Contact

For sales information ONLY:

Inpress Sales and Marketing
enquiries@inpressbooks.co.uk

For distribution and trade orders ONLY:

NBN International
10 Thornbury Rd, Plymouth PL6 7PP
+44 (0) 1752 202301
cservs@nbninternational.com

For wholesale orders:

Gardners Books
Switchboard: +44 (0)1323 521555
sales@gardners.com
internationalsales@gardners.com
+44 (0)1323 521777

Rights, PR and marketing correspondence address

Emma Barnes,
Managing Director,
Snowbooks Ltd,
55 North Street,
Thame OXON OX9 3BH UK

Email

emma@snowbooks.com

Please note: addresses here are for post only, and not appointments. Definitely do not just turn up at the office with your manuscript, or to enquire about progress on your submission, or anything else, or we will just stare at you.

Additionally, we do not take any phone calls, unless by prior arrangement. Please email in the first instance with all enquiries.

Submissions

So, you’ve decided to submit your manuscript to Snowbooks. Yay! At this point, you’ve finished writing your novel and have done your best to polish and edit it. We’re not expecting you to have hired a professional editor, of course. And the MS will go through several stages of editing if we decide to publish it, but you shouldn’t be sending anybody your MS if the last thing you did was type ‘The End’ and then save it. We know as well as anybody that typos happen, but if your writing is riddled with them, it shows that you don’t care very much about A) your MS and B) our time.

Since your writing is now the best you can make it, you’ve submitted your book to us. We’re excited! You’re excited! Maybe this is the start of a wonderful partnership!

If you’ve done everything right, it could take up to six or eight months to hear back from us — but hopefully less than that. If you receive a rejection, it’s going to be a short note, and it’s going to sound like a form rejection. That’s because it is. Sorry. We wrote our Open Rejection Letter to cover the many reasons we reject manuscripts, so I hope that’ll give you some insight into why we’re not publishing your novel. It’s important to stress that even though we didn’t love your writing (or feel like we could sell it), it’s really likely that somebody else will. We’ve gotten several replies to rejections, letting us know that another publisher has signed the book. That’s wonderful! We love hearing that. Anyway, our rejections are short and sweet. We understand the desire to know WHY we’ve rejected your MS in particular, but if we have something to elaborate on, we’ll include that in the original response.

But — joy of joys! — if we write back to say we adored your novel and we’d love to publish it and would you still like to work with us, that’s when the real fun begins. We’ll send you an author pack (which goes into more detail about our publishing process) and a sample contract for you to peruse and have vetted by whomever you like (we recommend the Society of Authors).

Once a contract is signed, we begin the editing process and design a cover and start pulling together all the information we’ll need to make your book a success. I think it’s helpful to mention right now — while you’re still considering whether Snowbooks is a good match for you — that we are retailer focussed, not media focussed. Our business model is based on our knowledge of how retail works. We believe that most readers buy books because of their experience browsing in-store or online, based on cover design, price, and the quality of the first few words that they read when flicking through the book. They also buy what their friends recommend – but they don't buy (in their masses) based on reviews in the media. The most important thing is to get the book in front of readers, hence the importance we place on making life as easy as possible for our retail, wholesale and online customers, focussing on providing excellent and timely metadata and playing by their timing and pricing rules.

We want to be clever about how we spend our time and money. For example, we would rather focus on doing all we can to get the big retailers to support your book than engaging in time-consuming and expensive author tours, signings and events that have no guarantee of generating sales. Author tours and readings eat up a lot of time and money, but we haven’t seen much evidence that they sell books. In most cases, we don’t arrange those kinds of events.

We want to stick to our values, which are to be nice to people, to be proud of what we do, to be successful and to do things properly. We want to work with people who share these values.

If this makes sense, you’re probably the right sort of author for us. Hooray! So get that submission form filled in today...