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When production of your book is finished (when the Editorial Manager approves and confirms your Proofs and Cover Workflow sections), we set the publication date for 10 full months later (e.g. a title finishing editorial production by 20 March 2024 will be scheduled a 25 February 2025 release. (Publication dates are set on or near the 20th of each month.)
We have a nominal publishing date of the last Tuesday in each month (except December, when it is the second Tuesday), and we aim for the same publication date for ebook and paperback.
There is such a long wait because it takes 10 months (sometimes more) for information about your book to circulate through the trade worldwide, and this is essential to maximize your prospects of long-term success.
Please note that this time may be slightly extended depending on where we are in the annual buying cycle.
In short, no, we cannot offer a live tracking of pre-orders. We get an idea of the figure only when Amazon, and other booksellers, etc place their initial orders a month or two before publication. As author, the best you can do to gauge pre-orders is check your Amazon sales rank.
If your book’s information (printed or ebook) is not displayed correctly online, post a query with your title and publication date on the Sales & Distribution/ Sales Online forum, and we will follow up.
As a blanket rule, we recommend ordering your books 2 months in advance of when you need them, 3 months if you are in Australia/NZ.
For any small orders (<20 copies) — you can order discounted copies of your book from your local distributor (details here) one month before publication.
For any large orders (>20 copies) — order direct from us on the Sales & Distribution: Sales to authors forum. This is so that we can ensure our distributors have enough copies left over after your order.
We aim to make the first print order three months before publication. It takes varying lengths of time for your book to get to get into the shops.
We gauge how many to print by checking trade buyers to see how many they have ordered, and looking at your Marketing page for any Promotional Plans and Marketing Activities.
Shops and online retailers should start receiving printed copies of your book when you receive the Your book is now in the warehouse notification (usually four weeks before publication). If stock is ordered earlier than six weeks into our US warehouse, NBN, they will advance the publication date, which can complicate things. In the US, we aim to deliver stock four weeks before publication so that this doesn’t happen.
The answer is usually one of the following:
If you have an issue, please let us know on the Questions & Problems About Your Printed Books forum, with as much specific detail about the issue as you can give us.
This is likely for the following reasons:
The information from Amazon.com feeds through to regional Amazons in France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India, and Mexico. This means that people in those countries can order the book from the US site. Your book may not appear on these sites until your publication date or soon after.
If you are searching for your pre-order title on Amazon in a region different from the one your computer is in (e.g., searching Amazon USA from the UK or vice versa), you might not find it or you may see it come up as unavailable, though people in that country will be able to see it.
Amazon UK has the right — as does every retailer — to sell books at whatever price they choose. This doesn't affect your royalty payments. If you do see a price promotion on Amazon, it is a great opportunity to promote the book to your networks.
There is very little we can do to manage Amazon stock levels, but our distributors can replenish stock there quickly, and we are in the process of making more and more of our stock print on demand, which means that if Amazon runs out of stock, they will print individual copies on demand until we can restock with traditional, off-set stock .
If you have an issue, you can contact us on the Editorial & Production - Printing queries forum; we will let you know their last order details and the current stock at NBN, our US distributor.
Every book we sell on Amazon offers Look Inside functionality. Readers can read random pages of no more than 20% of the text, mimicking the experience of browsing in a bookshop. We don't have any control over the pages of your book that Amazon chooses to preview. The content is decided by the Amazon algorithms, and they don't accommodate special requests.
Amazon categorises your book according to its own algorithms. This process is highly automated, and categories vary by retailer and region.
If you want to change your Amazon categories, you can recommend changes to bibliographic data on Amazon.com via an Author Central account. For Amazon UK, if your categories are wildly wrong, please contact us through the Author Forum in Sales & Distribution/Sales Online. Amazon won't change Kindle categories; they'll do this only for your print books.
Be warned: Amazon will remove a category more easily than add one. Changes can take several weeks to feed through and aren’t guaranteed.
We, as the publisher, have no power to remove negative reviews. If someone has posted a review of your book that seems unjust, you can complain to [email protected] or report it through your Author Central account.
Yes.
We recommend that all CI authors create an Amazon Author Central account to share the most up-to-date information about themselves across their Amazon books.
