It’s a bit pernickety, but the usual distinction is that a writer is someone who writes, and an author is a writer who has been published in a way that is accessible to the public at large. 

Immortalise is not a traditional publisher, instead we offer what we call Assisted Publication.
   A traditional publisher will look at a manuscript or excerpt and decide whether they think a book is likely to be a good seller and will then pay the costs involved in acquiring and editing the book for publication.
   A traditional publisher invests money and takes financial risks on an author’s work, banking on the idea that they can make their money from future book sales, and then pay the author a small percentage when, and if, it sells.

Immortalise’s approach is to offer services to assist you to make your book as good as it can be, and assist you to get it published so people can read it. We don’t invest money in your book and we don’t expect to make a lot of money from sales. We make money from any services you require between your work in the first step of writing the book and the final step of it becoming available to the public.  

You can send it to us, but we will typically only read the first few pages and/or an excerpt of your choosing along with any brief synopsis or cover letter you send. This is true of most big traditional publishers too. Our goal is not to simply to take your book and publish it for you, but rather to work with you to make it happen. 

Here is some helpful info for writers wanting to get published.

– what is unsolicited work?

– example of a cover letter.

– how to summarise a book in one paragraph.
– what does endorsement mean?

– what to do before you submit a manuscript.

Yes. 
Your book is yours and we do not keep any rights beyond the ability to publish it. If at any time you wish to withdraw it from our collection, you are very welcome. Please Just let us know so we can take it off our list. 

Not exactly. We use the methods set up for self publishing to publish your book, but the difference between self publishing and assisted publishing is that we offer you the services of an editor, illustrator, typesetter and cover designer to make your book as good as it can be before it goes to print, and we host the book online so that it will be available for people to buy. 

Not exactly. While we have some of the features of a vanity publisher, there are some significant differences. A vanity publisher will typically accept a book regardless of quality and charge the writer for editing and other services (similar to us), but they usually sell the author a package of services they may not want. They will also typically charge the writer for hundreds or even thousands of copies of their finished book which they are required to buy and store to then sell to their friends and family. Vanity publishers make a lot of their money from selling copies of the books to the authors who wrote them. We do not. 

We do not require an author to buy copies of their book (unless they want some). We also do not require authors to purchase any particular services we offer, but we do reserve the right to decide not to publish the book with our label on it or promote it with our other titles if we don’t think it’s up to our standard. 

Nope. We only want to give you the services you want. If you don’t need an illustrator or an editor that’s fine. If you don’t want your book to be in our collection, or to have our publishing label on it, that’s also fine. If you don’t want your book to be available for sale to the public (so only you are able to buy and distribute them) that is also fine. You only need to pay for the work you want us to do, but we do reserve the right not to put our logo on anything we don’t think is up to standard, or to make it visible in our collection unless we think it worth being associated with.

Probably. If you are a very talented writer you might be able to produce a clean and print-ready book (but pretty much everyone will tell you to get someone else to carefully edit your work because writers are inherently blind to their own errors.) 
   If you happen to also be a talented artist you could create some good quality illustrations and a schmick-looking cover design that suits your book perfectly (but not many folks are good at both writing and art.) 
   If you also happen to know how to publish your book online with a print on demand and/or an ebook setup and an ISBN, then you could do all of that too. 
   If that’s the case then you can self publish your book without any help from us at all, and good luck to you.
   If, however, you’d rather not be self published, or if all of this seems out of your reach, or too much hassle, then you might want to consider engaging some of our services to fill those gaps. 
Immortalise is set up to let you choose which services you want, and offer those to you so that your book can happen the way that you want it to.

If you choose to make your book available for sale, then you will receive 50% of any profit that comes from internet sales of your book.

If your book is hosted on our account, then you can buy books at cost plus postage and you keep 100% of the profit you make from selling them – we get nothing from those sales.

We will occasionally buy small numbers of hosted books to sell at events and to show off to potential authors (we request author permission during the setup process to do this). We keep all of that profit.