Strict Publishing International is interested in editing and publishing all types of literature – at no charge to the author.

Frequently Asked Questions – please read this section carefully BEFORE submitting any writing to us. Authors please note that the paragraphs below form part of a contract between us if you submit your writing to us for publication.

What sort of books do you publish?
We publish fiction, of many types.  We publish mainly as ebooks and make NO charges to the author for doing this.  We have the facility to publish paperbacks and hardbacks, but realistically very, very few printed books will sell enough to justify the time, effort and direct costs of producing the printed versions.  From time to time, usually after a large number of sales as an ebook, we will produce a printed version.

But I want my book in print!
Every author does!  But not every book, however good it is, manages to sell enough to make it worthwhile.  By publishing as an ebook first, you have some idea of how many it's likely to sell.  If it does well enough, then of course we will want to publish in print - we want to make money from it as much as you do.  If it has not done particularly well as an ebook, then we are still happy to publish in print as a paperback for a small fee and under certain conditions:
(a) Some ebooks, usually a very few in the "erotica" category, we think are unsuitable for print.  We will not produce printed versions of these.
(b) You must have made some sales from ebooks first. 
(c) Part of the cost of setting up the printed version will be your risk rather than ours, as follows:
     (i) you must have already sold some ebooks and have a royalty balance awaiting payment to you of at least $150
     (ii) at your request, we will then format the book for print, redesign the cover and prepare it
     (iii) the book will be published via a print-on-demand distributor, which means that it is available for purchase and copies will be printed as orders come in for it.  It will be listed on Amazon and other major retailers, and catalogued so that bookshops can order it.  You can buy copies for delivery to you at a discounted price (usually a little over a quarter of the retail price) plus delivery costs.
     (iv) we will deduct $150 from your balance of royalties for your ebooks, plus the costs of any copies you want for yourself
     (v) you will earn royalties at the same percentage rate as on ebooks, but bear in mind that the payment from the distributor per copy sold is lower in relation to the selling price than with ebooks - of course, the cost of printing the book is much higher than making an ebook available for download
     (vi) the selling price of a paperback will be higher than the same ebook - typically one third higher, so a $6.95 ebook will probably sell as a paperback at $9.95, and the royalties per sale that might average $3 per ebook sold will be around $2 per paperback sold on Amazon and less than $1 per copy sold from other bookshops.  Figures are approximate and depend on number of pages, weight, and numerous other factors.
  
REMEMBER: if your book does very well as an ebook, we will probably produce a printed version anyway, so it's worth waiting.  If we make the decision to print, then we do NOT take any fee from your ebook royalty balance.  We take ONLY the direct costs of setting up the print version (typically about $50), not our time to do it, AND we take that fee only from the royalties of printed book sales, not ebook sales.  If the printed version doesn't sell, we don't get our costs back and it has cost you nothing.

Will you take my writing?
Send it to editor@strictpublishing.com and we will take a look. Please send the whole book, not just a sample.  MS-Word format as an attachment to the e-mail is the best, but we are happy to take plain text. We can only consider writing in English (UK English, US English, Australian English etc etc.) but please specify if you are not writing in UK English and our editors will adjust language settings accordingly. We realise how irritating it can be for American authors, for example, to have their spelling "corrected" to a UK version!  Please make the subject line of your e-mail "New Submission" – we receive a large number of spam e-mails and it would be a pity if your work were mistaken for spam and deleted! Allow three weeks for a reply, although we try to read everything within a day or two of receiving it.
If we have already published one or more of your books, by sending us another book you are automatically giving us permission to publish it on the same terms.  If you are sending us a book for the first time, you give us permission to publish it as an ebook and/or in print once you have agreed the terms we specify.  By giving us permission to publish, you also give us permission to edit, re-write if necessary, amend layout, choose/design a suitable cover picture, set the selling price for the book (which we may change from time to time), and decide which formats and outlets are most appropriate for selling your book.  Although we will always take an author's wishes into consideration, the decisions we take regarding the editing and selling of the book are ultimately ours and ours alone - and, of course, it is in our interests as well as those of our authors to ensure we achieve the best possible level of sales.  IF we have not published a book within three months of accepting it for publication, the author may withdraw it unless we have informed the author that we have already started editing and publishing it.

Suppose you reject my writing?
If we reject it, it will be because the amount of work to make it saleable is not justified by the number of copies we think it will sell over a period of time. It does not necessarily mean you are not a good writer; it just means that this particular submission is not right for us. If you receive a rejection, then write something else and try again.

How do I know if anyone will like my writing?
You don’t.  We can make a fair guess from experience of what has sold in the past, and obviously we are not going to spend hours or days editing a book that we don’t think will sell.

What is it going to cost me?
Nothing. We do not make any charge for our services. We simply take a commission of the sales, so it is in our interests to maximize the numbers sold of anything we handle. We normally expect to take between 25% and 50% of the royalties after the retailer has taken their percentage.  In exceptional cases we may consider taking a lower percentage.  Different retailers take different percentages and the amount we receive may vary depending on transaction charges (credit card fees to the retailer), download costs etc.  Please note that we take a lot of time and trouble to edit and format a book for sale and for that reason, whilst you are free to publish the same book elsewhere twelve months after we first publish it, we will only withdraw the edition we have published from sale in exceptional circumstances.
Where we have agreed with the author that we will provide additional services at a cost (e.g. producing a paperback version before the ebook has sold a reasonable number or when we don't think a paperback version will make anything) then any charge to the author will be taken from the royalty balance, only after full agreement from the author.  We never ask an author to make a payment to us.

