Frequently Asked Questions
- All
- Amazon
- Awards
- Blurbs
- Distribution
- Editing and Production
- General Questions
- Miscellaneous
- Printing
- Publicity and Marketing
- Sales and Royalties
- Videos
Yes, all sales are aggregated into these statements. Please note that we have checked international sales each quarter and the sales are low for any author who’s not specifically opted in to POD printing in a foreign country, as is the case with some or our Aussie and Kiwi authors. Simon & Schuster has a thriving international team, so we expect this to be an area of growth for us in the future. We’ll keep you posted.
Your e-book price (on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, etc.) can be changed by your Project Manager to any price, including zero, for promotions, BookBub deals, etc. Please inform them at least two weeks ahead of time, as it often takes a few days for prices to change, as well as to go back to normal. Please keep in mind that we cannot control the exact time of a price change, so it may change a few days before the date of your sale or promotion. Please make sure to check, after your promotion is over, that your list price point has gone back to normal.
While we strongly prefer bookstores order through Simon & Schuster, some will insist on ordering through Ingram. This is okay, as bookstores can order our books through Ingram Wholesale. Still, if you are connected with a bookstore, please share this ordering information with them: shewritespress.com/ordering
S&S will fulfill bookstore orders whether you’ve opted to make your book available through a print run or through POD.
Yes, ARCs are a standard part of our process and built into our production process. Having ARCs goes hand in hand with having a publicity plan. Some books will not need ARCs, but most books do. If you’re working with a publicist, we will encourage you to order ARCs. We handle the files, file upload, and printing of the ARCs, and will price out the per-unit cost for you. They’re usually around $3 to $5 per ARC.
SWP authors who opt for an offset print run (which is about 95% of our authors) will own their own inventory outright. You may order your books at any point directly from She Writes Press at SWP@stablebookgroup.com. Please reference the Author Handbook under Ordering 101. You will pay the cost of shipping only when you order your own book.
Yes, we file copyright for all of our titles, as well as register for a Library of Control Congress number. Since we have to send in the most final version of a book for copyright registration (and the fact that the copyright office has a 8 to 9 month lead time), authors often don’t receive their copyright certificate for a year or more after they publish.
We do not offer e-book only publishing. Our experience has shown us that authors always want to have a print book, even if they start with digital-only. We always simultaneously publish print and ebooks, and these formats will have the same publishing date, and will be synced on retail outlet sites.
We do not publish children’s book on She Writes Press. However, because we have children’s books on our backlist, we make this resource available to interested authors: Children’s Book Publishing + Illustrator Tip Sheet.
Yes. We pay authors their earnings biannually, within ninety days of the close of Quarter 2 (June 30) and Quarter 4 (December 31).
Simon & Schuster distributes SWP books through international distribution outlets in England and Australia, unless we specify otherwise. Please let us know at the point of negotiation if you do not want your book released for international sales. Amazon sells across the world, and SWP will make available the US edition for international purchase. While books are made available in these markets, we do not have an active sales team in any territory beyond the United States and Canada. This does not give us the right to sell translation rights, which are rights our authors retain.
Proofreading is a nonnegotiable step, and it’s included in our publishing package. We have our own stable of proofreaders we work with and a process that’s delineated in our Author Handbook. We do the proofreading before the book has been laid out into designed pages. As such, we urge you to review your final laid out pages very carefully, and if you choose to hire an outside proofreader or a trusted friend to do a final pass, please be advised that we will only consider changes that are actual errors, and not discretionary editorial changes. We have a thorough checklist of things to watch out for when you receive your first designed pages, but it’s never going to hurt to enlist more help and get another final set of eyes on your final product. Also, if you’re up for it, we recommend doing a final out-loud reading of your own book once it’s in ARCs. There’s no better way to catch errors than to read your work aloud.
We will prepare and upload all your files, sending them to the printer on your behalf and making the e-book files available. The retailers we distribute to include:
Retail Partners
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Amazon.com
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Barnes & Noble
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Baker & Taylor (retail fulfillment & metadata to stores/libraries)
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Ingram Wholesale
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Readerlink
Ebook Retailers
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Amazon Kindle Store
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Apple Books (iBooks Store)
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Google Play Books
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Barnes & Noble (NOOK Store)
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Kobo
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Scribd
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Bookshop.org (ebooks)
Library & Institutional Channels
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OverDrive / Libby
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Public library catalog platforms
You will own your files with the hybrid model, so at any point post-publication you can ask us to send you your packaged files.
Yes, check the person’s website first for contact information. If there’s a contact form, you can try to contact them that way. Next, reach out via social media, or through their agent or publisher or speakers bureau (their contact info will sometimes be listed on the website). Don’t be afraid to share with them what you loved about their book when you make the ask, and remember that if you’re shooting for “pie in the sky” authors, you may be disappointed. Many authors get asked ALL THE TIME, so make two lists—one for your reaches and one for those authors who are more reasonable so that you don’t reach your pub date without any blurbs lined up.
