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Aventine Press is a small publishing
house. Their basic service package starts at $399.00 with additional services
(custom cover, copyediting, image insertion, LOC#, web presence for your book) additional.
They also don't allow changes to the manuscript once you submit it without
paying an alteration fee of $50 per hour.
Aventine Press does not screen books, so they'll pretty
much print anything. This means potential buyers cannot count on the quality of
books produced under that imprint.
The retail
prices of their books are competitive, even a bit low, and they suggest that
they pay a full 55% distributor discount.
Aventine's marketing is based on setting up a website for
the book, doing a press release (but with no distribution list), applying for a
Library of Congress number (which is rightly part of publishing), putting the
book on Ingram Advance. This is an additional $995. They don't provide an online
store for their books or include a webpage as part of their package. They
include only two free books in their package.
Royalties are 80% of net, that is 80% of what's left after
they take out the print cost and the distributor discount of 55%. This is pretty
good, but since they don't take orders or fill them, they can't offer the higher
royalties for retail sales that can be had through other publishers. Also, if
you look at the cost of a 300 page hardcover using their numbers, the author's
royalty comes out to 80% of $.97 or $.78. This, by the way, leaves a
whopping $.27 for the publisher. This makes me think that selling books is
not this publisher's priority. Although the formula they say they use works well
for shorter paperback books, there's something going on with higher priced ones,
and I'm not sure what it is.
On the upside, they are relatively affordable and pay a
good royalty on some books. They offer a non-exclusive contract. I could
not find any information in the contract or online regarding cost of books to
author. However, I will keep looking.
In
Summary:
On the plus side:
-Good royalties on some books
-Good looking website
-Affordable
On the negative side:
-Don't take book orders
-No retail sales and no royalties for retail sales
-Don't screen for quality
-Marketing is aimed at creating websites
-No returnability option
available
-Few options
-Lots of extras (including cover design) add to cost
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