Red Compass Publishers gives you a fast, easy way to self-publish.
We’ll handle the formatting. You set the price of your books, get monthly payments, and see daily reports of your book sales. We make it all work with 24-hour support and dedicated customer service. We keep 30% of the sales price, and our authors keep 100% of their rights.
What’s the catch? There isn’t one.
If you’ve already published your book through another distributor, you can still use Red Compass Publshers to expand your reach and simplify your project maintenance for all other sales channels.
STEP 1: SET UP YOUR ACCOUNT
There’s no upfront cost and no risk to you. When you sign up for an account, we’ll need a couple of basic pieces of information:
- Title
- Description
- Sales categories
- Search terms
Our interface is easy to use, so getting set up only takes a couple of minutes. Forget trying to learn the quirks of each sales outlet and duplicating your effort across multiple channels. We give you one simple place where you can get it all done and make changes at any time, free of charge.
STEP 2: UPLOAD YOUR MANUSCRIPT
All you need to get started is a Word document (.doc or .docx format), RTF, or any other file type Word can read. We don’t have a style guide or any special formatting requirements.
- Unless you already have one you like, skip the title page and copyright page. Just give us the story, and we’ll make them for you.
- Mark your chapter breaks with something distinctive, and be consistent. Make it centered and bold, or larger font, or use a Heading style. Set apart your chapter titles, and we’ll do our best to recognize them.
- If you have cover art, upload that too. A 1600×2400 JPEG works best, but any tall rectangle will do. We’ll resize whatever you send to meet the requirements of your chosen sales channels.
That’s it! From there, we’ll make sure your book gets a working Table of Contents and page breaks between chapters. We also generate custom endmatter like About the Author and Teaser pages. We guarantee that anything we produce will pass Epubcheck, meaning it meets the technical standards for all of our digital stores.
Our conversion process creates a beautiful epub and you’ll be able to download a mobi file for Kindle reading too.
Your ebook may look a little different from the original document you uploaded. Our goal is to make your story look as good as possible on the devices readers use.
If you have an expertly-formatted epub of your own, that’s cool too. We won’t make any changes, but we’ll gladly distribute it to all our digital stores for you.
The process really is this easy, and our Customer Support team is here to help if you have questions at any time.
Instead of maintaining author profiles, sales descriptions, book versions, and series titles on all of those different accounts, we give you one easy place to maintain the information and make updates. Turning any of the sales channels on or off is as easy as clicking a checkbox. If you’d like to see support for a sales channel not mentioned above, let us know at feature-info@redcompass.co.za.
You can contact the South African National Library to get your free ISBN.
STEP 3: SET YOUR LIST PRICE
When you publish a book, you’ll enter a Digital Book Price (in ZAR). The list price is up to you!
We will direct our digital stores to sell your book at the list price you provided.
Want to list your book for free? No problem. Choose a list price of R 0.00 on the publishing page, and we’ll make it happen.
If you decide to change your book’s price at any time (either temporarily or for good), just go back into our portal and make your adjustment. We’ll ensure that information gets updated with all of your vendors.
STEP 4: MANAGE AND TRACK
Our goal is to take the headache out of publishing your book and managing it once it’s out there.
- Manage changes. If you need to make any changes—whether it’s to the body text, the product description, or just tweaking the price for a weekend promotion—Red Compass Publishers will push the changes through immediately at no charge to you.
- See reports. We provide constant access to up-to-date sales reports for all of your vendors. We always post your sales numbers as soon as they’re available. And we make analysis easy by providing you all of your sales data in dynamic charts instead of in long, complicated spreadsheets.
- Get paid. Red Compass Publishers pays monthly, with a minimum payment threshold ($20 for Paypal, and ZAR 0 for all other digital payments). Once we receive your royalty payment – usually 30-90 days after sales occur – we’ll subtract our 10% and send the rest on to you. See our pricing information for more details.