If you enter your book into an awards opportunity, you’ll do so on your own or through your publicist. We recommend creating graphics to share on social media if you win or place. If you choose to add an award to your cover, please contact your project manager and send them a png of the sticker, which you can request from the awards program or entity. We can get the sticker on your digital book right away, and it will be updated on your print book once you reprint.
Your Amazon categories are chosen by Amazon based on BISACS, keywords, and also what other potential buyers look at before and after viewing your book. Your project manager can alter your BISACs and keywords, but please know that we cannot choose your Amazon category. We often have to find creative ways to get there and we’ll work with you as best we can!
She Writes Press has foreign representation by a reputable literary group. This group represents all of our titles (except for those authors who withheld their foreign or translation rights in their contract). If you’re interested in being specifically represented in a particular country because there’s relevance or a tie-in to your book, please let Brooke know early on.
Once we let you know that we’ve received foreign interest, or an offer, on your book, the process is fairly slow. You will not have direct access to our foreign rights agent or to a contact at a prospective foreign publisher, but we will update you as we receive requests for your titles.
In terms of our success rate, it’s highest for nonfiction that’s not memoir, and for fiction that has place-specific tie-ins, and we typically do around 15-25 deals per season.
Sharing your book on social media platforms is a great visual way to reach current fans and create new ones. You can copy and paste the URL from your author page or book page (we encourage you to use Simon & Schuster’s listing which you can find by Googling or by asking your Project Manager about six months before your publication date). Paste the link into a post on your favorite social media platform, and share! Don’t forget to tag us: @shewritespress, and consider hashtags like #amwriting, or boosting your posts to reach new audiences.
The option to order a short print run is a unique service that we offer in the world of hybrid publishing. We talk through the choices and help our authors decide whether or not it makes sense to do a short print run. As a general rule of thumb, authors who believe they can sell over 500 books in one year are good candidates for printing, versus POD. Please note that the author fronts the cost of their print runs.
She Writes Press does not offer fulfillment services on direct sales from authors’ websites. That said, we store your books in Simon & Schuster’s warehouse. These are books you own, so S&S will fulfill your orders through us at any time, and you only pay the shipping costs. To place an order for your own books (whether for your own purposes or to fulfill a direct customer order), please reference Ordering 101 in our Author Handbook.
Our cover program is overseen by our creative director, Julie Metz. Early in the process of publishing with She Writes Press, authors are asked to fill out a cover memo to give us direction, and from there they are given at least three cover “comps” to review. The author will then weighs in on the direction, or even ideally choose their favorite concept. We work with our authors to create the best possible cover for their book, and we also request from our authors that this be a collaborative process. We take our covers very seriously and strive to produce covers we can all be proud of.
Our books are distributed by Simon & Schuster, and all books benefit from their internal sales process. Your book will also be listed in Simon & Schuster’s online catalog through Edelweiss. We warehouse books in Tennessee at no additional cost to the author.
She Writes Press takes a distribution, management, and warehousing fee of 40% of net sales on all print books sold and 30% on all e-books sold. We provide quarterly statements to all of our authors and always make sure that the accounts are current. We liaison with all major accounts. The primary difference in your earnings will come from your printing costs. We encourage you to study our Author Handbook and look at our sample breakout of what you will earn per unit, which you can find in the FAQ section.
There are many free options available, like Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress. However, unless you know how to design a website, you’ll have to pay someone to do the design work for you. We have recommended web designers in our Author Handbook, which you can download here. Websites can cost as little as $2,000, and of course much more than that depending on who you work with and the complexity of the site. Please feel free to post on the Secret Facebook group (that you have access to once you’re a signed author) to get recommendations from your fellow authors! We absolutely recommend you have a website up and running by the time your book is published.
The project managers add books in batches by season, and all covers, author headshots, and tip sheets must be in our system with Simon & Schuster before this happens. As an example, the April-July authors (spring season) are usually added in October/November, while August-November authors (fall season) are usually added in January/February. So you can expect the timing to be approximately six months prior to your pub date.
Email your project manager, please. It typically takes up to 10 working days for the feed to refresh. Please do not go onto the back end of Amazon Author Central and make the change yourself or you will risk seeing duplicated and/or erroneous content. Thank you!
It’s likely that you’ll find a typo or few post-publication. Please keep a list and send your project manager a complete list of corrections you want to have made in the next printing of your book. Provide all of the corrections in a single file. Please do not send it piecemeal. We ask that this be provided in the same format as the corrections made to your proofread and you can find that information in our Author Handbook, or ask your project manager if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
While it can depend on your book and your audience, overall we recommend an author profile page, but there’s a difference of opinion. For some memoirists, for example, doing all your promotion on your personal page may make sense. For others, you may find that your real-life friends don’t want to only be seeing your promotional posts surrounding your book. There isn’t a simple one-size-fits all solution here, so we encourage you to look at what others in your genre are doing. If you’re building a platform for your current and future books, we still rest on advice to have a separate author profile page.
