We have had several people coming into our messenger lately, ready to go. They are down to get on with the publishing and are eager to send us their files, but when they ask the bottom line question. “How much is it going to cost me?” We can hear their shriek in the background a moment before they tell us “I think I’m going to have to take my chances with the skills I have.”
We don’t get the opportunity to really explain the savings they get from using our services. Especially with platforms like Ingram Spark (IS) and Smashwords. Setting up with them can be costly and extremely complicated.
Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP or Amazon) is much easier to get going on, but even it is not glitch and headache free most of the time.
Sabrina and I have published multiple books on all of these platforms ourselves. We’ve worked our ways through the glitches, hiccups, and what can seem like absurd requirements with all of them. We’ve emailed back and forth to get issues resolved, made and waited for the return phone calls, and worked our asses off to learn how each of the platforms work, even when we don’t always understand the why. We have trial and error-ed and put in thousands of hours of research over the years, so you don’t have to.
We have spent weeks and months longer than we should have trying to figure them out, when we really should have just gone to a professional right off the bat. Making excuses like “I’ll never make that money back on this book” and “If I can just figure it out, I’ll never have this problem again.” Only to run into the same or other issues with each platform. Granted, this time wasn’t completely wasted. We learned so much from all of it and now, we can help so many others with it
When we offer the done-for-you package at $300/platform, we are not charging you $300 for something you can do yourself. We are saving you massive amounts of time, energy, and money, because we have done a lot of the work already. We can save you the hours of research and back and forth with technical support and have you on your way to published much faster than trying to figure it out on your own.
How do we figure that?
Our average turn around time for publishing a book is 72 hours and as a service it runs $300. We do offer a walk-through assistance service via chat at $100 per hour per platform.
A new author not familiar with the ins and outs of a platform will spend anywhere from days to upwards of a solid month, before they become so frustrated that they have to reach out for assistance, or they just give up completely (we absolutely HATE seeing this happen. It’s not necessary! Email us!). They upload the files, get an email instead of the book going live saying there is an issue, spend hours researching what the problem is and how to fix it, spend time fixing it, then try again.
A lot of times, that issue is fixed, but now there is something else wrong. The process continues, over and over again, until they have literally wasted hours (and in some cases money for set up and listing fees every new upload) of their valuable time and pulled their hair out in frustration. This is the point that they reach out to find someone who knows more than they do and can help them sort it out.
That process may not have cost them anything financially, but that time spent trying to figure things out could have been spent making sales because the book was already published.
We offer the walk-through service because we understand that people like to learn from the process. We applaud and support that. Any business owner should know the ins and outs of how things work within their business. We offer this level of service because we get that. It isn’t the most cost effective service we offer when you really break it down.
The average time spent walking a client through a single issue via chat is 3-5 hours. It’s a lot of “do this and hit send. Let me know what comes up next… Ok. Back out of that, go to this and change this, fix that, and do this…now take that back to there and do this, again… Ok, what comes up? Great! Hit submit! Now we have to wait and see what happens. Contact me and let me know if it went live or not as soon as you find out. Have a great day!”
Two days later, they are back again because it appears that the changes made to the file has messed something else up and you are still getting error messages. Now, we are on day 2 of 3-5 hours of walk-through fixing the new issue. When it’s all said and done, the average walk-through is 10-15 hours, spread out over several days because of the turn around time of the platform.
At $100 per hour, the fees and the time lost really start to add up.
If you spend the $300 for the done for you service, you eliminate the back and forth via chat, save multiple listing and set up fees, and multiple days of waiting on the platform’s turn around time to find out whether or not there is still an issue and repeating the process. This is a big issue that we see quite often with Ingram Spark and other platforms. You fix one issue, but it changes the page count or the alignment of the entire file by the slightest bit and the file gets kicked back for fixing again.
We know about those common issues with each of the different platforms, so, we can do all of the work at once , from modifying and fixing the files so that they don’t get kicked back, to uploading and waiting for the book to go live. We even have experience working through the not-so-common glitches and hiccups.
Now imagine the savings you can get from spending $300 for a service that gets your book published in 3 days, vs being frustrated and losing 30 days or more of potential sales because the book went unpublished while you figured it out.
We’re here to help you. Contact us today to schedule a consult or shoot us a question and we can send back guidance on the best and most cost effective way to proceed. Don’t wait until you have spent weeks figuring things out and are at your wits end. Get published in a few days!
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