From the fingers of Neff Rotter
Belgrave House has been offering ebooks since 2000. We started small but our list has grown over the years to over 600 ebooks and 60+ authors. Several years ago, Regency Reads was spun off to handle only the sale of Regency and Georgian romances, as they were by far – and still are – our best sellers. Most publishers have ceased publishing traditional Regencies as mass market paperbacks, and the small but loyal band of fans found they could purchase them as ebooks on the internet. Many Regency authors have taken advantage of this opportunity to have their long out-of-print books available again to their readers.
At both Belgrave House and Regency Reads we partner with authors of previously commercially published books to offer them as ebooks. We take no rights in the books themselves, but provide the various services necessary to see them successfully offered through our sites and various distributors.
Most of our ebooks sell for $5 on our sites, though sometimes for less on distributor sites. We offer ten formats: epub (industry standard), PRC (Mobipocket, Kindle), PDF, Microsoft Reader (LIT), Palm Reader (PDB), HTML, Word, Rich Text Format, RB (Rocket ready) and Hiebook (KML). We don't encrypt our ebooks.
Our intention is to run a casual publishing partnership with authors interested in making their backlists available as ebooks. By this, we mean we prefer a "gentleman's agreement" with our authors on the following items:
- We only accept books to which you have the reverted rights.
- We hope authors can provide a clean Word (or similar) file of the text, but we will scan paper books provided to us. We ask that the author proofread the scanned file to make corrections.
- We convert your files to ten ebook formats.
- We provide cover art for the ebooks. Generally we use historical fashion plates or portraits for the Regencies; images from royalty-free sites for other covers.
- We share revenue 60% (to author) – 40% (to BH). On the Regency Reads and Belgrave House sites authors get the full 60%; on distributor sites where we make them available (Amazon Kindle, Apple iBookstore, Fictionwise, ebooks.com, Content Reserve/Overdrive, Barnes and Noble, etc.), the author receives 60% of whatever Belgrave House receives.
- Authors receive an accounting on their ebook sales monthly, when $50 in sales has been achieved.
- We encourage authors to direct traffic to our sites so their ebooks can be sold there. Authors may also wish to use social media to announce the availability of their backlists as ebooks.
- Authors may withdraw their ebooks at any time, however If authors wish to withdraw their ebooks within the first six months, they should reimburse us for the cost of formatting their ebooks and revising the website to offer and then remove them ($100).
Authors should contact us (ebooks@regencyreads.com or ebooks@belgravehouse.com before sending electronic files.
Filed as: Industry Guests, New Technology
