You. Working on the CALVENDO platform means that you become a self-publisher. We can’t take over the creation process for you. We do, however, provide a wealth of resources and lots of guidelines informing you how to design calendars. Have a read through this FAQ section, browse through our blog and info center!
Yes. German law stipulates that these products must have an imprint. It will be created automatically from the information you entered for your project and printed on the index page.
You can publish anything, as long as it is within the legal limits: Erotic material is permitted, however, not pornography. Our jury will not select projects for publication that cross the line into pornography.
Please note that the keyword “erotic” needs to be included for erotic products because there are a small number of retailers, especially those with a church background, who want to be able to filter them out.
Our jury assesses all projects using an extensive list of criteria. This assures that all CALVENDO products meet certain standards in terms of their subjects, technical quality and product descriptions. The members of our jury have long-standing professional experience with backgrounds in graphic design, illustration, art, culture, media, communication and translation. We work with three different juries, corresponding to the three languages (German, English, French) and markets our products are published in. The members of these juries are native speakers.
Please note: Since each of our main distribution areas (German, French and English-speaking markets) have their own local jury, it is quite possible that, for example, the French jury will release a given project for publication but the English jury won’t. This is no coincidence: aesthetic habits, ideas about quality and sense of justice may differ from country to country. A product may do well in one market but not so well in another. Therefore, do your homework and analyse the different markets. This might also save you disappointment.
A project that has been submitted and rejected (i.e. been sent back to you for corrections) may be resubmitted (after correcting it) twice more. A project that has been rejected three times in total will not be published as a CALVENDO product. Once our jury has finally rejected a project, it cannot be submitted again and no copies of it are allowed either!
Final rejection means that your calendar or poster book will not be assigned an ISBN and it will not be entered in the official book retail databases (in the UK: Nielsen database).
Once you’ve reached the “Submit“ tab which is the last one in our online editing tool (editor) that you use for creating your calendars, you will see a field called“Your note to our jury“ (bottom left). Please use this field to leave a message for the jury.
There are no other options to communicate with the jury directly and messages that you send to the jury using our support email, co.uk@support.calvendo.com, will not be forwarded to members of the jury.
The basic question our jury asks is: Will a product sell? They will decide on the answer using the following criteria:
The juries give points for each of these criteria. If a project does not reach the minimum number of points for any one criterion or not enough on the total count, it is not chosen for publication and will be rejected. You have then two chances to resubmit your project after making improvements.
The decision of our jury is final. Authors cannot claim the right to be published.
Please note: Each of our main distribution areas (German, French and English-speaking markets) have their own local jury. It is quite possible that, for example, the French jury will release a given project for publication but the English jury won’t. This is no coincidence: aesthetic habits, ideas about quality and sense of justice may differ from country to country. A product may do well in one market but not so well in another. Therefore, do your homework and analyse the different markets: It might save you some disappointment.
Our jury mainly consider the common questions regarding target groups:
When a project is rejected by the jury, you will always be told which specific aspects of your work need correction and how you can improve your calendar in order to turn it into a product that can be released for publication.
To make these corrections, open your project in “My Projects” by clicking on the blue pen button on the right. Please do not work with a copy but always use the original project. Please go through every remark the jury made and make every correction. Once you’ve saved your work, you can re-submit it to the jury. Should the jury find more aspects that need correction, they will reject the project again, including information what needs to be corrected. After having made these corrections you can resubmit your work one last time.
Once you have submitted your project, please expect at least five working days for the jury to get back to you.
We kindly ask you not to inquire about the status of your submission and ask for a quicker assessment. We won’t be able to answer you. Each project has its own requirements and the jury can’t tell in advance how long the assessment will take. Projects are assessed in the order they have been received by the jury and once your project has been through the quality check, you will be informed.
If the jury releases your project for publication, you will be informed accordingly. It will then take another 7 to 14 working days until you see your calendar in our product gallery on the CALVENDO website. From that point onwards, retailers will also start listing it on their websites. However, please note that retailers decide independently how often they update their information, which means that we cannot influence how quickly your project becomes available to customers. It can sometimes take up to six weeks until your product is available to order on retail sites.
Note regarding UK retailers: Many retailers in the UK list Calvendo products as “out of stock” due to the print-on-demand nature of the Calvendo system. Calendars are still available to order then!
A special note regarding timing: In the run-up to Christmas, things get particularly busy for retailers which means that it can take even longer for them to update their data and in some case, are not able at all anymore to integrate new products on their websites. This means that projects that have been published (too) late only have little chance to take full advantage of the Christmas selling period.
CALVENDO therefore strongly suggests submitting new calendars as early as possible to maximise your chances of selling. Most of our users create/submit their calendars in summer and no later than the beginning of October. For any work submitted after 1 November, we cannot guarantee that they can be made available for sale for the respective calendar sales period.
Please also note: We adhere to a "resting period" for published calendars. This means that you cannot make changes to your published calendars between approx. September to February.
Yes, that happens automatically in the layout phase when you create your calendar. CALVENDO does not, however, check that an image is in focus, for instance – only that it has the required minimum resolution. After you have submitted your project, all images and text will be checked to see if they meet CALVENDO’s quality standards in terms of content and technical details.
You will significantly increase your chances of being published if you use a critical eye and carefully check your work from a technical as well as content point of view.
