Frequently asked questions

We'll be totally honest - self-publishing a book is not an easy way to make money and we cannot guarantee that every author will do so. There are so many variables that go into whether an author achieves sales success or not, with many of those variables being outside Troubador's control. The profits and losses for each book will vary. We are happy to advise on the likely returns for authors using individual figures, at the time at which an initial quotation being prepared.

The average timescale from signed contract signature to printed book is around 18-28 weeks. This timescale varies depending on the service you choose and the time it takes you, as the author, to approve each stage of the process. If you are taking any editorial services with us, the timescale is likely to be closer to 22-32 weeks. Our Customer Service team will be able to advise on a more specific timescale while discussing the details of your quote and contract with you.

Our editorial services are optional; however, we do strongly advise that all authors have their manuscript copy edited and proof read (it does not have to be carried out by us). Authors work so closely with their manuscript that they understandably may experience 'author blindness' and read what the manuscript should say and not what it actually does say, allowing errors to slip through. An impartial editor who is new to the work going through the manuscript is usually beneficial in ensuring a manuscript is as error-free as possible before typesetting.

We do not have illustrators in-house at Troubador, however, we have recommended illustrators with whom we have worked with in the past that we are happy to recommend. Please email us on [email protected] for further information.

Although most authors will opt to use a Troubador ISBN, we are happy to work with authors who would like to use their own ISBN. When using your own ISBN, there are some responsibilities that you need to be aware of. Please see our mor detailed information on using your own ISBN.

Owing to copyright laws, authors are not permitted to use song lyrics within their book without first obtaining copyright permission to do so. Even quoting a single line from a song that is in copyright without permisison can result in a fine. Please see our more detailed information on using song lyrics.

How much you receive per sale can vary between 25%–85%, depending on where the book is sold. Each retailer will take a different percentage from your RRP. Please see our further information on royalties.

We are happy to work with authors who have their own cover design. We would first need to see the design in order to ensure we are able to work with it and it has been set-up up to the correct specifications. Please see our further information on this.

When we review our manuscript submissions, we do not read the whole manuscript (we'd love to if time permitted!). Instead, we typically read sections from the beginning, middle and end to ensure we are happy with the quality of the writing. Provided that the writing does not require substantial editorial work and does not pose any legal issues, we will be happy to take on the work for publication.

The next stage is for you to get in touch with us and submit your manuscript for our consideration. Please complete our 'Get Started' form that you can find at the top right-hand side of our website and we will be in touch within 48hrs to discuss the next steps of your publishing journey.

We ideally ask our authors to supply their manuscripts to us as Microsoft Word documents. However, we are also happy to work with manuscripts in other formats. Please contact our Customer Services team at [email protected] to discuss this further.

We are not copyright experts, but we can advise authors to the best of our knowledge. As a self-published author, should you require copyright permission for any content within the manuscript, you will have to arrange this yourself. We have made available further information on copyright material that should help you.

As the author you have final say on the cover price of your book (the Recommended Retail Price - RRP); however, we have recommended retail pricing guidelines for different genres of books and are happy to advise.

How many books you print depends on the services is entirely up to you. However, we typically advise authors to scale their print run to the level of marketing they are undertaking, and to err on the side of caution... money spent on printing books that do not sell is wasted, you can always reprint a title if it is selling well. The majority of our authors will start with a print run of between 100 and 500 copies (we store up to 300 copies for free in our warehouse), but this does vary by author. Our Customer Services team will be happy to discuss your self-publishing objectives and advise on the quantity most suitable to achieve them.

Of course you can. If you have any preferred specifications for your book (eg. paper type and colour, cover finishes, book size, etc.), please provide this information when submitting your manuscript. If you do not have any preferred specifications, this is also fine – we will base the book's specifications on what we would expect such a title to be printed as. This initial quotation can then be discussed and refined to ensure your book looks and feels as you wish it to.

We are happy to arrange for sample books to be sent to our authors so that you can see the quality of our beautiful books, and the materials used in printing. Please contact our Customer Services team to request a sample at [email protected].

No, that is not something we offer. However, we are happy to help promote an event on our social media channels, provide marketing materials you may need for the big day (costs apply), and help a bookshop secure stock.

Unfortunately, no. As your publisher, we cannot post a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or any other retailer or review platform, on behalf of a third-party reviewer. This is because the review would show with our publisher name against it, and a publisher reviewing their own title will (rightly) be considered to be biased. Amazon has very strict review policies, and the review would either not make it past their approval stage, or it would be removed very quickly. We do encourage anyone who leaves a positive review on NetGalley to also post it on Amazon, if they haven't done so already – but it is ultimately their decision as to whether or not they do this.

