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Deunant eBooks

We pride ourselves on treating each one of our writers as an individual and are happy to tailor our services to your requirements. We pay royalties on sales at varying rates, but never less than 25% and often much more, depending upon the work that we need to do. We also reserve the right to make a charge for certain work but usually only where we need to use outside editorial or proofreading services; we simply cannot absorb these costs, but will agree the amount with the writer before making any commitment.

Our single acceptance criterion is simple - if we believe that your eBook will enhance the quality of our catalogue it's deemed acceptable. What could be simpler? And if we have to decline your work we'll explain why: some of the eBooks in our catalogue were originally declined but the authors acted upon what we'd said and later had their revised work accepted.

Give us a try - what's the worst that can happen?

As a business, Deunant eBooks suffered a troubled birth. It was conceived as a way of getting the work of one writer out into the big wide world where those who were interested could see it; other writers soon found out and we rapidly got to the point where we could launch a website with a dozen or more titles.

But then a few little problems arose. Just how do you go about building a website that lets people buy eBooks? And anyway, what exactly are eBooks?

Let's deal with the second question first. We all know what book is - a front cover, a back cover and a lot of pages in between which have words, and sometimes pictures, on them and all made of paper. Well, an electronic book, more conveniently referred to as an eBook, is the same, in that it's a means of conveying ideas from the mind of the writer to that of the reader, but different because it uses no paper and exists only as a 'file' on a computer. It has a 'virtual' front cover and lots of pages which have words, and sometimes pictures, on them. There's a difference in reading them too as eBooks can be read direct from your computer screen, or transferred to another device such as a hand-held machine and read more or less anywhere. We wouldn't recommend using a hand-held computer in the shower though, but then you wouldn't read a printed book in the shower either, would you?

eBooks have cropped up in some unlikely places. In his 'Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy' the late and much-missed Douglas Adams described the 'Guide' very clearly, and it's quite obviously an e-book to be read on a hand-held computer - in that case a computer dedicated solely to the task of storing the 'Guide'. That fine actress Amanda Redman was seen in one episode of the TV series 'New Tricks' reading a Shakespeare sonnet on her laptop computer, which admittedly pales into insignificance compared to the various 'Star Trek' series: written reports are passed between crew members on hand-held computers and those reports are without doubt a form of e-book.

So, we knew how to define eBooks, if indeed that's actually possible, but still needed a website that would do everything we wanted it to do. That's why, in late 2001, we embarked on a course of action that involved consultants acting as project managers and website designers actually doing the work.

At that point we had amassed around 30 titles from a number of different authors: those who have been with us since the very earliest days include Edward Lacey, Mary Lloyd, J Douglas Tyler, Peter Waters, Liam Leddy, Michael Ratcliffe and Lillie Evans, the last-named having since died. We had no idea, at that time, how widespread our author base would be, or indeed how many sales of books would be made around the world.

So, we've been in existence really only since February 2003, achieving 'life' after a less than straightforward gestation period. And it's not all been plain sailing since!

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We have been reasonably successful in securing Press coverage of our activities, always by having articles written about us in newspapers and magazines instead of paid-for advertising. Usually this has been at our instigation, but sometimes our writers have sought publicity for themselves and we have benefited from that. At other times writers have done things that attract a lot of publicity: the benefit to us has been hard to see, at least in the short term. Take the case of Father Neil Horan, for instance. He earned himself the nickname 'the Grand Prix Priest' when, in the guise of telling us all to read our Bibles, he ran onto the Silverstone race track during the British Formula 1 Grand Prix. That action gathered a lot of publicity, of course, and Neil went to prison for six weeks. It also led to a charge, which was we hope a little tongue in cheek, that we might have put him up to it because another of our writers, Alan Beardmore, admits that he used to sneak into the Brands Hatch race track through a gap in the fence!

