Everything You Need To Digitally Self-Publish Your Book Today.

YOU Upload >> WE Edit >> WE Convert >> YOU Sell Online

DIY Publisher

only £6/1000 words

  • Proofreading
  • Typesetting
  • Ebook conversion
  • ISBN
  • Upload to Amazon & Apple iBooks
  • Free bookstore listing

Submit Your Book

Indie Publisher

only £10/1000 words

  • Copy Editing
  • Typesetting
  • Ebook conversion
  • ISBN
  • Upload to Amazon & Apple iBooks
  • Free bookstore listing

Submit Your Book

Pro Publisher

only £15/1000 words

  • Proofreading & Copy Editing
  • Typesetting
  • Ebook conversion
  • ISBN
  • Upload to Amazon & Apple iBooks
  • Free bookstore listing

Submit Your Book

Companies Who Encourage Writers To Self-Publish…

BubbleCow helped me learn from my mistakes and reined me in where I was over-enthusiastic. I’m a better writer for their advice, and no mistake. They were measured, kind and constructive, basically taking a sewing machine to my work, sorting out all the stitches I had dropped, either in haste or simply through inexperience.

Matt Hill, author of Colin & The Strimmer Men

OK, let me be honest: I am worried we might have been buffoons and failed to communicate clearly just why we think this self-publishing service is just so amazing.

So here, in words that our co-founder Gary Smailes can understand, is what you get:

We take your book, edit it, put it onto Amazon (and other platforms), give you a page on our Bookstore and then step back and let you sell.

ALL you need to do is send us your book… we will do the rest.

We all know that digital self publishing has the potential to allow writers to take control of their own career. However, the whole process from writing to publishing is daunting and complex.

How do you know if your book is ready for publication?

How do you convert from that Word document to an ebook?

How do you convince Amazon to sell your book?

Well, BubbleCow’s Digital Self Publishing package makes the whole process super easy.

We will…

  • Professionally edit and prepare your book for publication.
  • Produce an ebook in every format possible.
  • Upload your book onto Amazon Kindle Shop, Apple’s iBookstore, Google Books and Kobo.
  • Create a bookstore page that will allow you to sell your own books at 100% profit.

Publishing with us means that after paying the upfront cost you will get all the profit — forever.

What Will It All Cost?

The final cost all depends on the size of your book. The longer your book, the more man hours involved and the higher the cost.

Since every book is different let’s knock up some costs for a typical novel of say, 60,000 words.

With the Indie Publisher package, your book would be professionally copy edited, converted to an ebook and added to our digital distribution system. The cost for this package is £10/1000 words, so would be £600 all in.

If you didn’t need a copy edit, but did need a proofread, then the DIY Publisher would be the best option. The cost of this is £6/1000 words and a 60,000 word book would come out at £360. This includes the proof, ebook conversion and digital distribution.

However, if you were looking at the full Pro Publisher package, which includes a copy edit, a proofread, ebook conversion and digital distribution, then the cost would be £15/1000 words (should be £16 but what the heck). This comes out at £900.

How many books will I have to sell before I break even?

Good question. After all this is a business and you need to make some money. Let’s go back to that 60,000 novel. We know that DIY Publisher (proofreading) would cost £360, Indie Publisher (copy editing) would be £600 and Pro Publisher (both) would be £900.

This means that at £5 a shot you would have to sell 72 copies off the Bookstore to break even if using DIY Publishing.

For the Indie Publisher you would need to sell 120 books.

The Pro Publisher would see you looking at selling 180 books to cover the costs.

This is not including Amazon sales, though you will only get 70% of the book cost from Amazon. This is a fixed cost. The money goes to Amazon and there is no way around this. However, always remember to send readers to your Bookstore page and you will make more money.

Therefore, the question we suggest you ask yourself is: ‘Can I sell 200 books?’

If the answer to this question is NO, then we are not the correct choice for you and your book.

So… to work out the cost:

Pick your package, divide your word count by 1000 and multiply by cost per 1000 words.

OR — email [email protected] and say, ‘Gaz, your pricing is far too complex! I love the product but you are an idiot to make us poor writers do stupid A-level maths questions just to work out a price. If you want my business then you work it out for me. My word count is [YOUR WORD COUNT]. Get a wriggle on and email me a quote today.’

What The Proofreading Will include…

Could you imagine Bloomsbury publishing a Harry Potter novel that contained hundreds of basic spelling mistakes? No, nor me.

Let’s face it, if proofreading was not an essential part of the publishing process then tightfisted publishers would happily throw their proofreading lads and lasses onto the street tomorrow. So if the Scrooges that are publishers feel paying for proofreading is essential, how do you think a self-publishing writer can be taken seriously without treating their book to the same TLC.

Still not convinced?

