Is 8Letters Bookstore & Publishing the right fit for you?
Before entering into an agreement with 8Letters, we’d like you to understand what we are all about. We have compiled the vital information in this article to have a better understanding as an author.
A Little History Lesson…
We started as book curators in 2016. We curate a number of books and help market them. Back then, the self-publishing community didn’t get enough exposure. Distribution via mainstream bookstores is too expensive and requires the author to go through a tedious process. We wanted to find a solution to this—thus, 8Letters focused on distributing books to cafes and fairs.
Years later, we would curate not only books but also stories. That’s when the publishing house was born. Fast forward to today, we now house over 500 titles with a growing community of local writers. We also partner with Fully Booked, Amazon, and other distribution platforms here and abroad. We’re a member of The Indie Publishers Collab PH, the National Book Development Board, and the Book Development Association of the Philippines, giving us more opportunities to become advocates of contemporary Filipino books.
How to be a writer of 8Letters
We offer two options for writers who want to publish with us:
- Traditional routing – We only have limited slots in a year and the process takes longer than usual (around six months or more) as we prioritize authors who go through the self-published routing. An alternative is joining our writing challenges posted via the 8Circles Facebook community, held three times a year.
- Self-published routing – Check out our publishing packages via this link. The FAQs are also posted here.
If you have self-published your book somewhere and want to explore a new platform, we can provide you with our print-on-demand platforms. In whatever direction you go, we require that you submit your manuscript for evaluation to our email address: [email protected].
What can 8Letters contribute to your writing career?
At a glance, here’s what we can offer you:
- A healthy writing community in both Facebook and Discord
- Post-publishing support: We have a great team to whom you can reach out from Monday – Friday, 9 am – 6 pm.
- Writing and marketing resources from our rich experience of publishing contemporary Filipino works.
We see the author-publisher relationship as a collaboration. For a successful partnership, you, as a writer, don’t just write. You have a fair share of responsibility, too, which includes equipping yourself with the knowledge of how it works (reading this document is the first step), marketing your work, checking the quality of the books we send you, and many more.
What if you discovered that 8Letters is not the right platform for you?
You own the copyright to your work, so you have the freedom to pull your works out. All you need to do is write a formal email informing us of your decision – which we totally respect, and we’ll remove your books from our platforms. Please note that if the collaterals (ISBN, book cover, formatted manuscript, etc.) came from us, you are not allowed to use them in the new edition of your book.