As if that wasn't enough, during the 2004 Olympic Games in Greece, Neil surfaced again, bearing a similar placard. This time he intended to run alongside the leader of the men's Marathon race, just to get on worldwide television. He got a lot more than that, because he knocked the runner, Vanderlei de Lima of Brazil, over and into the crowd lining the street. Life for the next several days went into overdrive because anyone searching the internet for information about Neil found us: the world's Press beat a path, by phone, fax and e-mail, to our door. As well as that we received a huge number of abusive e-mails, mostly anonymous. Those that were anonymous were binned, of course, but those that contained anything approaching a reasoned argument, even if they were abusive, were replied to. The eight or nine death threats we received we ignored, but they were a little disconcerting, to say the least, at the time. It's at times like that when the old Hollywood adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity is rather difficult to accept.

Of course, some of the publicity we've had has arisen from coincidence and gone on to achieve far more than we could reasonably have expected. Liam Leddy, one of our best selling writers, comes from the south east of Glasgow as did David Livingstone, the explorer. Now, Deunant Books is based near Denbigh, in North Wales, and Denbigh just happens to be the birthplace, so the town claims, of Henry Morton Stanley. It was Stanley who was sent of to track Livingstone down in darkest Africa. That interesting little coincidence was reported to the local newspaper in Liam's area; the resulting article was seen by a reporter on a major Sunday newspaper and he wrote his own article about Liam's work which in turn was spotted by another reporter working for a local cable television company. The result of all this was Liam's appearance on television, a distinction he shares only with Neil Horan and Ralph Thomas, as far as we know, among our writers. Having said that, Alan Wilkinson has served a stint as scriptwriter on a British TV soap opera, but it's not quite the same thing and anyway we rather think he doesn't want to make an issue of it!

The whole issue of publicity has served to show how small the world has become. We are a small business based in an obscure Welsh valley near an equally obscure town, yet we've been reported upon by newspapers in Wales, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Eire, Canada, USA, Australia, Brazil, Japan and quite possibly other countries too: the lack of linguistic skill in our office means that we'd have missed a lot of the foreign language reports.

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It was clear from the very early days that we were going to have a number of books for children submitted to us. We've always taken the view that this is a very important aspect of our work as such books not only help children with their reading, which is a critical skill, but also gets them used to the computer in a way that doesn't involve those horrifically bloodthirsty games that are sadly so popular; they only seem to teach children that violence is an acceptable way of life and that death is nothing to be concerned about. So we always take the greatest care with children's books to ensure that the content is acceptable, the spelling is 100% correct and that they are written wholly in accordance with the rules of grammar. We must be doing something right because the books are generally proving quite popular.

It's also been pleasing to see material submitted by young writers, in their teenage years or even younger. In releasing work by such young writers we take on an extra burden of responsibility: an adult is capable of assessing what personal information he or she should release, but a child necessarily cannot do so as he or she does not have the experience to do so. It's natural for us to want to make it clear when a writer is of such tender years as the writing submitted to us is without exception of outstanding quality, but we have to do so without exposing a vulnerable individual to any risk. It is a sad fact of modern life that some people have become predators with children as the prey: we will do nothing to expose our youthful writers to predators and everything we can to protect them. It's only right that we should do so.

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It is a fact of life that if something can go wrong, sooner or later it will. We've had our share of disasters in the short life of Deunant eBooks with computers crashing, servers going into meltdown and good old-fashioned human error. We've lost the website a few times, but only twice with really dramatic effect. The first time involved us in a lot of work re-uploading all of our books manually - that's an exercise that takes a lot of time - but it was otherwise not a great problem. The second time was rather more comprehensive and led to a bewildering range of errors appearing on the site for no reason that was immediately obvious to anybody. Correcting them so they didn't reappear was an exercise that left many poor souls scratching their heads and indeed there were still uncorrected errors when we took the old site offline. It seemed that correcting one flaw made another one pop up and eventually it all became too much: taking the site offline and rebuilding it was clearly the only solution, so that's exactly what we did.