Well maybe BBC News will change your mind. In 2011 they said:

Sales figures suggest misspellings put off consumers (link)

Proofreading is pretty straight forward. In essence it’s correcting errors in the final moments before the book gets published. Wiki describes it as: Proofreading (also proof-reading) is the reading of a galley proof or computer monitor to detect and correct production-errors of text or art. Proofreaders are expected to be consistently accurate by default because they occupy the last stage of typographic production before publication.

Our professional proofreaders will go through your book and, line-by-line, will correct any errors they find. They will do this using the ‘tracked changes’ function on the word processing package. This will allow you to stay in control and accept/reject any suggested changes.

And how do they know what to change?

Well, all of our editors use the following two style guides:

  • Copy-editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers Judith Butcher. 3rd ed. 1992 Cambridge.
  • Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Ed. R. W. Burchfield. Rev. 3rd ed. London: Clarendon Press, 2004.

The result of the proofread will be a document that is corrected and ready to be converted to en ebook and published digitally.

What The Copy Editing Will include…

So here’s the big question — ‘What’s the difference between proofreading and copy editing?’

Or, perhaps, this is a bigger question — ‘Why should I pay more for copy editing?

Both are very good questions.

Before I answer them here is what the Society For Editors and Proofreaders has to say about copy editing (yeah, I know they are biased but stick with me):

If you are an author, you may have been crafting your work for a long time. You know it better than anyone. The idea of some stranger altering so much as a comma may seem unthinkable.

However, your very closeness to and familiarity with your work may be blinding you to its flaws. You hold the whole text in your mind, and you have developed its ideas in sequence right to its conclusion. You can’t now put yourself in the reader’s place by somehow ‘unknowing’ any of this. A copy-editor, though, will bring fresh eyes to your text, helping you to reveal your concepts in a logical order.

You may also be less than confident in spelling and in your use of grammar (and it’s unwise to rely on spelling and grammar checkers). Perhaps you know what you want to say but find it hard to put it into words. A copy-editor will be sufficiently detached from the writing process to spot mistakes and inconsistencies that distract the reader.

Above all, he or she can add a professional finish to your work that will make it a cut above the rest.

The single most important aspect of our editing service is that it is designed to look at each line and word of your book, and then provide the advice, feedback and guidance you need to correct errors both big and small. The goal of the copy edit is to provide editorial feedback which, when applied to your book, will bring it to a publishable standard.

BubbleCow’s copy editing service has been designed to provide a ‘publisher’ style edit, which leaves your manuscript as close to ‘print ready’ as possible. This means that our copy edit will leave you confident that your manuscript is ready to move to the next stage.

If your book was being prepared for publication by a publishing house, it would pass through a three editing step process – Structural Editing, Stylistic Editing and Copy Editing. Our service combines the three types of edit (Structural, Stylistic and Copy) to provide you with a ‘publisher’ standard in-depth line edit. The edit involves one of our professional and experienced editors reading through your work, line by line, and asking themselves the following questions:

  • Is the book’s organisation and content suitable for the intended audience, medium, market, and purpose? [Structural]
  • How can the book’s meaning be clarified, the flow improved and the language smoothed?[Stylistic]
  • Have you ensured the correctness, consistency, accuracy, and completeness of the document? [Copy]

In reality this means that we will not only be looking to correct grammar and punctuation, but also paying attention to the narrative flow, potential plot holes and the overall ‘feel’ of the book in relation to its genre and readership.

If you wish to see the style guidelines we use when line editing then this document will help you to understand the internal process in more detail. We have built our line editing process around the professionally recognised line editing standards and our style document will show the changes we will make.

So to answer the question — ‘Why should I pay more for copy editing?’

The answer is simple — to make your book the best it can be.

What Your Copy Editing Will Look Like…

Your final report will be made up of two parts.

The first is the Copy Editor’s Report. This includes our copy editor’s thoughts on your manuscript, ideas about improving your work and any general structural points you should consider. This feedback also includes any points that we feel need particular attention. The aim of this report is to provide a single summary document that you can use as a reference point when applying the feedback. Many writers have told us that they found it very useful to have a summary of the key areas that need attention, especially when the individual comments and changes embedded with the document can number in the high hundreds.

The second part is the in-depth line edit. This is embedded in your original document and can be viewed by opening the document with any good word processing package. Our comments will appear on the right hand side of the text. The copy editor will have read through your work on a line-by-line basis, and added comments and pointers that will improve your text. Though this is not a proofread, any grammar or spelling mistakes we spot will be corrected. The report is designed to allow you to produce a new and better re-write by systematically working through the comments and implementing as you see fit.

Please note that when copy editing we often use a mixture of tracked changes and comments. The reason for this is that much of the editing process requires the editor to make a judgement call. Our editors will suggest the corrections and changes their experience and training tells them will work best in the context of your book. However, you may wish to overrule their judgement.