The community has had success with a variety of methods, but some of the most successful outreaches are to direct email addresses (versus using a contact form) and to people authors have some type of history or interaction with. When creating your outreach list, consider both people related to your specific book (think genre, setting, common themes) as well as your dream list. Also, lean into the SWP community. Many of our authors blurb each other! Watch Brooke’s video about soliciting blurbs here.
If you placed an order directly through the warehouse for your book, that number will be reflected under Gross Units Sold. When you order your own books, this is considered a “stock transfer” from Simon & Schuster, and we don’t have a way to separate those orders as their own line item. Therefore, please subtract the number of books you might have ordered from your gross units sold to get an accurate print number for this (and every quarter), and our apologies for this inconvenience.
If this is your second quarter, you will likely feel that your royalties compared to last quarter are very low. It’s important to reiterate here how presales work. When a book first goes into the world it goes out in relatively big numbers, in that our major accounts take stock of all of our books and put them in their warehouses or on their shelves. These orders are reflected on your statement as sales, and they are going to be really heavily weighted toward your first quarter post-publication. Those books, however, are not “sold-through.” Which means they’re sitting in warehouses and on shelves waiting to be bought. So as the quarters move along, those books that are already out in the world are the ones being sold. What you see on your statement may therefore seem low, because your customers are now buying books that were presold to our retail accounts six months ago or more. The success in later statements should be measured not by new books sold, but rather in low returns.
No, you do not owe us money, but if you have a negative statement this means we are carrying your loss. We hope that future sales will continue to eat away at that negative balance. We make every effort not to get to the point where authors are carrying a negative balance, which is why we hold against returns. Sometimes authors opt to pay a negative balance to bring their accounts to zero.
It’s always a good idea to submit for unpaid reviews first. If your book isn’t accepted for a non-paid review, you can always go back to the same reviewer and pay for a review at a later date. Paid reviews are still non-biased, honest reviews. If the review is unfavorable, you can opt not to publish and share it. Please note that Kirkus specifically often offers discounted reviews, so sign up for their newsletter. The major trade review outlets are: Kirkus, Booklist, Foreword, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. We recommend working with your publicist to submit your work to all five, first traditionally, and then paid for those outlets that do paid reviews: Kirkus, Publishers Weekly’s Booklist, and Foreword’s Clarion Reviews.
As your publisher, we pay out royalties owed 90 days after the close of Q2 and Q4, so as a reminder, this is a statement-only period showing your Q3 report. This report will roll over and your next statement for Q4 will be sent out at the end of February. Any monies owed for Q3 and Q4 will then be mailed out by the end of March. For the full schedule of when statements and checks are sent, please refer to the updated Author Handbook attached at the end of this email.
Your tip sheet is assembled from all of the data you provide us in your tip sheet template. Each piece of metadata, however, lives on its own in our Simon & Schuster database and can be updated at any time. If you see a correction that needs to be made to your data (which you’ll typically notice once your Amazon page goes live), or if you want to make an addition (to a publicity update or because you got a new blurb), email your project manager and let them know that you have a metadata change. Please be aware that it takes ten business days for a change to be made in the system, so be patient. And please don’t try to circumvent by making the change directly in your Author Central profile, as that can result in broken and/or duplicated data.
We have two paper choices—60-pound white offset or 55-pound hi-bulk natural (cream). These are both excellent paper choices. We typically recommend white for how-to and self-help, and natural for memoirs and novels. You also get to choose between a matte and a glossy cover finish. We typically choose matte for novels and memoirs, and glossy for how-to/self-help books.
She Writes Press mostly publish paperback (perfect-bound) books. If an author wants a hardcover (case-bound), they must consider the print costs, and we would like to have a conversation with you about the pros and cons of this option. Our standard trim sizes are 5.5 x 8.5 inches and 6 x 9 inches. We have the capacity to print mechanical and saddle-stitched books, and well as nontraditional trim sizes. We print the majority of our books with an American offset printer, but we do occasionally work with offshore printers when we have four-color books. If you have a book that’s outside of a traditional trim size or specifications, make sure to address this with us early on.
We are thrilled that She Writes Press is routinely the top awarded hybrid publisher in the industry. Often, authors ask us which award contests are worth entering. We decided it would be beneficial to share this list of award contests we recommend. Keep it on hand for future entries—and good luck!
The American Fiction Awards – Sponsored by American Book Fest
Category Info: Over 80 categories to choose from (click here for full list)
Price: $69 per title/per category
Deadline: The final deadline is typically mid-July. Winners are usually announced late August.
Award Program Background: The 3rd Annual American Fiction Awards (AFA) are a new specialty book awards focused on honoring excellence in FICTION and are specifically designed to not only garner MEDIA COVERAGE & BOOK SALES for the winners & finalists but to PROMOTE awarded books to the PUBLISHING & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES!
Prizes:
- Results Announced on American Book Fest’s Social Media Pages (134,000+ Fans/Friends)
- Promote Your Title as an Award-Winning Book: As a winner or finalist you will have the right to highlight your award on your book cover, website, and marketing material. Award stickers will be available for purchase for all winners & finalists in each category.