Today retailers are a lot more cautious about immediately ordering in stock of an unknown title, and this has led to many retailers waiting to see what kind of demand there is for a book. This may mean that they list a book as avialble, but do not order copies into their warehouse. That is when an author may see a listing where it says 'available in X amount of time'. Once they see a demand for the book, the retailers are then more likely to order a copy to fulfil the order(s), and perhaps other copies to have for future sale. Additionally, the book trade can move quite slowly, so even though we have copies available in our warehouse, it still takes time for an order to be placed by a retailer, for our warehouse team to ship it, and for it to be received and processed by the retailer. Very often when a retailer or wholesaler has your book listed as 'out of stock' or 'temporarily out of stock', this is because there is an order in the system but it is moving slowly through it. We are only able to send copies of any book to a retailer if we have received an order from them; we cannot simply send copies to retailers ad hoc... not only would they be unlikely to pay for them, they would be likely to destroy them.

While we will happily supply a retailer directly through our distribution setup, the majority of bookshops prefer to order their stock through a wholesaler (such as Gardners, the UK's main wholesaler). As this is a third party, we are not privy to their orders from retailers, and can only see the order they place with us for stock. We do not know which bookshops a wholesaler's order is then sold to by the wholesaler.

We set the RRP (the recommended retailer price) for our books. While retailers will purchase the book at that price (minus any trade discount that has been negotiated), they have every right then to list the book at whatever price they believe it will sell best at. We know authors worry that they are then losing out on their royalties, but rest assured, no matter what discount a retailer is listing a book at, they will have paid the same price regardless of whether they are discounting it. So if a retailer is discounting a book, this is a good thing as they will be funding that discount, and a discount will help the book to sell.

No - the only website on which we can set a discount for a book is on our own bookshop, because that is under our control. All other third party retailers will choose what price they like to list the book at, in accordance with what they think will help it to sell best.

There is no exact science as to when the stock of the book will sell out and you will need to have a reprint of your title. Book retailers and wholesalers will order copies of the book from us, but they then need to sell those books on to their customers. So there can be a while before they come back and order more copies from us. They are also allowed to send copies back to us if they do not sell through, which is when you can get 'returns' on your title showing on your royalty statement (most books are sold on a 'Sale Or Return' basis in the UK). It is best to keep an eye on the number of copies you have left in our warehouse, and get in contact with us when that seems to be getting low. We do also try and keep an eye on the stock of your title, but it is best to regularly check this.

The Star Sales agency present all of the books they’re representing to all the accounts they visit. These are all the major retailer and wholesaler accounts for the country as well as independent retailers. There are no statistics they can report back to us from the presentation of books, as they do not get that kind of feedback from the retailers they visit. This is because the response from buyers is not at the time of the presentation, but will be later on when they consider all of the month’s new titles that have been presented to them, and then decide which of these they are then going to order. Many small bookshops will see the new books presented by the sales representatives, but will actually order the books from Gardners (a UK book wholesaler), who they use for all their book supply. While Star do have contacts in many local areas, the main attraction of the Star sales force is their contact with book retailers' head offices, main book buyers and wholesalers, as these national level contacts are very difficult to set up meetings with. While an author can go and talk to their local bookshop, it would be harder for them to contact the head buyers of Waterstones to ask them to consider stocking their book, for example. This is why we send out our own small digital local AI mailing, and why it is also so important for authors to get in touch with their local bookshops as well.

Sadly not. While we would love to promise that there will be some media interest in your book, we are entirely dependent on third parties (i.e. journalists, producers) being interested in a title – we cannot force someone to take an interest in a book. This is often not a reflection on the book: there may have been something similar covered recently, that particular journalist may not be interested, the timing is wrong, etc. What we can promise is that we will do our best to draft an interesting press release and a comprehensive media list to send it out to, and to tailor each pitch to journalists to maximise our chances of getting a book noticed, also conducting follow-ups after a few weeks to nudge as much interest as we can out of these contacts. We also act as your liasion to the press when needed, and will always keep you aware of any further interest that comes in, even after our active marketing has ended.

No. Each campaign we run is bespoke to a particular book, for the simple reason that this is the best method of trying to secure interest. By tailoring each media list to the book, we are sending information out to the media contacts most likely to be interested in your book, and therefore increasing the odds at securing coverage. While we do have media contacts we may reach out to from previous campaigns, our publicists craft a campaign that is 100% tailored around your book to give both of us the best chance of coverage.

Absolutely. While we have our industry experience behind us, you are the most passionate advocate for your book and know it best. We are happy to discuss your additions to the media list, bearing in mind that the contacts need to be media that is based in the UK and those we can find contact details for. We see this as a collaboration and one that works best when we work together.

We do not work in the same way as a mainstream publisher, in that we are limited to the final print run you decide on and pay for when the book is ready to go to print. A mainstream publisher may print a small number of advanced copies to send to influencers/journalists ahead of time, but this isn't financially feasible for most authors to do. We do send out digital review copies when we run our marketing campaign, and invite bloggers and other professional readers to access the copy on NetGalley, but we cannot run an ARC campaign for you.

