“If you write fantastic content and you make a difference to your readers’ lives, the financial reward will come regardless,” that’s the opinion of a wildly successful self-publisher of non-fiction interviewed in this week’s Lancashire Evening Post.

Richard McMunn’s self-publishing career began when he wrote a guide for prospective firefighters 10 years ago. At the time, McMunn was himself working as a fire fighter and had no idea his guide would go on to be the catalyst for such a successful self-publishing business.

He is currently assisting almost 100 authors achieve success through self-publishing.

His first book was called How To Become A Firefighter and it topok him three months to finish, writing the book after his shifts with the fire service.

The book sold well through Amazon and he found himself having to drive round to post the orders in lots of different post boxes because he was filling them too quickly. He started writing new content and guides and before he knew it, he had 30 guides for sale and his business was booming.

He resigned from the fire service to concentrate on his business, How2Become, which went on to generate a six-figure income.

McMunn puts his success down to including dedicated content that focuses on helping people pass interviews and fitness tests for the jobs that they want. He is currently working with 93 authors through a mentoring programme and he says he encourages them to always think about how their content will help their reader. He also encourages people to self-publish, rather than trying to find a publisher.

​Read the full article here. 

Merry Christmas to all of you from Comely Bank Publishing!

We hope you have a terrific day - and that Santa brings you lots of good books to read...

Inspired by the work she did as a student, an Edinburgh woman has created a novel that focuses on the lives, loves and adventures of characters working in a fictional 1970s department store.
 
Jane Tulloch’s debut novel, Our Best Attention, will be published by Comely Bank Publishing on 11 January. The book is set in Murrays, a fictional Edinburgh department store in the 1970s. It’s a large, gothic and rambling building, but the store’s real heart lies in its staff and its customers and the book tells the story of Miss Murray, her team (and some very surprising VIP customers) and their efforts to adapt the store to changing times.
 
Monkeys, murderers, mayhem and more are all included in this heart-warming tale which brings the era alive and populates the fictional landscape with a new set of delightful and intriguing characters.
 
Jane, who was born in Edinburgh in 1954 and who has lived there ever since, said: “In the 1970s, I worked during my student holidays in a store very like Murrays. I was always struck by its likeness to a theatre and I really enjoyed working with the customers and staff. It was a lot of fun.
 
“After many years working with adults with Asperger’s Syndrome in the NHS and writing lots of very serious reports, it was liberating to write fiction at last. My experience of working in a department store and working with and writing about with and writing about unusual and interesting people and their families melded together and Our Best Attention was the result.
 
“It was very liberating to write things that do not need to be true – I found that the characters and stories just grew like magic. I can only suppose they had been there all along."
 
Jane has worked for the NHS for 30 years and writes as a form of relaxation.  She lives with her husband, a giant cat and welcomes the occasional interruption from her boisterous grandsons.
 
She added: “Having found a format I like, I plan to complete a trilogy based on Murrays of Edinburgh. It’s a great vehicle for creating more characters or taking existing ones further into the future – the 1980s and beyond.”
 
Jane chose to work with the community publishing co-operative, Comely Bank Publishing, which was set up by author Gordon Lawrie in 2012. Gordon set up the publishing co-operative to give Scottish writers additional options for self-publishing and for writers to share their experiences and expertise.
 
Gordon said: “I set up Comely Bank Publishing because I genuinely believe that too many authors are failing to have their works published. Agents and publishers and have become too cautious, grasping at poorer-quality work simply because it carries the name of an established author or a bankable name such as a celebrity.

“The future of literature can only be saved if bright new talent is nurtured as it used to be.

“Here at Comely Bank Publishing we want to share our experiences so that others who want to self-publish can benefit from what we have learned along the way.”

Two former Apprentice contenders are to self-publish a children’s book.

Sam Curry and Elle Stevenson who appeared in this year’s show originally worked as a team for one of the show’s tasks to create a children’s book. The team lost the task, but the book about a dragon/elephant hybrid creature called Snottydink sold out in bookshops. Curry and Stevenson have since spent time writing a new book.

Called Gobble Gruff, the story is about an over-sized beast who lives in a magical winter forest.

Curry said so many people had come up to him, asking where they could buy a copy of Snottydink and that the How to Train Your Dragon author Cressida Cowell had been in touch with him privately, praising the book that he decided that writing children’s literature was a viable project.
​
Gobble Gruff will be released on Amazon on Wednesday 16 December.

Are books the new business card? That’s the question an article by serial entrepreneur Andrew Meal writing for The Entrepreneur asks.

Quoting from the Bowker Report in the article, Medal states that more than 400,000 books were self-published in the US in 2013, an increase of more than 400 percent since 2007, and non-self-published books issued annually has also increased to more than 300,000 in 2013.

So why does the author feel that books can be used as a business card? As someone who self-published a book in 2013, Medal views a book as “high-quality marketing tool” which can potentially earn you side income from new customers or users, speaking opportunities and consulting jobs.

• A book can establish expertise – it shows off that expertise better than a business card.
• It sets you apart – from other people in your space, as not everyone in your space or industry will be a published author so this can help differentiate you.
• It can open doors.
• It can bring you new business. Your book can help establish your expertise in an area, which in turn can help generate you new business or customers.
• It's a marketing tool. You can give copies of your book to contacts when you meet with them, send copies to potential clients and mail them to other people you’re hoping to connect with.

There are different ways to get published in this day and age and hybrid publishing is one of them.

A recent article in the Huffington Post by author Kristen Houghton explores this option and what it means for both author and publisher.

Publishing new authors is an expensive and time-consuming business for publishers, she explains. Publishing houses use staffers to read proposals and manuscripts, and have teams of editors, cover designers, book lay-out designers, printers and distributors, and all of this work is done without any guarantee that a book will find an audience. All of which makes a publisher hesitant to take risks – which is what new authors pose for publishers.

Hybrid publishing, Houghton says, is a relatively new concept and it is popular with many new as well as established authors. Hybrid publishing, she says, is not self-publishing or traditional publishing, but a “comfortable combination of the two”.

The example she uses is an author whose career started with traditionally published books and has now decided to go with a hybrid publisher so that he or she can retain deadline and financial control. (Traditional publishing usually has a long waiting period – sometimes more than a year from finished book to launch date.) At hybrid publishing, you also have control over the book cover and all of the sales revenue.

But hybrid publishing also has benefits for traditional publishing houses. It is less of a risk for them because they do not need to invest quite as much time and money, and they can use it to woo new authors who have begun to establish an audience.

As with self-publishing, hybrid publishing makes you the CEO of the company – which is no bad thing, according to Houghton. She estimates the costs of bringing a book to print in the region of $1,800 to $2,500 (presumably this includes the costs of a good cover, layout, editing and proof-reading, and marketing, as well as the work done by the hybrid publisher), but that many authors consider it a worthwhile investment.

The third way of publishing Houghton outlines is digital publishing – a real boon for authors because it is the least expensive way to publish a book, and the book is often less expensive than a hard copy making it more attractive to readers. And of course if your book does sell well this way you can follow up with a print version – CreateSpace, IngramSpark or Nook Publishing offer this option.

As Houghton points out, whichever way you publish you do need to get people reading your books. And that is the key to success.

Read the full article here. Pic thanks to freeblogphots on flickr