t Dreamline Publishing, we strive to provide you with the best services as you progress through the publishing process. Our publishing packages come with editing services, and can also be purchased à la carte from our range of editing services.
Below, you’ll find descriptions of our services for:
Illustration Design Editing Printing Distribution Royalties Author Website Consulting Hours
Illustrations
Illustrations and text work together to tell a great story. Visual art draws the reader in and brings the story to life. Our experienced illustrators have created art across different genres from juvenile to cartoon to sci-fi and fantasy. They listen to the author’s vision, and commit to delivering art that best tells their story.
Design
Many of the barriers to publishing a book have crumbled in the last ten years. But one barrier has not disappeared, rather it has become even worse — competition.
A well-designed book is an incredibly important way to stand out from the competition. People judge books by their covers. Readers, book reviewers, critics, whether or not they notice your book in the first place may depend on the quality of your cover.
People who design and test advertisements know that different designs can have dramatic, measurable impact on results. The same is true of book covers. There are many cases where a change in cover design has resulted in significant increases in sales volumes.
The layout of the book also affects its readability. An impressive book design can help an author feel a great deal of excitement about his or her book. This sense of pride and excitement is critical when the time comes to promote the book.
A professional designer ensures the layout of the cover and the inside of the book meets all of the formatting requirements required by the various e-book and print-on-demand distribution channels.
Editing
Has your literary work been professionally edited?A great piece truly becomes premium after editing. Like a sculptor, editors can use all the creative tools available to refine and bring out the best form of your manuscript. Good editing can save your document from disrepute, and help get your vision across, concisely and correctly.
Editing brings with it the confidence of knowing that your manuscript possesses quality, design and refinement, according to your specifications. An extra set of eyes on your document ensures erroneous material from being published.
There are number of different editing options available to fit your literary needs, including:
We offer Editorial Evaluation which answers questions such as: Is your manuscript up to standards? Is it ready to be published after basic proof-reading? Or does it require extensive reconstruction?
Editorial evaluation lets a qualified and sharp editor to evaluate your document in its entirety. After its been reviewed, a short report is issued evaluating your document, outlining and assessing what needs to be accomplished before publishing.
Editorial evaluation is $500 for documents up to 75, 000 words and 0.7¢ per additional word after that.
In a substantive editing, there is one count of content editing and one count of copy editing. Contend editing entails looking at the overall document and how the quality could be improved. Issues such as theme, structure and pacing of the story is looked at and addressed.
A content edit looks at the overall quality of your manuscript and how it can be improved. It will address issues related to pacing, structure, theme and overall effectiveness of the story. For example, is the story engaging and suspenseful? Are the characters well developed? Are there sections that are slow, dry, or duplicating previous sections and can be deleted? Is dialogue or, in the case of nonfiction, are anecdotes used effectively? Is the manuscript structured and ordered in the best possible way?
A copy edit fixes grammatical and spelling errors and cleans up awkward sentence structure.
Our editors have a keen eye for storytelling. They will read through your manuscript and make line by line changes and suggestions on how to improve the story.
The notes are made using the “track-changes” feature of Microsoft Word, which allows you review the comments and to either accept or reject each change to the manuscript. At the end of the day, you as the author get the final say on every change.
As with any piece of writing, there are opportunities to make it stronger. Sometimes it takes another set of eyes to really find the weak points and patch them up.
Copy editing catches any grammar and spelling mistakes, repairs broken syntax and sentence structure, and ensures your manuscript adheres to a clear and consistent style.
A proofread is a final set of eyes to catch typos and minor grammatical errors that made it through the copy edit. If perfection is important to you, then an extra set of eyes via a copy edit is not enough — you need yet another set of eyes.
A proofread may occur after the design process but before the files are converted into print-ready and e-book formats ready for distribution.
Printing
We partner with printers located within Canada, and around the world. We have options for printing anywhere from 1 book, to thousands at economical pricing.
For books being distributed you will need to know your print-on-demand cost, this is the cost the distributor charges to print and fulfill orders from the retailers, it is ‘free’ in the sense it doesn’t require cash upfront as the customer pays for the printing and fulfillment in the retail price they pay when purchasing your book.
Distribution
Book distribution refers to the process of making your book available to the public. This can include publishing your book in paperback, hard cover, and/or as an eBook, and making the book available to retail channels where people typically go to buy books.
Distribution also includes the process of printing and fulfilling orders, collecting payment, and shipping the books to customers or booksellers who act as middlemen.
Distribution has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. For print books, it is now possible to make your book available to over 30,000 booksellers without spending any cash up front on printing, storage and fulfillment.
Print on Demand systems allow the print edition of your book to be listed for sale with major online retailers like Amazon.com, Chapters.com and BarnesAndNoble.com. Brick and mortar bookstores will also be able to easily order your book through their distributors.
For eBooks, there are no major barriers to having your book published alongside bestselling authors. A handful of eBook formats dominate the marketplace, including:
- The Kindle (Amazon.com)
- The Kobo (Chapters-Indigo), which is especially popular in Canada
- The Nook (Barnes and Noble)
- Apple iTunes ebooks
The most effective strategy is to make your book available in all of the above formats as well as soft cover and hard cover. This ensures that your book is available to the broadest possible audience in the format they prefer.
Royalties*
Every time a bookstore buys your book for resale, or people buy your book from an online retailer like Amazon.com, you earn a royalty. In assisted self-publishing, you earn much, much higher royalties than in traditional publishing.
We offer two main streams of distribution, Managed Distribution and Direct Distribution.
The Direct Distribution route can be great for someone who really wants to be able to take control of his or her own distribution. This option gives you control of managing your all of your different accounts so you can log in to each individual account and make changes whenever you feel the need! This option puts you in the driver’s seat, offering100% royalties.
The second option, Managed Distribution, is just as exciting. This more assisted option puts a great level of the work on Dreamline, instead of you. This can be a great option for authors who do not have the time to manage multiple accounts and keep up with the agreements of all of the different accounts. Instead, Dreamline will set your book up for distribution with all of the important channels for you. Instead of managing lots of accounts, you just have your Dreamline account where we will consolidate information for you, and make it all easily accessible in one place. This option lets you sit back and relax with 85% royalties.
*Terms and conditions apply to royalty rates; for example, to get a 70% e-book royalty, the book must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99 and be priced 20% lower than the print edition.
Author Website (starting at $500.00 Basic)
An author website is a central hub to share information about yourself, your book, upcoming events and news coverage. It is also an essential promotional tool. Dreamline offers both basic website setup – for the author looking to increase their online footprint, and a more advanced option – for the author wanting to use it as an engagement platform.
In both options, we’ll purchase the domain name, set up the website with pages about you and your book, choose a suitable design and host it for one year.
Please contact us for further information.
Consulting Hours
You can purchase additional review hours with our Consultants to address anything else you need help with. This could include social media setup and strategy, additional assistance with the website, help contacting bookstores, planning a launch event or book tour, preparing for interviews or simply brainstorming any other concern or ideas.
Additional hours can be purchased for $100/an hour.