Nikki Leigh publishes a number of free promotional blogs where you can get extra exposure for your book - just visit any or all of these sites and click on "HOW TO SUBMIT".

First Chapter Blog - Share the First Chapter of Your Book
http://www.startatbeginning.blogspot.com/
Share Details About the Best Friend in Your Book
http://www.mybestfriendsstory.blogspot.com/
Share Your Book Cover and the Story Behind the Cover
http://www.judgebookbycover.blogspot.com/
Tell Us More About the Setting of Your Book
http://www.itsallinthesetting.blogspot.com/
Share Details About Your Heroine
http://www.shareyourheroine.blogspot.com/
Share Information About the Hero
http://www.shareyourhero.blogspot.com/
Tell Us About Your Bad Guy or Bad Girl
http://www.badguysandvillains.blogspot.com/
Start With the Facts - For All Non Fiction Books and many Fiction
http://www.startwithfacts.blogspot.com/
From Books to Movies
http://www.frombookstomovies.blogspot.com/
In Detail with Nikki Leigh
http://detailwithnikkileigh.blogspot.com/
Promote Your Book Through Current Events
http://www.inspiredauthor.com/v3/current-events-and-your-book-promotion-0
Submit an example of an article which ties the content of your book with current events.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of marketing your book. A book that is not advertised, whether self published or not, will not sell, it's as simple as that. We constantly see the difference in sales between advertised and non advertised books and we especially see it when it comes to paying royalties.

Tags: blogs, Book Promotion

One of our authors sent a mail today, asking whether we could double check his sales figures. He had checked his amazon ranking and according to those numbers he felt that his sales could be higher.
Unfortunately the amazon sales rank has little to do with the actual number of sales a book has made. Instead it is, amongst many other factors, both an indication of how well a book doing against other books and projection of future sales.

Steve Rhodes writes:

Later he reveals "One sale a day can put a title in the top 10,000 sellers; a sale every few days can land a title in the next tier of 100,000. When the rest of the list is updated each month, rankings are determined by a complex mathematical formula based on the most recent sale and the time between sales."
The article concludes by showing even a small number of books ordered can have a big impact on the rank: "...wishing won't make it so, but action can work wonders. Lew McCreary saw his well-reviewed thriller 'The Minus Man' (Penguin Books, 1994) locked in Amazon.com's dark middle kingdom since the start of the rankings. He regularly checked the ranking over several weeks. It barely budged. Last week's slot: 680,281. 'I just want to know what to do to get under 500,000,' he said last week.
"After some thought, Mr. McCreary, whose day job is editorial director of CIO, a magazine for chief information officers, rallied the magazine's staffers at lunchtime. He told them he would reimburse them for the book's $9.95 purchase price if they called Amazon.com and placed an order. Five hours later, 10 books had been bought, and Mr. McCreary was making a run for glory.
"By 5:35 p.m. his rank was 368. 'I feel like I have the bends,' chortled the author, preparing for a night of celebration. 'I surfaced much too quickly. I just hope I can stay up this high until morning.'"

Fluff has an in-depth information and graph page available, although you need to be a bit of a geek to understand it. Another explanation can be found here.

Tags: Amazon sales rank

There is now a Spire Publishing group active on Facebook. If you have a Facebook account just log in and search for the Spire Publishing Group. If you don't have an account please send a mail to me and I'll invite you in. We discuss all aspects of self publishing and would love you to join us.

PS: I know that Facebook is getting bad press right now because it banned a mother for posting pictures of her breast feeding her young son (no breasts were actually visible) but it is still a very good social networking site.

Today we cleaned up our stores. As some of you may know, we maintain a Canadian Bookstore, a UK Bookstore and a US Bookstore. This means that Canadian orders are shipped from Canada, UK orders from the UK and US orders from the US, minimizing shipping costs and delivery times.

The old set-up was not as clear as we wanted it to be, so now we cleaned everything up and put the entire store into it's own separate area. We hope you'll like it.

This just in: Alastair Humphreys, author of Moods of Future Joys which we published some months ago, has been offered a contract with a major travel publisher for his second book. I'll be posting more details later. This is further evidence that self publishing a book can open doors that would otherwise stay forever closed.

Tags: Travel, Publishers, Travel Writing

My wife and I had tickets for the world premiere of Brick Lane yesterday. The premiere was part part of the Toronto Film Festival and as I had liked the book very much I was keen to see what the movie had to offer. During my time in London I had lived very close to Brick Lane. I know my way around the area and I am reasonably familiar with the lives of the Bangladeshi community who lives there.