Best Book Awards – Sponsored by American Book Fest
Category Info: 100 categories to choose from (click here for full list)
Price: $69 per book/per category
Deadline: The final deadline is typically late September. Winners are usually announced mid-November.
Award Program Background: The Annual “Best Book” Awards are specifically designed to not only garner MEDIA COVERAGE & BOOK SALES for the winners & finalists but to PROMOTE awarded books to the PUBLISHING & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES!
Prizes:
- AmericanBookFest.com Exposure: A Ten-Month Book Listing which includes your color book cover, a brief paragraph about your title and a hyperlink to your website (valued at $2,500.00!)
- Results Announced on American Book Fest’s Social Media Pages (134,000+ Fans/Friends)
- Promote Your Title as an Award-Winning Book: As a winner or finalist you will have the right to highlight your award on your book cover, website, and marketing material. Award stickers will be available for purchase for all winners & finalists in each category.
Chanticleer International Book Awards
Award Divisions: The CIBAs are split into 16 Fiction Genre divisions, 6 Nonfiction divisions, a Fiction Series division, and a division for short stories, essays, novelettes, and novellas. Each division has its own set of category requirements. See the full list of divisions you can enter here. Scroll to the bottom of the page for contest genre breakdown.
Price: The entry fee is $99 for Non-Members and $75 for Chanticleer Community Members per entry per category.
Deadline: The final deadlines vary by division, ranging between July and November. Winners are typically announced April of the following year.
Award Program Background: Today, readers now have over two million new titles a year vying for their attention. Being an excellent writer is no longer enough to be successful in today’s publishing universe. Chanticleer Book Reviews was founded to discover the best books and then help them to gain visibility in today’s highly competitive publishing market.
Prizes:
- All First in Category Winning Titles will be placed in the queue to receive a coveted Chanticleer Book Review Package (value $445) and go on to compete for the genre Grand Prize and the Overall Grand Prize.
- The Overall Grand Prize Winner is named Chanticleer Reviews Best Book of the Year and awarded the $1000 prize
- All Winners receive a Chanticleer Prize Package which includes a coveted prize ribbon, digital badges, and book stickers
Eric Hoffer Awards
Category info: Art, Poetry, Chapbook, General Fiction, Commercial Fiction, Children, Middle Reader, Young Adult, Historical Fiction, Mystery/Crime, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Short Story/Anthology, Romance, Culture, Memoir, Business, Reference, Home, Health, Self-Help/Spiritual, Legacy Fiction, Legacy Nonfiction, E-book Fiction, and E-book Nonfiction.
Price: $60 / $40 for chapter books
Deadline: Since the registration desk remains open all year long, January 21 is the postmark cutoff date for all books either published or copyrighted in the prior two years from our annual January deadline. Winners are typically announced in May.
Award Program Background: Each year, independent publishers release extraordinary books to little or no recognition. The Eric Hoffer Book Award recognizes excellence in publishing. A single registration offers six ways to enter by genre, press, the Montaigne Medal, the da Vince Eye, the First Horizon Award, and the Hoffer grand prize. There is a category for every book.
Prizes:
- $2,500 GRAND PRIZE (the Eric Hoffer Award for Books)
- Winner of the Montaigne Medal for most thought-provoking books
- Winner of the da Vinci Eye for best covers
- Winner of the First Horizon Award for debut authors
- Winner and First Runner-Up awarded for every category
- Honorable Mentions for every category
- Coverage in The US Review of Books (theUSreview.com) and on www.HofferAward.com
- Gold Seal certificates
Foreword Indies
Category info: 56 top genres from indie presses
- Fiction—Fantasy; General; Historical; Humor; LGBTQ+; Literary; Multicultural; Mystery; Religious; Romance; Science Fiction; Short Stories; Thriller & Suspense; War & Military
- Adult Nonfiction—Adventure, Sports & Recreation; Art; Autobiography & Memoir; Biography; Body, Mind & Spirit; Business & Economics; Career; Cooking; Ecology & Environment; Education; Essays; Family & Relationships; Grief/Grieving; Health; History; Hobbies & Home; Humor; LGBTQ+; Multicultural; Nature; Performing Arts & Music; Photography; Poetry; Political and Social Sciences; Popular Culture; Psychology; Reference; Regional; Religion; Science; Self-Help; Travel; War & Military; Women’s Studies
- Anthologies
- Graphic Novels & Comics
- Children’s—Juvenile Fiction; Juvenile Nonfiction; Picture Books; Picture Books, Early Reader; Young Adult Fiction
- General—Coffee Table Books
Price: $99 per entry, and $79 for additional categories.
Deadline: Deadline is January 31 of award year. Finalists are announced end of March. Winners are announced in June.
Award Program Background: Since its creation in 1998, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards has served to showcase the talent of established university and independent press titles, as well as emerging authors who self-publish. Well aware of the challenges faced by small publishers, our goal is to highlight deserving books—those that not only meet our editorial standards, but also blow our minds—to our audience of librarians, booksellers, industry professionals, and other book lovers, domestically and internationally.
