Well, first, obviously, if we make a mistake, we fix it.  That's not at your expense.

Secondly, we're delighted to make AA's—Author Amendments, or "edits," to your book.  But, obviously, as we quote fixed-price quotes, solely on what we are able to see when we receive the file for a quote, we can't make AA's for free.  When we're working in HTML, it takes us just about an hour to make 20 edits.  Imagine if we received a book, quoted it, and it came back with 200 edits!  (And that happens more often than you'd think!).  Those are costs that we just can't eat, not and keep our prices as low and publisher-friendly as they are.  (See next page for clarification on our editing policies)

 

How We Charge, and How We Work/Schedule Revisions

Our revision pricing is pretty straightforward and simple.    

 

For the obvious reasons shown above, with regard to second, third, fourth revision cycles, we strongly encourage our clients to be very thorough in their initial review of their books, both print and digital. 

Why Do You Charge Revision Cycle Fees?

We charge for revision cycles simply because of how the business schedules its bookmakers. Nobody sits around here, with nothing to do. Bookmakers aren't scheduled for seven hours a day, with an eighth hour unscheduled.  Every bookmaker is fully scheduled, eight hours, sometimes nine, per day, six days a week.  When we schedule your book, we schedule it for the number of hours we estimated it would take, plus 20-30 minutes for revisions.

If you have more revisions than we have included in our quote (typically, five free edits), we charge.  That helps cover the costs of the bookmaker's time. But when you come back with a second revision round, no time at all was scheduled for that.  As the bookmaker is already slated for her full week, she has to work overtime, on a night or her one weekend free day, Sunday, to do your revisions. Your revision round fee goes to pay for that extra time for that bookmaker.  That's what you're paying for.

But, what if it's Just One Edit?

"I mean, it's only ONE thing, right?"

Look, we try to be fair, but unfortunately, many authors who came before you were masters of what we call, "The Columbo edit."  What's that mean?  You remember that TV character, Lieutenant Columbo, (Peter Falk) the detective—he'd be talking to a suspect, and he'd be leaving. Just before he got to the door, he'd turn and say, "Sir, just one more thing..." You remember that show, if you're old enough, or have seen it in reruns.

When it comes to eBooks, particularly a MOBI file, making one edit still takes a lot of time. In fact, if we have used an embedded font in your eBook, we have to make the change, save the source file, build the new MOBI, and then upload that MOBI file at the KDP.  We wait for it to get done with the upload, and then view the online Preview, to ensure that the font's behaving as we expect it to.  That takes, typically, not a minute less than 30 minutes.  

Even for a print book—someone still has to read your email, review your edit sheet, schedule the edit to be done, so that it doesn't get lost amongst the 100+ books in production. That's somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes of time.  The clearer your edit sheet is, the faster this goes.  Nonetheless, time is involved.  

So for us, there's simply not "one simple edit."  If you send us a Colombo edit, we have to charge you—even if it means that the price is $36—the Columbo edit fee ($35) for print and eBooks, and the $1 for the single edit.  That's to cover the bookmaker's work, after hours or on a weekend, plus the MOBI rebuild time, which is half an hour, all by itself.  Given that other firms charge upwards of $80/hour for their work, we really do think we're being fair.

We're not trying to gouge you—we're just trying to cover our time, to do the work that you've requested us to do.