Happy Labour Day

This coming Monday is a holiday here in Canada, Labour Day. Traditionally this marks the end of summer and the beginning of the cooler (and cold) months ahead. The heat of July and August will soon be only a memory and instead of switching on the air conditioning we'll switch on the heating. My wife and I will take advantage of the beautiful weather and spend a couple of days up at Lake Huron, close to Kincardine. The water should will still be warm enough for swimming and the forecast is sunny.

See you all next week.

Burnt! Food, Feuds and Failures

Restaurant owner turned author Steve Barton has published Burnt! Food, Feuds and Failures with Spire Publishing. The book chronicles Steve's adventures whilst opening and running a restaurant in the Lake District. Here's what he has to say about the experience:

“And the winner of Master Chef Goes Large is….”

After a disappointing un-televised and un-glamorous damp day filming at a Birmingham Travel Lodge, Steve Barton was booted out of this popular BBC cooking competition.
 
Undaunted by this minor setback, he turned his back on the bustle of the city he loved to open an idyllic riverside restaurant in the calms of the Lake District. 
 
Burnt is for anyone who has ever dreamed of owning or running their own restaurant. A stark tale of hiring’s and firings, evil landlords, scrapping lesbians, swingers, marriage, devastating floods and a flirt with bankruptcy.
 
If you have ever dreamt of owning or running a restaurant you really ought to read this cautionary tale first. Then again, perhaps you shouldn't....
"Just remember one thing; sometimes your dreams can keep you awake at night"

Steve's personal website.
Burnt! The blog of the book.

Burnt! will be released in approximately two weeks.

How to use your free website

One of the best things you can possibly do to get exposure for your book is to make it available on the free website we provide. I know that this sounds strange - why would readers buy your book when they can read it for free online? Allow me to elaborate:

1. Reading huge amounts of text on a computer screen isn't fun. While it's ok to read a blog, or a website online, reading a book is a different matter altogether. It's difficult to curl up with a good laptop.


2. You don't have to make everything available at the same time. Release a chapter a week, a page a day, whatever suits you. That way you'll build up a regular readership. Also, google loves few things better than a website that is frequently updated. The more often you post a new page, or chapter, the higher your chances that your book comes up as a search result on google and other search engines. And that is a very good thing.

If you have any questions about your website, just ask. We're here to help.

A free website for every new author

These days you need to be online if you'd like to be successful in any publishing venture. This is especially true for the self publishing author. To make sure that your book gets the widest exposure possible, we register the book's title as an internet domain for you. Should that not be possible we'll try and get as close as possible.

We then add from three to five email addresses to the account, so you can communicate with readers without having to give out your private home email address. The account also comes pre-installed with the WordPress blogging and publishing platform.

This means that even as a novice internet user you can add your own content to your new site in minutes. There is no coding and you can choose from dozens of attractive design templates. We will give you a start by adding your book title and a sales link to amazon, then it's over to you. You may either just leave the site as we deliver it or you may add your own content, sell your books, post reviews, author images, etc.

Writing a blog is a great way to get exposure online, and with the service we provide you're set up to succeed. Hosting your site on our servers is included in the price of the Publishing Package.

Service Outage

This afternoon our hosting company experienced problems with one of their main routers. As a result our site was not reachable for about 60 minutes. We apologize for any frustration that might have caused. Everything is up and running again. We have an emergency blog for occasion like this where we can keep you up to date with any developments.

Welcome back, Duncan

Duncan Gillespie, author of The Man in the Manse, has decided to self-publish his second book, Happy Now with Spire Publishing. Welcome back, Duncan.

The Girl with a One-track Mind

I was browsing a number of literary blogs when I noticed a blog named Girl with a one track mind. Before you click through please do keep in mind that this links to adult material. No nudity, but the subject deals with human sexuality.