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The printed book, as opposed to a hand-written and meticulously copied one, became a reality thanks to William Caxton, but really has changed little in format or construction since. Things have been changing though. Quietly, a revolution has been happening. EBooks are here, and they're here to stay. As a cheap and convenient way of buying the eBooks concept really can't be beaten; it's a lot easier to sit at a computer, press a few buttons and download your purchase to your computer in seconds than it is to go to a bookshop or even to buy a printed book online and wait for delivery. Consider also the writer who is rejected time and time again simply because publishers won't gamble on an unknown name. Because eBooks publishing involves no paper, no printing and no expensive distribution all that wasted talent can be given a stage, one that can be accessed instantly, worldwide. Because eBooks are so accessible they are seen by a lot of people around the world including people in the film and TV industries; we know, we’ve seen it happen. But the computer as an alternative medium to paper offers scope to do things that simply can't be done with paper.

It's fair enough to say that any printed book can be added to or amended, those changes being reflected in the second and subsequent editions. But there could be a long delay between editions, meaning that the original, although outdated, is still the latest available. We have a solution to this enigma, in the form of our 'interactive' books. Let's call them i-ebooks as a convenient shorthand: an i-e-book can be amended or added to as often as is necessary and those who buy the book can revisit our website as often as they like an access the updates as they happen. An i-ebook might be updated as often as every week; it really doesn't matter how frequent the updating is, the buyer can always download updates as soon as they become available and all at no extra cost. It all operates by password, which is valid for a year from the date of purchase. Why, you might ask, is it limited to a year? Well, taking an hypothetical example, if we assume an i-e-book has 50 pages when it's bought but at the end of that year it has 100 pages the price is likely to have gone up. There has to be a limit to how much can be given away free!

The i-ebooks in existence are themselves added to from time to time, but cover such diverse subjects as films, motor cars, sport, mental health, genealogy, history and humour. but that's not all we do that simply isn't possible in print.

We have experimented with the inclusion of sound and video in our books and expect to decide upon a way forward at some time in 2007. We have always been aware of download times: nobody wants to sit doing nothing for twenty minutes while a file downloads but broadband internet access has slashed transmission speeds by phenomenal amounts compared to what was possible with dial-up connections. This allows us to go further than ever before in developing our download products.

This begs the question when does a book cease to be a book? Or, when does something that clearly isn't a book become one? We don't claim to know the answer to either question, but as we exist purely to effect the transfer of ideas and concepts from writer to reader, does it actually matter?

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In 2006 we moved away from being just an eBook business for the first time when we began to deal in more tangible products. In our case those products were, and still are, audiobooks on CD. We had looked at what was available and realised that a lot of audiobooks were abridged versions of printed books, but even so often ran to four, five or even six CDs. If each CD has a running time of, say, 70 minutes the time needed to listen to a complete audiobook is obvious. But it's difficult to flick back a few pages in an audiobook to remind yourself of what's going on, so we decided that ours would be different. Firstly, they wouldn't be abridged at all, and secondly, they would be limited to two, or at most three, CDs. After all, where do most people listen to CDs? In the car is the answer that cropped up most often, and, certainly in the UK, the purpose of the trip is more often than not the commute to work. That might account for an hour a day in the car; an audiobook lasting a couple of hours seems just about ideal, doesn't it?

As our audiobooks are sold from the same website as our downloadable eBooks, it seemed sensible to make them downloadable too. The CD might be a relatively new innovation, but it is being supplanted to a large extent by such things as mp3 players and downloadable audio products that can be played that way are very popular. Making our own audio products downloadable seemed therefore to be a perfectly logical step.

It is stating the obvious to say that audio products need to be recorded, but not everyone can feel comfortable in a studio in front of a microphone. Our intention is to enhance the appeal of our audiobooks by using an ever more diverse range of radio and television actors and personalities, as well as some lesser known names, to record our books. The aim is to use the most suitable person to record each book, although the definition of 'suitable' is subjective and we're happy to accept that not everyone will agree with our choices all the time! The books themselves will usually be the same as their e-book equivalent, but there are already audiobooks that are different and there will be others in the future. It all adds variety to what is available from Deunant Books.

Electronic books, downloadable from Deunant Books - eBooks for busy people! Why not contribute to our eBooks and audiobooks blog at www.write4.co.uk?

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