You can specify a product end date when submitting your project but also at any point after. This date cannot be more than 36 months later than the submission date. If you don’t specify an end date when submitting your product or do so only later, CALVENDO will assess its marketability 36 months (at the latest) after its initial publication date. If sales were slow or non-existent, CALVENDO will take your product off its list. The guideline we apply is that each product/each ISBN needs to generate at least one order per calendar year. You will be notified if your product is not marketable anymore.
If there are technical or legal issues associated with your product – such as open questions about legal claims of third parties – CALVENDO may take your product off the market at any time.
Yes. However, if you make changes to your project to alter its content or make any other changes, you have to re-submit it to the jury for new assessment. Please note that here is no automatic guarantee for re-publication.
In order to make changes, such as correcting copy or swapping images, please use the blue pen button on the right, next to your published project in your account. Simply making the changes and saving them is not sufficient; you will always have to re-submit your project to the jury! Please use the „Your note to our jury“ field („Submit“ tab) in order to inform the jury about the changes you have made. This makes it easier for the jury when re-assessing your work and avoids unneccessary questions and time delays for you.
As long as the jury is still checking your re-submitted project, your original product remains on the market and can be ordered. Should the jury reject your changes, your “old“(original) product remains on the market. Should you wish to take it from the market, simply withdraw it (using the red button next to your published project on the right).
Should the jury accept your changes, your old product will automatically be replaced and retailers will be supplied with the new data. However, please note that it takes a number of days or even weeks before your “old” product has been removed from retail ordering systems and replaced with the “new” updated product. CALVENDO cannot influence how long this process takes because this is something that happens on the retail side.
During the main calendar sales season, i.e. from late autumn onwards, published calendars cannot be changed anymore. This period last for several weeks and we will inform you about exact dates in our newsletter. This break needs to be kept because it is impossible for retailers in the run-up to Christmas to continually reflect changes for products that they offer in their databases and order systems. It is important that customers who’ve ordered a calendar receive the product as it was described and any changes can lead to irritation and disappointment. We therefore recommend to make any changes to published projects by late September.
Yes. CALVENDO will remove your product if sales were slow or non-existent. The guideline we apply is that each product/each ISBN needs to generate at least one order per calendar year.
When submitting your project but also at any point after, you can specify a product end date This cannot be more than 36 months later than the submission date. If you don’t specify an end date when submitting your product or do so only later, CALVENDO will assess its marketability 36 months (at the latest) after its initial publication date. You will be informed should your product be taken from the market as a result of this assessment.
If there are technical or legal issues associated with your product – such as open questions about legal claims of third parties – CALVENDO may take your product off the market at any time. The same applies if we have received complaints from retailers or end consumers.You can define when and where you product is sold. When you submit your project (or later) you can set a date after which you do not want your product to be sold anymore and set the countries or regions where it will be available. However, in times of global trade it can be difficult to realise this or guarantee it. CALVENDO cannot guarantee that retailers adhere to such restrictions imposed on distribution.
Limiting availability to a certain group of buyers is not possible. As soon as your calendar received an ISBN, it can be ordered by anyone. Making it available only for adults, for example, is not possible.
If you want to limit availability, you can always create a project without an ISBN, then order and sell copies at your own risk. Products without an ISBN do not receive a Calvendo logo and are not entered in the official retail databes. This means that no retailer can order the product.
Products that have been selected by the CALVENDO Jury for publication receive an ISBN, a CALVENDO logo, and we enter them in the official book retail databases. For German-language products, this is the VLB, the list of German books in print (www.vlb.de); for English-language products, it is the Nielsen BookData database (www.nielsenbookdata.com); and for the French-language products it is the Sodis catalogue (www.sodis.fr). Now wholesalers and retailers can place orders for these products and sell them to customers.
Book retailers offer calendars almost exclusively in "calendar season," from around September to around January. Also, they stock mainly products that they expect to sell in larger numbers.
Of course, you can always draw your local book shop’s attention to your products, using, for example, the free-of-charge catalogue PDF that you can download in the product gallery or in your account for each published product. Some of our users have been lucky with this approach because their local book shop saw potential and ordered in products. The CALVENDO print-on-demand system makes this easy because there’s no minimum order.
Absolutely! It is one of the great advantages when working with CALVENDO that you can create a calendar, then offer it for years without having to make changes and get royalties for each copy sold. Here’s how it works:
Simply select the option “flexible calendar grid” when setting up your project and each year your calendar will automatically be updated with new dates and republished.
Yes. However, we do not accept the same calendar in three or more versions. We are looking for calendars that really open up new sales areas.
The following rules apply with regards to different versions for different countries and product variants:
- Each calendar needs to have a different title and different cover image.
- The content of each calendar needs to be different, i.e. at least the order of the images needs to be changed.
Why? Potential buyers need to be able to clearly distinguish between each product.
Should you, for example, wish to offer your English-language calendar also in German, you can’t simply make a copy of your English project. You will have to set up a new project including copy and product description in German. This is because your product will need a country-specific ISBN which is not possible if you work with a copy. However, you can use all the images that you have already uploaded in your account!
Things to consider when creating calendars for different markets
Tastes differ, i.e. what consumers like or don’t like, what they consider to be attractive or interesting or of good quality differs from country to country. A product may do well in one market but not so well in another. Therefore, do your homework and analyse the different markets. It might save you some disappointment.
Each of our main distribution areas (German, French and English-speaking markets) have their own local jury. It is quite possible that, for example, the French jury will release a given project for publication but the English jury won’t. Improve your chances by adapting your projects as best as you can to the conditions of each respective sales area.