This Girl with a One-track Mind, who called herself Abby Lee, had for several years written a very popular blog, journaling her sexual adventures as a single girl looking for Mr Right, living in London. A publishing contract soon followed (sex sell, after all) and Abby was offered a healthy advance on her book, rumoured to be in six figures. I read some of her blog entries and all of a sudden it clicked, or so I thought at the time.

In 2004 a young woman from London, who called herself Abby, had published four books of erotica with us. They were semi-autobiographical. The style these books are written in is very close to Abby Lee's book. The 'adventures' described are almost identical. Could this be the same women? And if so, why hadn't she told us? I shot off a mail to one of my colleagues who deals with our submissions to amazon and other book traders. Here's her response:

I hate to burst your bubble but this isn't our Abby, different woman with the same name writing the same material but not our lady.
Amazon mixed up the two authors last year and I had to sort it out. So unfortunately, no, they aren't the same author.

I still think that the similarities in writing are very, very close. So you might want to take a look, especially if you enjoyed Abby Lee's book. Here's a link:

And here's a link to one of the books 'our' Abby published:



PS: Here is what The Times has to say, the paper that managed to unmask Abby Lee.

Amusing email

So I take a look at our help@spirepublishing.com account this morning and this is one of the mails that arrived overnight:

The final pdf of my book is attached, it already has an isbn but I need someone to distribute it and submit it to the bookstores. It is already available on amazon and the online book stores as I self published it with lulu.com (I am the publisher) but I want someone to distribute it to bookstores, while still retaining all rights and be able to back out of our agreement at any time. I don’t want to pay the initial 400 or whatever dollar fee you have as my book is good enough that you should want to take it on without that.

Please consider
Name removed to protect the innocent

Truth be told, we haven't had one of these for a while. "We'd like to use your services, but you should be working for free" - we get all sorts of mails, but these are remarkably rare. Anyway, here's my reply to him:

Lower Author Prices for North American authors

A couple of days ago we lowered our author prices for UK authors. We managed to do that because our sales numbers in the UK are up from last year. Today we went through the accounts for Canada and the US, calculated the number of books printed last year and our forecast for the current year and when all was said and done we had managed to lower our costs here too. It is with great pleasure that we're passing that saving on to our customers. The cost of single books orders has been lowered by over $1.00 per book. That difference will go straight to our author's bottom line.

New Stores

We've just launched new bookstores for our customers. Yes, not just one bookstore, three of them. As most of our authors come from the UK and Canada, then from the US, we thought that it was only fair to offer a Canadian store, a UK store and a US store. The stores carry all those of our books which were published with a distribution agreement and are run in association with amazon. This means that you can take advantage of the usual amazon goodies, like free shipping on orders over a certain amount and express delivery for urgent orders.

Initially we had planned to open a store ourselves, but then we looked at what we're good at - designing and publishing books - and then we took a look at what amazon is good at - selling books. So we scrapped our own store design and went back to publishing books, rather than wrapping them, dropping them, repackaging a fresh copy.... you can see where this is going.

Here are the stores. Let us know how you like them.

PS: Not all eligible books are listed in all stores yet. We're working on it and everything should be finished by the middle of next week.

New Publishing Packages introduced

We've been struggling with this. On the one hand we didn't want to complicate things and keep our service as simple as possible, on the other hand authors were demanding highly varying service levels. Some are uploading print ready pdfs (and frequently asking for a discount because they have done a lot of the design work themselves) some just want to mail in a manuscript and forget about it until it's ready and published.

As a result we've now introduced a number of publishing packages for the self publishing author. You can choose from Spire Publishing Basic, where you do most of the preparation work, to Spire Publishing Professional, where we take care of pretty much everything but writing the book. (Having said that, we do have a ghost-writer under contract - just in case you're wondering.) The varying levels of our involvement and services are of course reflected in the price. Take a look at the Publishing Packages page for details.

As ever, we appreciate your feedback.