Yes! We offer a range of marketing materials, both physical and digital, as supplementary items you can order any time after you have an approved front cover. Whether you need a poster advertising a book event, bookmarks to pass out at an event or graphics to use on your social media channels, our marketing team can assist with bespoke designs on a range of marketing materials based around your book. And if there is an item not listed on our website or in our Supplementary Marketing Materials handbook, please speak to a member of the team - we have designed various bespoke items such as mugs, tote bags and Christmas cards in the past, and are happy to discuss whatever you may need.

While we would love to promise that your book will be stocked in bookshops, but as that decision lies solely with the retailers, we can't 'guarantee' that a particular retailer will stock a title. We can only respond to orders, not send books out speculatively in the hopes that a bookshop will choose to stock it. Our emphasis is on ensuring the book is easily available to order by retailers, and ensuring as efficient a distribution process as possible.

Yes, but only after the book has been published. Up until the time of publication, Amazon will take information about new titles from Nielsen Bookdata. After it has been published, and we have become the official supplier of that title, we do get access to some of the information about the book on Amazon, but not to all of the information there. Anything we amend still needs to be approved by Amazon, so it can take some time to be implemented, but they do normally agree to the changes we request.

There are a number of different ways bookshops might wish to source books for an author event. We are very happy to supply them directly if they wish to order books from us. Alternatively, they may wish to order stock through a wholesaler. However they wish to obtain books, please ask them to order the stock for any event at least three weeks in advance, and go back to your contact at the bookshop to make sure this has happened. Bookshops can be very slow in placing orders for and getting copies of a book, and then have a last-minute panic when they realise they may not have books in time for the event.

For an endorsement to be added to your book's cover, this would need to be obtained fairly early on in the production process, often before the book has been edited and/or typeset; the marketing campaign that is run for your book would be at a later stage in the process, so you would need to obtain any reviews that you would like to be used in the printed book in advance yourself, as this is not a service that we offer. If your book receives an endorsement or review from a credible relevant source after the first print run has been published, we can discuss the addition of such quotes to subsequent print runs.

Yes! If you'd like a quotation for publishing an ebook only, please send your manuscript to the Digital team who will let you know the next steps: [email protected]

Yes, all ebooks published under the Troubador imprint will be assigned an ISBN.

No. If you have a quotation put together for an ebook by a member of the Digital team, this will be a quotation for an ebook only. If you wanted a printed book in 'print-on-demand' format alongside this, then our Customer Services team will be able to put together a quotation for you for this option. The reason that an ebook quotation does not include a print-on-demand version is because books and printed books have to be formatted in different ways, so your manuscript would need to go through our printed book production process, not just the ebook production process. The ebook file we would be creating for you from an ebook quotation will be an ebook-specific file, and it cannot be printed as a book. Contact us here for more details: [email protected]

We have a large international ebook distribution network, including supplying to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble US, Kobo and Google Play, as well as through distributors, subscription services and library suppliers worldwide, to ensure our ebooks reach as wide an international audience as possible.

Yes, as long as the device it's being viewed on has a colour screen. For devices that do not have a colour screen, images will display in black and white.

Yes, our Digital team will ensure that images are formatted so that they display optimally across all e-reading devices.

The timescale depends on what services you opt for, but on average ranges from 4-8 weeks. An author opting for a copy edit as well as our ebook production services (including cover design and ebook conversion) would be looking at a timescale of around 8 weeks, whereas an author who has already had their manuscript edited elsewhere and who is only looking for ebook production and cover design is likely to be around 4 weeks. The actual timescale is influenced by the author as we require an author's approval at various stages of the process.

We offer two audiobook distribution services that the author can choose between: our Basic Distribution Service, which makes an audiobook available on Amazon, Audible and Apple; and our Full Audiobook Distribution Service, which makes our audiobooks available through Amazon, Audible, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, Spotify, Youtube and via many other retailers.

No. Before you sign a contract with us we make sure that you know exactly how much you will be spending throughout the process and roughly when you'll receive those invoices given the current services you have selected. There are three reasons why your costs may change throughout the publishing process. Firstly, if you want to add or remove services that you have opted for in your contract. Secondly, if any contracted limitations are exceeded (for example, you require more sets of amendments to your manuscript than is stated in our contract) throughout the process - however you'll be made aware of this as soon as possible. Finally, the cost of printing quoted is based on an estimated page extent, so it may increase or decrease, depending on the final typeset page extent of your book (which cannot be known until it is actually completed).

Although we do not accept payment in instalments, payments are already staggered across the course of publication. We do not ask for all publishing services to be paid up-front. We ask for an initial deposit of £500 when you return your contract, then any remaining services you have chosen will be invoiced as and when the work is carried out. Please contact our Customer Services team at [email protected] to discuss this further.

The exact cost of publication will vary for each author, as there are many variable factors that have to be considered, e.g. length of the book, format(s) required, use of images in colour, paper type, book size, etc. We have given some example pricing as a guideline for authors of what they can expect to spend when looking at popular services, though we always supply a written, no-obligation quotation based on an individual manuscript, and then refine that to suit an author's budget and aims. See the 'Pricing' section above for examples of typical prices authors can expect.