You must wait until your book is available to purchase on Amazon before you can set up an Author Central account.
The account connects your books together in an easy way, gives your readers more information about you, helps you build your brand, gain fans, and learn about how to sell more books. Information available includes access to your Amazon Sales Rank, Nielson Bookscan data for authors published in the USA, and access to all your online reviews in one place. NOTE: Amazon Author Central Accounts are not yet centralized — you have to create one for Amazon.com (USA), one for Amazon.co.uk (UK), etc.
We recommend that you:
We provide monthly sales figures on your Financials page, by units and value in £ sterling.
Printed copies of your book are not the same as sales of your book. We print the copies, then we have to sell them to booksellers.
In an ideal world, we would sell every copy we print, but in practice, it is unlikely. We carefully manage our print runs, avoiding too many unsold copies by aiming to keep stock levels at the number of books that have sold in the previous three months.
Besides buying books from us, booksellers also return unsold stock.
If you have negative sales for any given month, it means that there were more returns (by booksellers) than sales (to booksellers) in that month.
The numbers you see refer to net returned books rather than gross.
Net sales can appear as negative because orders from over-ambitious retailers are being returned and are often higher than more-recent outgoing orders, and it is now more cost-effective to pulp returned copies.
No, you can't see your specific number of Amazon sales. If you have an Amazon Author Central account, you can see your Amazon sales rank, which indicates how well your book is performing.
Amazon also offers Nielson Bookscan data for its Amazon.com site. This gives an indication of books sold at point of sale to customers for the USA only (not the same as the numbers on your Financials page, which is books sold to the trade).
The current monthly sales figures, going back to November 2008, are accurate, despite some slippage from one month to the next, but before 2008, they are not, particularly if your book was published before January 2005. The royalty statements, however, will be accurate overall, but at times, we put in an approximation rather than checking every royalty statement for each book. Sales of ebooks before November 2011 are not given on the website but will appear on your royalty statement.
We are represented by companies generally reckoned to be amongst the best independent sales teams around the world:
They work at contacting all relevant wholesalers and retailers, online and bricks-and-mortar, about your book, worldwide. Libraries usually find out about books from wholesalers, so they too are covered. We're in constant touch with the above groups, sending them AI/tipsheets and catalogues, and attending sales meetings. All the main reps get access to an AI sheet on every title, and we provide them with subject catalogues that include strong backlists.
Realistically, with us, your best chance of getting stocked in physical bookstores is in the UK, North America, and Europe (and getting them stocked in these regions is tough).
The market in Australia is extremely difficult at present, and it is highly unlikely that we will be able to get your books into shops there unless you're a national name or there's specific demand.
A bookseller is far more likely to be persuaded to order copies of a new book if they are alerted to significant marketing. This includes details of upcoming events, scheduled interviews, endorsements from high-profile reviewers, and any traction a book may have gained in mainstream press or on social media. Our Sales Coordinator passes on important marketing information, which the reps then highlight to buyers when pitching your book to bookstores. Tell us about the marketing you do by adding it to your Marketing Activities. For really big news, let us know on the Author Forum.
We produce catalogues twice a year. These cover eight areas:
We also produce Top 20 lists in BISAC categories and in all sub-categories.
Download these from www.collectiveinkbooks.com and click on Catalogues on the top menu.
Direct them to How to Order on our website, where they will find contact details for the distributor in their region and can contact CI to negotiate terms.
If the bookstore wants to order a few copies for their shelves, they can also order direct from our distributors via the How to Order page or they may prefer to order through a wholesaler.
Please let us know of any trade orders that you are involved in through the Help forum under Sales & Distribution: Sales to authors. It helps us plan our printing.
Please note that many of these sites claiming to offer a free copy of your book do not actually do so. They are phishing sites looking to collect your personal data.
Printed books are rarely pirated. Piracy of ebooks is more common.
Along with most publishers, we do not build digital rights management (DRM) into our ebooks because it would restrict their readability and distribution. Third-party stores (e.g. Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble) add a layer of DRM that locks the book to a specific user account and device.
If you do come across an instance of your manuscript being offered as a free download and you can find a contact email address on the offending site, post this and the URL link to your book on the Help forum in Sales & Distribution/ Sales Online. We will issue a take-down notice to their service provider. Word Press and YouTube are on our side and will take down any offending URL.