Increase the chances of having your book reviewed

Start by doing some research. Think of all the media outlets that do book reviews and may review your book. If your book is on yachting, are there any sailing titles that might review your book? Remember that you can later use good reviews from smaller titles to encourage bigger ones to look at your book.

Once you know where you want your review to appear, it’s time to pick up the phone. Get in touch with the right person and tell them about your book. Maybe send through some information or your Author Information sheet if you have one. Try to agree that a review will take place. Never send out your book without agreeing the review first. Once you’ve sent you book, ring up to make sure they have your book and have a discussion on when it will be reviewed and when that review will appear. You don’t want to hassle the publication but it is a good idea to try to get them to fix on a publication date.

Once the review has appeared, it may be worth talking to the publication or broadcast outlet to see if you can reproduce the review for other marketing activities.

New book: The Man in The Manse, by Duncan Gillespie

"Duncan Gillespie has been contributing a weekly column to the "Strathspey and Badenoch Herald" as the Man in the Manse, for the past 14 years. With his spell at the "Strathy" now drawn to a close, I'm delighted that he has chosen to publish a selection of these columns as a "best of " collection.

Duncan has an innate ability to write illuminating prose on most subjects under the sun - and indeed beyond. As the title of his column suggests, religion is a recurring theme in his writing, and he is a man of religious convictions, but his columns have a much wider appeal than that - there's something for everyone.

In more than fifty years of journalism, his inkwell has seemingly never run dry. His talent and passion shine through, whether he is writing about ghostly visitors, Robert Burns, the Newtonmore Haggis Hounds, the Pearly Gates, or the sins of the past.. I hope that these "Man in the Manse" columns, brought together for the first time, are received by readers new and old with the same enthusiasm as went into their making."

Gavin Musgrove, Editor "Strathspey & Badenoch Herald"

ISBN-10: 1897312431

ISBN-13: 978-1897312438

Email slowness

We are currently migrating our mail systems to a new server. As a result you might experience slower than usual response times or even bounced mails from both our info and help addresses. This is due to the new DNS information propagation on the net and outside of our control. Everything should return to normal by tomorrow at the latest.

Update, Tuesday evening: Everything is working again as it should.

Lower Author Prices for UK authors

We have just reduced our Author Price for books published by our UK authors. The Author's Price for single book purchases has been reduced by £0.21 per copy. This reduction in price goes directly to our author's bottom line when selling their books, either through the book trade or through their own personal sales. For every 100 books sold this adds £21.00 in earnings.

New book: Shadow Lands, by Simon Lister

The catastrophe plunged the world back into a new Dark Age, where six months of summer light followed six months of winter darkness. It brought Mankind to the brink of extinction.

The cataclysm unleashed chaos but it also released Merdynn from his long spellbound imprisonment and for millennia he struggled to help keep the flame of Man alive while he searched for the ancient bloodline of legend. As the increasing threat to Britain grew he despaired of ever finding the link to the past until the day he came across the remains of a raided village. There were only two survivors, a boy and girl.

Forty years later Britain stands against the darkness and that boy leads the strongest war band in Britain. His name is Arthur. The Arthur of Celtic legend returns at the time of Britain's greatest need to unite the warriors of a divided land in this dark and compelling tale of heroism and despair where conflicting loyalties and outright betrayals are played out against a bloody war that threatens to overwhelm and destroy everything Arthur's sworn to protect.

ISBN 1897312350

ISBN-13: 978-1897312353

New website launched

Today we are launching the new Spire Publishing website. We're exhausted but happy. The main benefits of the new site are:

• Vastly simplified book submission process. Rather than sending our authors to an automated submission page we have now made submitting a manuscript part of author support. This means one of our author support staff will be able to help you from step one.


• New help system. We have made changes to our author help system, integrating it with this site and running it on our own servers. This means no more archived project, all sections will stay live, all of the time.


• Green servers. All of our files are now hosted on carbon neutral servers. This is reducing the level of environmental impact our books have even further.