Prizes:
- Winners showcased in Foreword print edition, digital newsletters, and international media list
- $1,500 cash prize—one for fiction, the other nonfiction
- Promoted on Foreword social media channels
- Press releases will be sent to Foreword’s 10,000+ list of media and industry professionals
- Finalists and winners recieve a Foreword INDIES marketing toolkit
- Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Honorable Mention winners will receive 500 foil seals for book covers
IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards
Category info: (full list)
- 42 Print Book categories
- 11 Design & Other categories
- 3 Featured categories
Deadline: Final deadline is in December. Winners are announced in May of following year.
Price:
- Current IBPA Members: $95 per title/per category (i.e., $95 for the initial entry; $95 for additional entries)
- Fee for non-members of IBPA:
$229 for the initial entry; $95 for additional entries
$95 per title/per category, plus $134 to cover annual IBPA membership fee (an annual membership fee savings of from $6 to $335 depending on size of company)
Award Program Background: Over this time, the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ for excellence in book publishing has become one of the highest national honors for independent publishers. The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ program is unique in that all entrants receive direct feedback on their entries. Winning an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ expands a publisher’s marketability and solidifies its credibility.
Prizes:
- Recognition prior to the awards ceremony on the IBPA website.
- Archived listing after the awards ceremony on the IBPA website.
- Two tickets to the awards ceremony recognizing all of the award winners.
- 15% off all IBPA marketing programs during the book(s) winning year.
- A press release template to use when personally announcing the winning book(s).
- A personalized award certificate.
- Special award stickers to affix to the winning books.
International Book Awards
Category info:
- 32 categories
Price: $69-$89 per title/per category.
Deadline: Final Deadline is in April of award year. Winners are announced in June.
Award Program Background: The Annual International Book Awards (IBA 2020) are specifically designed to be a promotional vehicle for authors and publishers to launch their careers, open global markets and compete with talented authors and publishers throughout the world.
Prizes:
- Results Announced on our Network of Social Media Pages (Over 134,000 Book Fans!)
- Results listed on InternationalBookAwards.com!
- Promote Your Title as an Award-Winning Book: As an honored winner or finalist you will have the right to highlight your award on your book cover, website, and marketing material. Award stickers will be available for purchase for all winners & finalists in each category!
IPPYs
Deadline: All entries must be posted online or postmarked by the final deadline of February. Three to six medalists per category will be named in April.
Category info: (full list)
- 85 General Categories
- 11 Ebook Categories
- 12 Regional Categories
Price: $85-$95
Award Program Background:
The Independent Publisher Book Awards were conceived in 1996 as a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the independent publishing industry,and are open to independent authors and publishers worldwide who produce books intended for an English speaking audience. The awards are intended to bring increased recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent, university, and self-published titles published each year. Since the inaugural contest in 1996, over 5,000 books have received “IPPY“ Awards.
Prizes:
- Featured in a series of articles at IndependentPublisher.com which had 80,000+ unique visitors in the past year
- Inclusion in press releases sent to over 2,000 publishing industry media outlets
- Two passes, valued at $300, to the IPPY gala held during BookExpo America
- A Winner’s Celebration Packet with set of book seals, official winner’s certificate, and a medal.
Jewish Book Awards
Deadline: All books must be received by the end of September with a completed entry form. The winner are announced in January of the following year.
Category Info: American Jewish Studies, Anthologies and Collections, Autobiographies and Memoirs, Children’s Literature, Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice, Debut Fiction, Non-Fiction, Education, Poetry, Young Adult, Women Studies, Scholarship and Cookbooks
Price: $150
Award Program Background: Inaugurated in 1950, the National Jewish Book Awards is the longest running North American awards program of its kind and is recognized as the most prestigious. The Awards are intended to recognize authors, and encourage reading, of outstanding English language books of Jewish interest.
Prizes:
- to encourage the reading of meritorious books
- to recognize authors of outstanding Jewish literature
- to stimulate others to further literary creativity
- to acknowledge original contributions to scholarship
Lambda Literary Awards (Lammy Award)
Deadline: Submissions open around September and are open until November.
Category Info: Anthology, Children’s/Young Adult, Drama, Erotica, Graphic Novel, Nonfiction, Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror, Studies, General Fiction, Memoir/Biography, Mystery, Poetry and Romance.
Price: $55
Award Program Background: For over 30 years, the Lambda Literary Awards (the “Lammys”) have identified and honored the best lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender books. The Lammys, which receive national and international media attention, bring together 600 attendees—including nominees, celebrities, sponsors, and publishing executives—to celebrate excellence in LGBTQ publishing. It is the most prestigious and glamorous LGBTQ literary event in the world.
Prizes:
- Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction honors lesbian/queer-identified women and trans/gender non-conforming nonfiction authors and includes a cash prize of $2,500.
- Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers recognizes LGBTQ-identified writers whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers and includes a cash prize of $1000.
- Visionary Award on individuals who have broken new ground in the field of LGBTQ literature and publishing.
- Trustee Award on individuals who have broken new ground in the field of LGBT literature, publishing, filmmaking, journalism, playwriting, etc
- Publishing Professional Award honors a distinguished individual in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community whose innovative work in the publishing industry promotes and promulgates LGBTQ literature.
Living Now Book Awards
Deadline: Final entry deadline in late June. Three to five medalists per category will be named on or about the end of July.
Category info: (full list)
- 25 Living Now categories
- 5 Evergreen categories
Price: $75 per category
Award Program Background:
The Living Now Book Awards are designed to bring increased recognition to the year’s very best lifestyle books and their creators. This contest is for lifestyle, homestyle, personal development and wellness books published since January 1, 2000, and is open to authors, illustrators, and publishers worldwide of books written in English and intended for the North American market.
Prizes:
- Each medal-winning book receives a packet including the medal, a certificate, 20 foil award seals, an awards program and marketing material
- The winning books are promoted on IndependentPublisher.com and to national media
Nautilus
Deadline: Entry season starts in late September and the deadline is usually in early February. The Award Winners will be notified by email in mid-April.
Category info: (full list)
- 35 General categories
- 8 categories for “Books for Children, Teens, Young Adults”
Price: Varies
Award Program Background:
Core mission is to celebrate and honor books that support conscious living & green values, high-level wellness, positive social change & social justice, and spiritual growth.
Prizes:
- $2,500 cash prize for Grand Winner
- Exhibit opportunities at national and international trade shows, including Book Expo America, American Library Association Annual, London Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, Beijing Book Fair – and other book shows
- Announcements and online listings of winning titles for one year
- Lifetime listing in the Nautilus Library of Imagination & Possibility
- Image of preprinted Custom Metallic Nautilus Winners Seals to purchase and use on website / marketing materials / reprints of book
Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Deadline: Completed entry form, entry fees and books by no later than early February. Winners and Finalists will be announced and notified by approximately mid-May.
Category info: (full list)
- Over 80 categories to choose from
Price: Entry fee is $75 per title for the first category entered, and $60 for each additional category entered. For example, if you enter one book in one category, the total fee is $75. However, if you enter one book in three categories, the total fee is $195 ($75 for the first category plus $60 for the second category plus $60 for the third category).
Award Program Background:
The Next Generation Indie Book Awards is the largest International awards program for indie authors and independent publishers. In its thirteenth year of operation, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards was established to recognize and honor the most exceptional independently published books in over 70 different categories, for the year, and is presented by Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group (www.IBPPG.com ) in cooperation with Marilyn Allen of Allen O’Shea Literary Agency.
Prizes:
- Cash prizes
- All winners will be listed in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards Catalog which will be distributed to thousands of book buyers, media, and others
- Exposure for a full year as a winner or finalist at IndieBookAwards.com
- An invitation to attend the Gala Awards Reception held at a world-famous landmark location
- Five award stickers with more available for purchase
Readers’ Favorite Awards
Deadline: The final deadline is June 1. The winners are usually announced early September.
Category info: 10-30 subcategories in each of the below main categories
- Children
- Christian
- Fiction
- Non-Fiction
- Poetry
- Romance
- Young Adult
Price: $99 to $119
Award Program Background:
The contest is broken down into 140+ genres, and each genre is judged separately, ensuring books only compete against books in their specific genre for a fairer and more accurate competition. Submissions are received from independent authors, small publishers, and publishing giants such as Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, with contestants that range from the first-time, self-published author to New York Times bestsellers like J.A. Jance, James Rollins, and #1 best-selling author Daniel Silva, as well as celebrity authors like Jim Carrey (Bruce Almighty), Jonathan Frakes (Star Trek) and Henry Winkler (Happy Days).
Prizes:
- Chance to win one of $100,000 in free prizes
- Chance to have your book made into a movie or TV show
- More features including a book review, award ceremony, and publicity
Sarton Women’s Book Awards
Deadline: The application completed, payment received, and books postmarked no later than November 15. Winners are typically announced in January of the following year.
Category info: Memoir; Nonfiction: Biography, Collective biography, Edited diaries, Scholarly studies of women’s literature, Anthologies; Contemporary Fiction; Historical Fiction.
Price: $90 to $110. (All entries include a one-year membership in the Story Circle Network).
Award Program Background:
The Sarton Women’s Book Awards™ are sponsored by the Story Circle Network, an international nonprofit association of women writers. The Story Circle Network is dedicated to helping women share the stories of their lives through memoir, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, and to raising public awareness of the importance of women’s personal histories. Our activities empower women to tell their stories, discover their identities through their stories, and choose to be the authors of their own lives.