It is our belief that the report is as much a teaching aid as it is an assessment of your book. We design our feedback to highlight areas in which you can strengthen your writing. We also structure our comments in such a way that you will be shown how to apply the techniques we are suggesting to improve your book.

No matter how many mistakes I made BubbleCow was only too pleased to correct them. My editor encouraged me in every line and file I sent. When there is something wrong, she told me. When something was good, she told me. Anyone who is completed a story should look no further than BubbleCow to edit it for them.

John Gillum, author of Big Bad Dog

What The Digital Publishing Will include…

OK, so let’s assume you have your manuscript ready for publication — what next?

Would you know what to do next?

Would you convert to pdf, or mobi or perhaps epub, or all three… or even none?

Would you splash out a fortune on InDesign or maybe download the free Sigil software?

Do you need an ISBN number? If so, where would you buy your ISBN?

How would you validate your mobi before uploading it to Amazon?

These are all questions you will never have to answer with our Digital Publishing Solution.

BubbleCow have teamed up with publishing professionals York Publishing Services to bring you the complete Book Distribution System.

Keeping it simple — we will convert your book, upload it to Amazon Kindle Shop, Apple’s iBookstore, Googlebooks and Kobo, and then produce your very own page on the YPS bookstore.

As part of our package you will receive:

Commission free and stress free distribution.

You will get:

  • Ebook conversion with the production of a pdf, mobi and epub.
  • Unique IBSN.
  • Free uploading to Amazon Kindle Shop, Apple’s iBookstore, Google Books and Kobo on your behalf.
  • A page of the YPS Book Store.
  • 100% of the profits (BubbleCow and YPS will never take a cut of your sales!).

You will receive a monthly book sales report. Most eBook retailers will require a 30% commission from publishers. However, there is absolutely no commission on any eBooks sold through YPDBooks.com ebookstore. The profit is all yours.

OK — this sounds sexy good, but what does it mean in reality?

Well you can sit on your bum while we upload your book to Amazon Kindle Shop, Apple’s iBookstore, Google Books and Kobo. You can then sell this book and make 100% profit with only the pesky companies like Apple and Amazon taking their cut (we can’t stop this – sorry).

Also, whilst you sit firmly warming your chair, you can direct readers to your page on the YPS Book Store. Any books you sell there will be commission free, meaning you get 100% of the profit.

How It Works

  • 1. Decide which publishing package suits your needs, we suggest you start by looking at the Indie Publisher.
  • 2. Hit the button that says, ‘Select This Option’ — it’s one of the blue buttons at the top of the page.
  • 3. You will be taken to a page that will allow you to submit your novel.
  • 4. Complete the form — your email, word count and name.
  • 5. Attach your manuscript and hit ‘Submit’.
  • 6. We will then email you to confirm and send you an email invoice.
  • 7. The invoice will contain a link to our secure PayPal page.
  • 8. You make a payment with card or even your own PayPal account.
  • 9. We start the magic.
  • 10. Your edit/proofread will be completed within 21 working days.
  • 11. We email back the edit/proof and report.
  • 12. You accept/reject changes and return the book to us.
  • 13. If using the Pro Publisher package your book will now be proofread and returned.
  • 14. Once you are happy with the book we convert it to pdf, mobi and epub.
  • 15. All formats of ebook are returned to you for final inspection.
  • 16. Once you give us the green light, the book is uploaded to Amazon Kindle Shop, Apple’s iBookstore, Google Books, Kobo and YPS Bookstore.
  • 17. You start selling and become the next internet self-publishing star.
  • 18. We get a little bit jealous.

Questions & Answers

What do I do about a book cover?

You will need a book cover. You have a couple of options. The first is to allow us to do it for you. This is going to cost extra and we will need to have a cheeky chat. The second is to get someone else to design it for you. We suggest you pop over to professional cover designer Ned Hoste and get him to give you a special ‘BubbleCow’ quote. The final option is to do it yourself. Whichever route you pick, we will need the finished cover before we can convert the manuscript to an ebook. This said, we can get on with proofing and editing without a cover.

Is the self publishing service just for novels/short stories or can you do non-fiction too? The web page uses words like plot and novel, no mention of other kinds of e-books.

This is a very good point you make. The service is indeed for non-fiction. In fact, the only types of books we can’t handle are poetry and short stories, and this is because we don’t have editors for these forms of fiction.

Would the service include uploading to CreateSpace? And if the typesetting would include for a paperback/hardback version as well?

The package is aimed at self-publishers who wish to produce ebooks. We have not made any provisions for writers looking to also produce paper books. This said the files (pdf) produced from the ebook conversion can be used to print paper books. In addition, York Publishing Services have a very long tradition of producing print books and would be able to offer more detailed guidance.