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The plan is this. You put your manuscript into an ASCII .TXT, .RTF, or MS Word .DOC file and add a copyright statement. Then you contact us and briefly describe your book. We will see what it’s about and may promptly invite you to mail or e-mail us the file. We will read it in order to evaluate it further for DamnYankee.com. Within about two weeks we will notify you whether your work meets our needs. If it does and we accept your book, we will prepare it for our web site. The time required to do this will depend upon many factors but should be a mere fraction of the year it takes to bring a book to print by conventional publishing standards. Subject to your approval we will format the page size and fonts and convert the entire work to the file formats we offer. We may also create cover art and extract an excerpt to add to our site. Books published here will then be listed at eBooks-in-Print.com and will be assigned an EPRN (Electronic Publications Registry Number). Once published, we anticipate a one-year contract, renewable by mutual agreement. (You’re reading the gist of it.) Electronic books eliminate the costs of paper, ink, transportation, storage, overruns, and the associated labor. They still entail costs for editing, formatting, correspondence, negotiation, promotion, and all of the labor associated with that. The customer, however, rightly perceives the reduced costs for the elimination of the material side of electronic publishing and expects to pay commensurately less. Reliable figures are not kept, but it is an accepted estimate that an author makes about $2 on a conventional book sold at or near retail price. DamnYankee.com attempts to assure that same return to authors of ebooks published here while keeping the price modest against customers’ expectations. DamnYankee.com has a financial stake in the success of works published here to the following extent. 1) We collect from $4 to $6 per ebook for each copy sold. Except as negotiated otherwise, DamnYankee.com keeps half, per download, and $1 more for each copy distributed on disk. Our costs for credit card fees, applicable sales taxes, disks, postage, and all overhead are covered by the portion we keep. The rest accrues to the author. 2) For any title offered by an author and which we accept, DamnYankee.com has first rights to publish it either as ebook, as a conventional (three-dimensional, printed-on-paper and bound) hard copy (hard cover or paperback), or both. When published as a hard copy, separate terms are negotiated. 3) A book originally published here only as an ebook may later be selected by another publisher for production. If a contract to this effect, not author-financed, is offered after an ebook has been hosted here for 60 days, or within 60 days after a book is withdrawn from here, DamnYankee.com claims a negotiable percentage of an advance and first-printing royalties. Rejection is a strong term. No doubt it will be necessary to use it once in a while. We will try to give an author a brief explanation of our basis for turning away her work. While we believe there is much that deserves to be published, we also believe that there is much which, frankly, does not. And there is much which, quality notwithstanding, does not interest us. We do not offer a manuscript repair service or advice on how to make it better. We will not edit to improve your writing. There will be works that teeter between yes and no and we will err both ways. Our best advice on whether you have the quality and type of material that we want is to read what is already posted here. Or request a list of our favorite books and authors. We may also post your work in an area of this site reserved for unclassified works, that is, books that we have not yet evaluated or which we will accept but won’t actively promote. Once accepted and formatted for our web site, a book posted with us does not automatically time out, and there is (at present) no plan to charge for continued, even indefinite, exposure. Prior to publication we will edit for apparent errors in spelling, grammar, and facts, (Timbuktu is in Cuba, etc.). Our guide is Strunk & White. You will approve our corrections before we publish your work. Books initially accepted which require a daunting amount of editing will be returned to the author for overhaul. You may direct us to remove your book from DamnYankee.com at any time after it is posted. We may arbitrarily remove it as well. Logical reasons for our removing your book would include evidence of plagiarism, evidence of fictional characters based on real people who object to their portrayal, and other things we can’t foresee. Because we publish electronically, any customer currently has the option of reading your work on a personal computer or printing segments for his own use. This is approved, within limits. A customer with modest computer skills has the option, illegal though it may be, to import the content of your work into a word processing program and modify it, or to redistribute it in similar or different form. This is not approved. It is the electronic age’s counterpart to the Xerox machine and its potential threat to honest publishing when introduced a generation or two ago. People do it, but the Xerox invention neither destroyed the publishing industry nor perceptibly affected authors in any significant way. We believe that, apart from some early clumsy attempts to steal intellectual property such as have already happened, the same copyright constraint will make it a non-issue in electronic publishing. (The Electronic Publishing Registry at eBooks-in-Print.com will help establish date of publication and content for registered works worldwide.) Each ebook file copy contains a standard copyright statement and explanation. Just as with a bound, printed book, readers are bound by copyright law. No one may modify your book or sell it. No one may copy it and distribute it further, except that she may remove the file from her own computer and give it to someone else, in the same way she may give away a book from her shelf. Copyright registration is the sole responsibility of the author. We will explain it to you if you have not done it before. Anyone may contact you through this web site. You, the author, may respond to someone’s correspondence or you may ignore it altogether. DamnYankee.com promotes awareness of the site and markets it titles solely by Internet. We arrange links with other web sites where your work can gain further exposure. We also correspond with web sites which may afford still more contact with interested readers. As other marketing channels and strategies are developed for Internet publishing, we will take advantage of them. Perhaps the best of these is at eBooks-in-Print.com, where all our titles will be listed. These provisions are negotiable, of course, and a written contract, based on these principles, is executed for each new work added to the site. |
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