Sonet custom publishing

What is custom publishing?

We must tell you an important piece of information right at the beginning. We are not a traditional publishing house like Albatros, Labyrint or Argo, we are a custom publishing house and we publish books on a turnkey basis. You could say that if you want to self-publish a book, you can approach us. This means that the cost of preparing the book before publication and producing it doesn’t go to us, it goes to you. At least in the first wave of printings. If it’s going to be

your book is in demand and you want to use our distribution network, the additional production costs are already behind us. This ensures that we, as a publishing house, don’t end up with your books in our stock and drown our budget in them. The book business is tribute tough.

What we can help you with

We deal primarily with non-traditional books and publications. We offer special bindings, non-traditional formats and paper types. We do both machine and hand binding. We can gild the type or spine of a book. Apart from that, we can of course also do classics.

We publish books, publications, catalogues, manuals, chronicles, comics, all corporate and promotional printed matter, even in small-run series. But gradually.

Beta reading

First and foremost, we can read and evaluate your manuscript. We have several beta readers who read a lot and like to read. They’ll also write your first short reviews to help you build your social media base. If you want to sell your book, spend a lot of time on social media and community building. Your fans are your potential readers, and the more of them you have, the better.

Proofreading and editing

We can proofread your manuscript – make stylistic and grammatical corrections, fix typos, etc. If you want (and we highly recommend it), we will also edit your text to make it readable for your target readership. This work should not be underestimated, as it will affect the tone of voice of the entire book. It can be a significant hit to your entire manuscript. This is where your writer’s pride should go a little sideways. An editor always knows better than anyone what text will work on a reader. But it’s always regular communication between the writer and the editor. With us, the author always has the last word!

Graphics and typesetting

Once this stage is over and the text is ready, the layout – the template and format of the book – needs to be designed. If your book contains illustrations, the graphic designer will play with them so that they fit well with the text and the book as a whole.

Then, finally, the typesetting of the text and illustrations is done. This work is very time-consuming because it is typeset paragraph by paragraph, picture by picture, and throughout the text, monosyllabic conjunctions must be moved from the end of a line to a new line. In between, we design the visual of the cover – the plates, which is the icing on the cake, but which will greatly influence the reader in whether or not to buy the physical product. The cover has to catch the eye of the target reader.

ISBN

Your book or any non-periodical publication must also be indexed in the ISBN system. In addition to the ISBN, we will also generate a barcode for the book cover. We will draw up a book cover and put all the statutory information where it should be according to the law on non-periodical publications.

When the book is ready and you approve the result, it can go to print and production. You can find out more about printing in the Print section.

Distribution

But this is where the book’s journey just begins. You’ve got the physical book in your hand and now you need to get it out to readers. You can either sell it on your E-shop, for example, or use our distribution network and our E-shop. Getting on bookseller shelves without a distributor is unfortunately not possible (except for small local booksellers in your town who know you well).

If you agree to distribute with us, you’ll want to know all the commissions, fees, and your entitlement to commission on sales. Here’s where you’re in luck. No more fees to pay. You, as the author, are entitled to a 25% royalty on book sales. That’s many times more than a traditional old-fashioned publishing house, but hardly enough to cover the cost of producing the first wave of copies. The other 75% is swallowed up by the distribution network (Kosmas, Pemic Books), bookstores, and the costs of packaging, shipping, etc.

Cost

This is also why we focus more on non-traditional and more expensive books. Because if you pay for the entire print run in the first wave, you also pay for the pre-press preparation of the book, and you get 25% of the sale price back, you’re in the red. In short, there’s that upfront cost. If you want to make money, you have to sell more than a thousand copies. That’s why there are only 2 authors in the Czech Republic who write for a living – Michal Viewegh and Radka Třeštíková. On the other hand, we give the opportunity to beginners and unknown writers to make a name for themselves on the book market.

Besides, we won’t force you into a large volume of copies. As we have already mentioned, you pay for the first wave of copies yourself. Together, we’ll test the interest in your book and if there is interest, we’ll do the next wave of copies at our own expense. This leaves a bigger chunk of money for you because you don’t have to deduct any costs from the 25% commission.

Marketing

We’ll help you with promotion! You can ask us for social media management, online advertising to promote the sales of your book, outdoor advertising for example in the subway, trams, city lights, billboards. But outdoor advertising is expensive. Promotional packages in cooperation with the distributor are great – signs, window displays, posters, book drop-offs at the entrance or inclusion in the new releases in every bookstore in the Kosmas network. It works!

Be flexible! The first print run is always a test run and you need to allow for loss! Unless you salt the sale price accordingly. If you are an unknown author, we recommend a rather smaller number of copies in the first wave to test the interest in your book. Reprints can be done at any time. The larger the print volume, the lower the cost per book. That makes sense!

You never know what kind of book will be a bestseller! And we wish you would!

You send us the necessary parameters and data about the book, set a tentative date when the book should be published and wait for us to send you a preliminary calculation.

If you decide to go ahead with it, we’ll get to work preparing the book for publication.

First, your manuscript is sent to a proofreader and editor and the book is reviewed. Then you’ll agree on the level of proofreading and editing. Put your author pride away here! Sometimes the hits are more than brutal.

After editing, the graphic designer designs the layout of the book, edits any photos or illustrations, or the illustrator draws them, and the typesetter then gets to work typesetting the text and images into the book layout. This work takes time.

In the meantime, the graphic designer designs or tweaks the cover and cover art, and the publisher indexes the book and assigns an ISBN.

After typesetting, the graphic designer makes a print pdf with all the printer requirements and the work is finished. We can print. Of course, at all milestones of the book you comment on the result and can suggest improvements, give comments.

Then the book is sent to the printer. Printing usually takes a while.

And distribution is either up to you, or you agree with us and we take the book to Kosmas (biggest Czech distributor) and display it on our E-shop as well. Successful sales can begin.