Author

• The Author is the owner of the book. They decide who they would like to contribute to the book, which pages these contributors can add to the book, what size the physical book will be, the orientation, and what the standard font sizes and layouts will be. Additionally, the Author can state what the desired publication date is, and most importantly, full editorial control over the content. An Author can overwrite, delete, re-position or add to other contributor’s content, and of course add their own content anywhere in the book.         

Contributor

• A contributor, as the name suggests, contributes content to the Author’s book; a contributor can add as much or as little as they like. They can be blocks of text, photo’s, overlays and backgrounds.
• When they are done, they finalise their submission by hitting the “finished” button, this lets the Author know that they’re done. If the Author happens to have the book open at the point, they can see this content being added in real-time.

Reviewer

• A reviewer can look through all pages written by the author and contributor, and make comments on any piece of content without it being written into the book itself. The comments from a reviewer are only viewable in the online version of the book.

This is a useful feature for a person not contributing to the book itself, but the opinions of the reviewer might alter the Author’s view on what to include.

We are in the process of creating professional templates with pre-designed sections for each of your contributors. This makes easy for your contributors as they essentially just have to fill in text boxes and add some photo’s into the image containers on their pages.

Authory books are created using a four-tier hierarchy of content “holders” which allows fine-detail functions and permissions, depending on the role of the user. These tiers are called “Book”, “Page”, “Container” and “Layer”.

• Book – A book is the highest level of hierarchy; at  this level, the Author defines various parameters, such as page orientation (Portrait, Landscape, or Square), what the default Font and font size is for page titles and paragraphs written either by the Author or the contributors. These standards give continuity throughout the book, regardless of the contributor.

• Page – A page can be constructed from several containers; each page can be thought of as a “collection of containers of content on the same page.”

• Container – A Container is an area of the page that the Author or Contributor defines to hold content. That content could be a photo, a title, a paragraph. Authory allows both Authors and Contributors to create containers to add whatever content they want to. These can be easily done in “Page layout” templates where the containers are pre-defined.

• Layer – A layer is a form of container that allows itself to be placed “on top of” other containers. A common example of this “layering” is a faded-out background image with a title or comment on top of the image. Both are containers, but a layer can be placed on top of another container. You can shuffle the order of layers to either “send backward” or “bring forward” – this allows things like photo-montages to be arranged flexibly.

The great thing about your contributors is that they give you significant advantages over the traditional way of creating photo-books.

They take the majority of the overhead away from you, as Author, and share the load of the creation process.

Secondly, they often provide photo’s that you’ve never seen, write stories that you’ve never heard – it’s a joyful discovery process in itself. Sometimes you might just get a few sentences from a contributor, other times you might get multiple pages of hilarity!

Something we hear quite often is “I never knew how many of my friends were creative writers!” If you’re the Author, you have complete editorial control over everything in your book, enabling you to update, delete or edit any content your contributors provide to you.

Contributor Status

You can invite as many or as little contributors as you like; there is no limitation on this within Authory itself. However, managing them manually takes a lot of time, especially if there’s more than 10 people contributing. Authory deals with this by giving you a “User Management” facility, where you can quickly see which contributors have done what. You can quickly see:

• Which contributors have not accepted your invite. (Colour-coded Red)
• Which ones accepted your invite and are in progress. (Colour-coded Amber)
• Which contributors have finalised their submission (Colour-coded Green)

Notifications are a simple, non-intrusive  way of keeping the Author and Contributors informed on the status of a book project. As an author, you will get notifications when contributors accept your invitation, and also when they have submitted their content for review. Just look for the small bell icon on the top right of your Authory dashboard. The small “loudhailer” icon is to allow us to let our users know what’s new, upcoming releases with new functionality.

In most cases, your contributors are happy (and flattered) to help you with your book, however, some people suffer with “writer’s block” or are so busy they forget to send their content. 

This is where the book publication date and the nudgebot comes into play. You can see the status of your contributors easily under the “User Management” function; Red means “no response yet”, Amber means “In progress” and Green for “Complete”.

You as the author will also get a notification when each contributor has submitted their content.

There’s also a “Remind” function that sends a nicely-worded email to the contributor, taking the book publication date into account and working out how many days are left to send in their text and photos.

There are some physical limitations in terms of page volumes, depending on the binding type. These are:

Paperback
Perfect Bound (i.e. Glued-in pages):    32-800 pages
Coil Bound:                                                 2-470 pages
Saddle Stitch (Stapled):                              4-48 pages

Hardcover
Casewrap (Printed gloss hardcover):   24-800 pages
Linen Wrap (Dust Jacket):                      24-800 pages

Having printed many books manually, and collated the contributor’s input ourselves (way before Authory was born) we noticed that several authors regretted choosing “standard” paper (60gsm or less), so we have standardised on 80gsm as a default. It’s very common to use this for high-quality books. Yes, it’s a bit more expensive, however 98% of people say this is fine, so we’ve gone with that option.

We are registered with the information commissioner’s office in the UK which covers GDPR regulations.

Our ICO registration number is ZB589582

Shipping

At present, we can only deliver within the UK, but we are looking to expand coverage once we get as efficient as possible locally.

We use two print and fulfillment partners in the UK, and are limited by their production timescales; however, we do aim to get your book to you within 6 business after your order is confirmed.

It takes our print partners 3 days to turn the files we send them into the finished product, then of course, the physical  shipping time.

By choosing the 24hr delivery service option, please allow 5 business days for delivery.

Remember, the publication date you set when creating your book can help you avoid any last-minute delays as the “Nudgebot” reminder facility utilises that date to remind contributors how much time they have left to get their content submitted.

We currently support the following languages within the application:

• English
• German
• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• Hindi

with more to follow soon!

At present, we can’t support contributor input from phones and tablets, but we know this would be really useful, so it’s the next big thing on. our roadmap. Please bear with us on this one!

Yes; we take people’s privacy very seriously. We don’t store any credit card information on our own servers, this is handled securely by our payment partner stripe. More details on their own privacy measure are here: 

https://support.stripe.com/questions/privacy-and-security-of-personal-information-submitted-to-stripe

You can always email support@authory.app if you have questions we haven’t answered in this FAQ. 

Additionally, within the application itself, there is an array of self-help videos and support forum guiding you through the creation process, how to invite contributors, page formatting, image management, previewing, publishing an other common “how-to’s”. Additionally we are looking to provide “real-person” chat support and shared screen via chat help in the future.