Prizes:
- $100 cash award
- Crystal plaque and gold book seals; virtual seal for use
- Announcements on the Sarton website, press release, social media
- Free advertising for 1 year on SCN websites, eletters, print publications (value $600). 20% discount for advertising in the next national conference brochure
- Additional 1-year membership in Story Circle Network
- Interview in the SCN Journal, republished on StoryCircleBookReviews
- Invitation to participate in SCN’s biannual conference
- Finalists:
- Silver seals; additional seals may be purchased; virtual seal for use on finalist’s website
- Announcements on the Sarton website, press release, social media
- Free advertising for 1 year on SCN websites, eletters, print publications (value $600). 20% discount for advertising in the next national conference brochure
It is relatively easy to self-publish. You don’t have to spend as much money. That said, most authors don’t know how to publish, what’s involved, and what they’re missing. It’s the old adage “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Most self-published books fail because they are editorially and aesthetically below par.
On SWP, no book will suffer the feedback of being poorly published, and you benefit from traditional distribution through Simon & Schuster, which has important benefits, not the least of which is getting your book into bookstores, libraries, and other retailers. Additionally, SWP books qualify to be traditionally reviewed by the major trade review outlets: Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Foreword, and Library Journal.
Watch’s Brooke’s video about traditional distribution and its benefits:
What Is Traditional Distribution and Why Does It Set SWP Apart?
Read Brooke’s posts on Substack:
Distribution: The Most Misunderstood Topic in Book Publishing
Distribution for Dummies
Reframing Hybrid vs. Traditional Publishing
We recommend an offset print run because of the benefits of economies of scale when you print 500+ copies. However, some authors do choose to go straight to print on demand (POD). If you make this choice, we will have a conversation about costs, and whether your book should be a candidate for POD only. POD costs are usually around a dollar or more expensive than offset per unit, and we can and will always estimate your print costs for you, both for offset and for POD.
She Writes Press offers “all list” marketing opportunities, which means that we are taking advantage of all kinds of marketing opportunities that come to us by way of Amazon, Simon & Schuster, Ingram, and elsewhere. We also have partnerships with Foreword and Publishers Weekly and you’ll see emails from us where we encourage you to consider enrolling in group ads (at a discounted price). SWP does not do individual title marketing and publicity, however. As such, we do recommend hiring an outside publicist or marketing expert. We have a list of recommended publicists in our Author Handbook, which can be downloaded here.
It’s always our first choice that a bookstore order through Simon & Schuster, and we encourage you to share with all bookstores our ordering information, which can be found here. However, there may be some instances where a bookstore insists on consigning, which means that they will take your books, and pay you for what they sell. We advise against this except in circumstances where you must. In these cases, you will sign a consignment agreement (usually 60 to you/40 to them; sometimes 50/50) and the venue will pay you directly. What they don’t sell, they’ll ask for you to come and retrieve at some point. In these cases, this is a direct sale. Ingram does not take a commission on consigned books. You, the author, will typically pay the shipping fee to get the books to the events. Always put a bookstore buyer who says they can’t get your book in touch with Brooke first, but if consignment is the only way to sell books, we always say yes!
It’s not uncommon for bookstores to be confused and/or to give misinformation about a book’s availability. If this happens, please ask them to order from Simon & Schuster. You can direct them to our ordering page here. In the event that you experience any resistance or confusion, please put them in touch with us directly so that we can sort out their issues with the support of Simon & Schuster.
If you want special elements in your book, or if you have images or charts or illustrations, please inform your project manager early on. It’s common for our authors to include design elements like these, but if they’re introduced too late in the process, it slows us down and creates more work for our designers. There’s information in the Author Handbook about sizing and how we want images and illustrations delivered. Also, some authors want to hire cartographers or other specialists. If you need a resource, ask us!
Extensive changes that happen once the book has already gone to layout will be charged at our current hourly rate. We take responsibility for small errors you might find, but not for substantive changes. It’s not too late to make these changes, but we ask you to please try to avoid changing the pagination of the manuscript, and to make the changes at a late stage only if they’re absolutely necessary.
Amazon employs scarcity tactics to get readers to buy books, and the impact on authors is that they think their books are constantly out of stock when they’re not! If you see something on Amazon that reads—“Only 3 left in stock – order soon”—fear not. It’s not true. It’s possible, of course, that stock is low in the warehouse, but usually that’s not the case. Read more about Amazon’s tactics and some workarounds from Brooke’s 2025 Substack post: The Retailer That’s Eating Us.
Our current default list price is $17.99, and this shows you what your earnings will be at that price point.
FOR BOOKS SOLD DIRECTLY FROM YOUR WEBSITE OR AT LIVE EVENTS:
- The Net Sales Price will be the $17.99, or a little less if you discount it.
- The manufacturing cost will be $3–$4.
- If you hand-sell the books from among your own initial inventory, or ship them yourself, those are your only costs. If you need to replenish your own stock from Simon & Schuster’s warehouse, you need to take those costs into consideration.
- So, if you sell your book directly, your Net Profit will be: $13.99–15.99.
We recommend you pass along the cost of shipping and handling to your consumer. Sending via media mail throughout the U.S. is $2.58 and the cost of mailers is typically about $1-$1.50 per mailer, so you can generally charge back between $4-$5 for shipping and handling.
