You must accept that your manuscript (ms) is totally edited and ready to be turned over to a designer. Coast Dog Press (CDP) provides editing services. There are two kinds of editing, substantive editing and copy-editing.

Substantive editing says, yes, you have a book or no you don’t have one. Copy-editing corrects spelling, grammar and glitches and typos. You are wearing your author’s hat if you ask us to edit. Publishers always edit an author’s work—even Hemingway’s!

You are going to depend on mail order sales? If your book is a Coast Dog Press format of 8.25 inches square, of 200 pages or less with a spine dimension of 7/16th or thereabouts and under 500 grams in weight it will mail to any
address in Canada at a very inexpensive cost.

Your manuscript should be presented in the form of individual chapters each Chapter in an MSWord document. Any font will do and single or double spacing is acceptable.

The cost to print goes down as the number of copies ordered goes up— large publishers order thousands of copies thus bringing their unit cost down to where that 40% discount is no problem. You are not in that league. We have some solutions for you. By the way: Coast Dog Press’s printer turns out a magnificent product and has the best pricing and delivery services you will find anywhere.

If photos and illustrations are to be used, a regular photo print is the most desirable format. We can scan each print to the level of resolution required for its specific use in your book.  These days, most of us collect low resolution JPGs on our computer and you may expect those to work but they do not.  Don’t get involved in the technical stuff, just send your jpgs to a Photo Lab and request 4 by 6 prints. Send the prints to us identified as to its chapter and the order of its appearance and, oh yes, a caption should be supplied for each photo.

If you assign a price to your book over $40 CAD you are hooped —$39.95 will not deter buyers but $40 will. So you go to a bookstore and they say they will buy your book but they want a 40% discount in order to resell it—this is the established trade discount. Your book is listed at $39.95 so they want it for $24.00 You have printed only 200 copies and the unit cost to you of your book is $30.00 and they want it for $24.00—talk about being hooped!  What to do?