readers. But the fact of the matter is that word of mouth marketing spreads faster and more effectively than any marketing we can do for you via our social media channels and our website, and that word of mouth marketing must start with you.

Readers tend to respond best to people they can interact with rather than companies that can feel more cold. Because of this, we do expect you to be present online and to be engaged in the marketing of your book. You will be able to curate a much more focused audience for your genre, connect with your readers, and engage with the community that will build around your book and your author career.

a

How should I send my manuscript to you?

Please send manuscripts to us in a Microsoft Word Document, formatted in double-spaced Times New Roman, size 12 font. It is also helpful if your chapter numbers are all labeled using the built in Microsoft Word style Heading 1. This helps us ensure that when we edit the document using Track Changes, a feature included in Microsoft Word, and when we prepare the file for layout, there are as few changes to formatting as possible.

If you have them prepared when we request your final version of your manuscript before developmental editing, please also send us your dedication, acknowledgements, and anything else you’d like to include in the final book.

If those are not prepared by the time your book goes into developmental editing, please send those before your book is moved into Layout.