Will I make a lot of money from my writing?
Probably not!  Very few books sell in vast numbers. A novel or a collection of short stories from a new author may sell only three or four copies in the first month or two. Once an author becomes known, then sales tend to increase, but are unlikely to be into the thousands.  However, ebooks are steadily becoming more popular and in many cases are now selling better than printed books.  There is always the possibility of having a real best-seller, IF your writing is good enough and happens to catch the public imagination at the right time.  Our authors who make a reasonable amount of money are mostly those who have written ten or more books.  We do have the facility to produce printed books, but realistically it is only economic to do this in very exceptional circumstances (see 'books in print' above).

When and how do I get paid?
We send out cheques (that’s "checks" for the USA!) or make a PayPal payment around six weeks after the end of each calendar quarter for all payments we have received during the period up to and including the last day of the previous month. Some retailers pay us monthly for the sales, and some pay us quarterly. If the amount due to you is regularly more than $1000 a month, then we try to make payments monthly.   If the amount due to you is less than $50 then it will roll forward until it reaches at least $50. We can make payment in £ Sterling or US Dollars, whichever you prefer. Please note that although the ebooks are generally sold in US $ we are paid in £ Sterling. There will be currency conversion rates to consider when calculating payment.  Please also note that cheques (checks) are written on a UK bank.  Some banks in the USA and elsewhere make fairly high charges for processing these, and some don't.  You can wait until a larger amount due to you has accrued, if you prefer.  Payments by PayPal in currencies other than pounds Sterling are subject to charges by PayPal that will be deducted from your payment.

Do you edit my work?
Yes!  We will correct grammar and spelling, and re-phrase any part of the writing that we think can be expressed more clearly. We take the editing very seriously, and we consider it part of our job to produce what we think will be most attractive to the reader without losing the general style and ideas of the author. In some cases we may remove whole sections or chapters, and in others we may add new ones.
We also write the "blurb" – the summary usually found on the back cover of a printed version of a book – which is the most important part of selling your book, or we will edit your own blurb to maximise its impact if you prefer to write it yourself.
We will design cover art for your book which will help to attract interest from potential readers.  Feel free to send any picture or artwork you think would be suitable.  We can accept and edit most graphics, but please be careful you are not sending pictures/artwork that are copyright to someone else.

Why can’t I send my writing straight to the retailer?
You can send to some online retailers, but some of them will only take books from publishers.  However, retailers do not edit, amend or correct your text, and promotion of your book will be very limited, all of which is what we do very well and is why we take some of the royalties - usually 50% but we will agree a percentage with you depending on how much editing and/or rewriting we think we will need to do.

How do you promote my book?
We generally post extracts on websites that are happy for us to do this. You should also try to promote your writing yourself, and we will provide you with a link to the web page on which your book is being sold. Obviously it is unwise to plaster every possible Internet forum with advertisements for your work, but many will be happy if you mention it along with other relevant discussion or extracts from the book. Common sense is required, but quite simply the more people know about it the more sales you will get.

Who owns copyright?
You do. You own the copyright to everything you write, and our contract with you is non-exclusive – i.e. you can publish elsewhere either in e-book or print format. However, where we have edited and/or re-written sections of your work, you agree that you will not allow your work to be sold or published with these amendments included for a period of 12 months following publication by Strict Publishing International.  Similarly, having taken a lot of time and trouble to edit and format your book, we will not withdraw our edition of it from sale unless there are exceptional reasons for doing so.

Is there any writing you don’t take?
We will consider any good story or collection of short stories if it is well written with reasonable attention to structure and grammar.  Good writing is just as important as good stories.  It is generally not worth publishing anything that is less than 30,000 words in total, but we may consider shorter novellas over 20,000 words.  Short story collections do not sell well unless the author is already known and liked for full novels or novellas.  The ideal length for an e-book is between 45,000 and 65,000 words, and successful printed books generally need to be over 65,000 words.  We are happy to consider erotica, but please see the exclusions below and understand that there is a difference between pornography (which we DON'T take) and erotica (which we are happy to consider).  We will consider collections of poetry, but poetry does not sell very well and it would have to be really exceptional to make it worth publishing.

We will NOT consider any of the following:

Erotica that includes -
* anything involving sexual acts with anyone under eighteen years old
* anything involving sexual acts with or injury to animals
* anything involving death or mutilation in a sexual context, except possibly in a science fiction setting or similar, and in that case any such content must be an integral part of the story
* anything involving real, named individuals that describes their sexual activities except possibly where the character is, for example, a historical figure and the story is unlikely to cause widespread offence
Additionally, there are various sexual activities that are, to put it simply, just unpleasant.  We don't mind a bit of kinkiness and we positively encourage authors to explore the wide variety of love and physical pleasure, but there are limits and we don't intend to describe them here.  Use your common sense.

Any book containing -
* anything that promotes or glorifies illegal actions - for purposes of deciding what is illegal, the laws of the UK AND the USA apply.  If it is illegal in either of those locations then don't encourage it in your writing.  This does not, of course, exclude writing about illegal activities; just don't promote or glorify anything illegal 

We don't usually take books with pictures (except on the cover), mainly because they rarely work well as ebooks and the cost of producing printed books with pictures is generally prohibitive.

There are various other areas that might limit distribution of a book - but, generally, it depends how the subject is handled.  For example, explicit erotica will not appear on Amazon Kindle or (usually) Apple - but as we don't take "pornography", the occasions when this is a problem are rare.  Similarly, incest and similar themes are not allowed on most retailers, although where the general context of the book is non-erotic and incest is a minor but relevant part of the story, it may be acceptable.

We will not take any writing that is designed to offend a large number of readers or that we find offensive when we read it. The best fiction, erotic or otherwise, addresses either a broad range of interests OR a niche readership WITHOUT offending the mainstream reader.  If it’s going to make readers write us long letters of complaint (or worse), then it’s not for us!

What are you waiting for?  Get writing!