If you would like to issue a take-down notice yourself, please use this template:
To the ISP Hosting Company:
[Author name] is the copyright owner of the ebook(s) being infringed at:
[Insert URL link]
This letter is official notification under the provisions of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") to effect removal of the above-reported infringements. I request that you immediately issue a cancellation message as specified in RFC 1036 for the specified postings and prevent the infringer, who is identified by its Web address, from posting the infringing material to your servers in the future. Please be advised that law requires you, as a service provider, to "expeditiously remove or disable access to" the infringing material upon receiving this notice. Noncompliance may result in a loss of immunity for liability under the DMCA.
I have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of here is not authorized by the author, the copyright holder, or the law. The information provided herein is accurate to the best of my knowledge.
Please reply to me promptly indicating the actions you have taken to resolve this matter.
Yours Faithfully,
We publish in the English language only, though we facilitate publication in other languages by selling the foreign rights. We sell about 30 foreign rights a year. Around 360 publishers subscribe to get a mailing from us. Last year, we sent out over 500 books for consideration, resulting in 35 foreign rights contracts.
We promote our books to agents and editors around the world and we meet with them at international book fairs.
If we have the translation rights (this is the case for roughly nine titles out of ten), to avoid confusion please log translation queries in the Rights section of the Author Forum.
No, we do not sub-license editions of your book to other publishers in English, with the exception of sales to India (their retail price is equivalent to our cost price).
The financial penalties involved in mistakenly selling translation rights to two different publishers in the same country can far outweigh income gained from selling any number of rights.
If you’re not a recognizable name or if we haven’t sold 10,000 or so copies of your book, the chances of rights sales are not high.
When we make a sale, most advances are at the level of €500–1000 (many are in the hundreds), or in places like Vietnam or Indonesia, many are sold with no advance.
€5000 is generally a good advance, but it doesn’t happen often.
Occasionally, an overseas publisher will bring out a translation quickly, but this is the exception.
Your overseas publisher will have to:
Yes.
We will send you two copies of the translated book after we receive them from the publisher.
We don’t get involved in detailed correspondence in this area. We do not chase overseas publishers, asking if or when they are going to publish or how many they are printing.
Yes, you can help the foreign rights sales of your book.
Approach overseas publishers directly, either via contacts already on our database (those who have published our titles before) or others you know. We are easy to work with the agreements. Encourage friends and colleagues in other countries to do the same. It makes a difference if a publisher knows that there are already people in their market keen to see a book.
If they are interested, ask them to contact Lisa von Fircks, our Foreign Rights Manager. ([email protected]).
Authors sometimes have friends/contacts who want to translate the book into their language or are bilingual and can do it themselves. Which is great, but in terms of publishing the translation, we cannot get directly involved with that. Effective publishing means finding a local-language publisher in that market. Encourage them to find one.
Please note: If you have supplied us with pictures or illustrations, make sure that you retain your own copies.
We can’t guarantee to make these available to an overseas publisher in future years.
When should I get in touch with my foreign publisher?
Feel free to contact them directly:
Please note: We do not forward statements on sales from overseas publishers.
We do record the advance paid to us, with subsequent royalties.
You can make a rough calculation of the numbers sold from royalty received, but we do not track sales of translated titles like we track our own sales. We do not chase publishers for royalty statements. It may be a few years before you receive anything other than the advance. This is because it can take two or three years to translate and publish, and some publishers do not send us a statement until the book has earned through the advance. Different publishers send us statements covering different periods; one might be six months, another once a year.
You can find this information on your Financials page.
After we have received the income from the other publisher, your percentage will be paid over to you in your subsequent royalty statement. We do not pay over your percentage of the advance as soon as the contract is signed because sometimes it can take 6–12 months to come through; sometimes it does not come at all and we have to cancel the contract.
If the rights deal has been made through an Agent, their commission (typically 10%) is deducted from the income before it comes to us. We then send you your share when your royalties are due. For this reason, along with bank charges, the sum we receive does not always exactly match the advance stated in the contract.
There is a sample foreign rights contract in Appendix 2.
