AUTHOR QUESTIONAIR
myebookstuff.com is a merchant,
not a publisher or wholesaler. As a merchant, our engagement with authors is
minimal, as most of what’s relevant to you is dealt with by, or with, your
publisher.
myebookstuff.com doesn’t
have an author-direct style self-publishing service. Instead, we rely on firms
like Lulu, Ingram Spark and iUniverse. They manage relationships with their
authors and, in turn, deliver a steady flow of ebooks to merchant like myebookstuff.com.
We then offer your
ebook(s) to our customers. When we make a sale, we pay the publisher the list
price, minus a pre-agreed discount. (That discount makes up the gross profit
that we, the merchant, earn from the sale.) The amount of the discount has been
negotiated and agreed between us (merchant) and the publisher. The same trade
discount applies to all the titles we receive from a given publisher. The
publisher will then remit to you from the money we pay them.
Editing, cover design and
ISBNs are typically managed by your publisher. Alternatively, you might manage
these things yourself and deliver a finished “bundle” to your publisher. But
they’re not things we, as a merchant, get involved in.
So, because I am self publishing
author I can’t sell my book on your ebook website? I have to use other ebook
outlets?
You certainly can sell
your ebook on myebookstuff.com. But to do so you’ll need to sign up with us.
Then your book will flow into myebookstuff.com database. We offer ebooks
from tens of thousands of self-publishers, just like you, through those
channels.
We’re a tiny minnow
compared with our massive competitors, and we just don’t have the resources to
manage tens of thousands of supplier relationships. And anyway, it’s a really,
really good idea to sign up with one of those guys because then your work will
automatically make its way onto the other major ebook retail sites, without
effort on your part. You’ll be in good company.
If an ISBN has been allotted
by another company can this ISBN apply, or would it only apply to that
company’s sales?
We accept and catalogue
ISBNs as they are delivered by publishers. It is possible for the same work to
have several ISBNs issued by the same publisher, or by different publishers.
When we sell an ebook, we remit to the publisher who supplied it to us,
according to its ISBN. So if it happens that we are provided the same work by
two different publishers (under two different ISBNs), we pay the publisher
whose version we sold.
Our system can’t accept a
duplicate ISBN. That means that, if your book is released by a publisher or
distributor under a particular ISBN, the system will reject an upload from
another publisher that has the same ISBN.
What incentives regarding
advertising do you supply and at what costs?
We don’t offer
advertising incentives to publishers or authors.
What assurances that all
sales will be shown to the author?
For us to under-report
sales would be serious breach of the agreement between myebookstuff.com and the
publisher. We’ve been an eBook merchant longer than some ebook retailer, and we
have never knowingly under-reported sales.
Can a sale from your
Company be cancelled or deleted and, if so, is the author also penalised by the
removal of the royalty paid.
We sometimes need to
refund a purchase, but the number is few. They’re mostly people who couldn’t
get the ebook to work because of outdated hardware or a faulty ebook file, or
they thought they were buying a printed book. In those instances when we refund
a consumer, the publisher is not paid for the original sale. When it comes to
refunds, no-one benefits.