FOR PHYSICAL BOOKS SOLD DIRECTLY THROUGH AMAZON, B&N, OR OTHER RETAILERS (THE BOOK TRADE):
- The Net Sales Price will be $8.99 or 50% of the $17.99 (standard trade discount).
- The manufacturing cost will be about $3–$4.
- For distribution, maintaining the trade relationships, warehousing, shipping, and accounting for book sales, SWP receives a 40% fee from the Net Sales Price.
- For books sold through the trade, your Net Profit will be: $2.41-$3.41 ($8.99 minus $3-$4 [manufacturing] minus $3.58 [40% of $8.97]).
- Because author earnings vary greatly depending on the cost of printing, SWP increasingly recommends print runs that will yield a lower price point per book and we will work with the author to obtain the best price point per unit.
FOR E-BOOK SALES:
- Our frontlist is currently distributed by S&S and sold at the price set by SWP. Our typical e-book price point is $12.99.
- For managing relationships and files, distribution to the trade partners, and for handling all customer service and accounting, SWP receives a 30% fee from the Net Sales Price.
- There are two ways in which e-book earnings are calculated, depending on where the e-books are sold. You will make approximately $3-$4/book on the wholesale model (Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and all platforms minus Apple), and $5/book on the Agency model (Apple).
We encourage you to start early. As soon as you secure your publishing deal, you can start to put out feelers, asking people if they’d be open to endorsing your book. For busy authors, giving them six months or more is reasonable, and then your job is to follow up around one month prior to the deadline you’ve given them. You may need to follow up more than once. Create a spreadsheet tracking who you’ve reached out to, on date, and what their response has been. It’s okay to follow up with each contact a couple times. Watch Brooke’s video about soliciting blurbs here.
Amazon will price your book at whatever price they choose, but it does NOT impact what She Writes Press, SparkPress, or SheBooks pays you. Amazon pays you based on the LIST price, not the sale price.
Your Hold Against Returns (HAR) gets released automatically after three royalty statement periods. After we release your first HAR, we may retain a much lower flat hold for a few additional quarters. We do this as a hold against returns and we will hold until we are sure that the majority of your initial preorders have come back to us from our accounts. We may hold some portion of your money for up to two years, but for those of you in Year 2 that amount is generally $200-$400 to ensure that we don’t put you in a position where you owe us money. By the time you’re two years post-publication, all remaining small holds will be released.
Your primary point of contact is your project manager. You will be assigned to one of three project managers after the kickoff call to your season. If you’re not sure who to reach, you can reach our entire publishing team at SWP@stablebookgroup.com.
Create a list of target authors—writers/authors you know or writers/authors a friend might know. You can of course reach for authors in your genre who you admire. A flattering ask goes a long way. You might also consider non-author experts in the subject you write about, as long as the person’s endorsement makes sense for your book. Watch Brooke’s video about soliciting blurbs here and also download our Author Handbook to review more advice about how to solicit blurbs.
Amazon allows third-party sellers to compete for the BUY buttons for books in new condition. This means that, even though we have inventory available of your book with Amazon, there’s a chance Amazon will retain the BUY button and allow third-party sellers to bid on it, allowing that seller’s site pops up as the main “seller” when you go to your Amazon page. There’s not much recourse for authors when this happens, but some authors have had success in purchasing the inventory from the third-party seller in order to remove them as the primary seller, thus reverting the BUY BOX back to Amazon.
We presell your books into the marketplace and we are paid for those sales (90+ days later, which means in many cases we are covering expenses for expected monies from Simon & Schuster to pay on time). At the same time, we are receiving as many or more returns as sales every month, which we have to pay back. We receive checks for the entire list from Simon & Schuster. It’s not a book-by-book accounting system. This means that although we’ve been paid (or are expecting payment soon) for the entire amount reflected on your statement, we are on a constantly “revolving door” basis with Simon & Schuster, paying back as much as we’re getting month-to-month. Some authors have expressed concerns that we are sitting on your money, or using your money to float company expenses while we hold your returns. This is not the case, and Simon & Schuster’s accounting and payment process doesn’t work this way. We consider all sales “soft” sales until we have a better handle on your returns. We view our returns as a whole, not book by book, author by author. It takes a full year for us to have an accurate gauge on sales. We let go of reserves against returns after three quarters, which is the point at which we stop anticipating the highest level of returns from retailers.
Please watch Brooke’s video about returns for more information:
Understanding (and Getting Mentally Ahead of) Returns from Retailers
And read her Substack post: Things That Make Authors Cry
Amazon is effectively cost-controlling your book, experimenting with different numbers to get the sale—but this does not mean you’re going to get paid less. So, for instance, the majority of our books are $17.99. As long as you see that list price, you can know that that’s what Amazon will be paying you on. Amazon typically discounts books for around 20-30 percent off the list price. What is happening here is that Amazon is undercutting its own profit, but you will always be paid on the list price, not the sale price.