I left the cinema somewhat disappointed. The thing I liked most about Monica Ali's book was that it managed to paint such a vivid picture of Brick Lane. The smells, the music, the hustle and bustle of Banglatown, as that area of London is also known as, jump off the page. Nazeen, the heroine, is alive in Ali's book. Her being married off at age 17 to a man she has never met, a man who lives in London - a city half way across the world from her native Bangladesh - is one of the most heartbreaking stories you can ever read. The movie skims these issues. There are too many scenes of wistful window gazing, too many flashbacks of Nazeem and her sister playing catch as children and not enough reality, not enough grit, not enough down and not nearly enough dirty. The comedian Eddie Izzard has a wonderful sketch parodying the difficulty UK films have with portraying emotions and Brick Lane too suffers from that very British disease.

Nazeem's initial suffering and her consequent growth into independence and freedom are pleasantly, at times beautifully, shot but ultimately a wonderful story is blandly told. Nazeem's sister, who is of such importance to Nazeem's development in the book, is reduced to writer of letters from faraway Bangladesh. Had I not read the book I would have had serious problems to understand what her significance was. Her failure to live an independent life in a society that treats a woman as the possession of her husband and her consequent slipping into prostitution is barely touched upon and when it finally becomes clear what is happening it comes as a total surprise for the audience.

So was it worth it? If you haven't read the book before seeing the movie then be prepared for a whole new depth of storytelling when you do read it. If you've read the book already, like I had, I suspect that you'll leave the cinema feeling slightly empty.

Tags: Brick Lane, Monica Ali, London, movie reviews

Good news for our UK authors: All of the books published with the Spire Professional Package are now for sale from the Tesco website. This adds yet another sales channel and helps make your books available to the biggest audience possible.

Tags: Tesco, UK Authors

It was a dark and rainy Saturday afternoon in November 2002. At the time I lived in London, England, so nothing out of the ordinary so far. I was working on a Christmas present for my parents, designing and writing a cookbook, from recipes collected from my family. Suddenly I thought that it would be a really neat idea to actually publish the book, not just print and bind it. How hard could it be? So I went online and started researching. And researching. And researching. There were a handful of self publishing companies around but they weren't what I was looking for. Some were too expensive, some were too far away, some didn't offer features I wanted. The evening looked like it would end in frustration.

Then it hit me: Why not start a small publishing company myself. The name for the new venture, Publish and be damned, was decided upon, with the help of half a bottle of red, before bedtime.

The next I went to Companies House and registered a new publishing company, my own. I bought my first set of ISBN numbers later that week and then started looking for a printer. Many listened politely, then started talking about print runs and warehousing and numbers that made no sense whatsoever for me. All I wanted was to publish a book, not to own a warehouse full of paper. However, something else happened during that time. As word got around my circle of friends that I was trying to publish a book, several other authors and designers came forward and asked if, while I was at it, I could publish their books for them too. And after searching for weeks and weeks I finally found a printer who was willing to take my business, on terms that made sense to me.

Publish and be dammed went into overdrive. I joined forces with two partners and together we built a website, a manuscript submission page, a CMS and a bookstore. We all had day jobs but were working all the evening hours we could and we were having a lot of fun. After a year we had published nearly 100 books. What we hadn't done was make any money. In the words of our accountant at the time: "You haven't got a business, you've got a hobby."

Several things happened next. I moved on to live in Canada and my partners decided that they wanted to explore other opportunities. I then got introduced to somebody who had what I didn't have - business sense. That person had just sold a company and was looking for a new challenge. She took a good look at Publish and be damned, decided that it had promise and started to invest both time and money. And on the strength of that new partnership we've moved the company from being a hobby to being a business. The quality of our service went up. We added international distribution, colour printing, managed to lower our prices, increase the quality of our books and still, finally, make a profit. That was several years ago. Since then we've done a lot of growing up and this summer we decided that it was time that this was reflected in a name change.

Many authors had told us that they, while they loved the service, would have preferred a less flippant name. Especially in North America few people know about the Duke of Wellington and how he coined the phrase "Publish and be damned". As a result, Spire Publishing was born. And today we've switched off the servers for pabd.com and all traffic is being forwarded to Spire Publishing. It's the end of an exciting time, and the beginning of something new. Even lower prices, free author websites, more and better self publishing services for the independent author - we're all looking forward to the next five years and I hope you'll join us.

Tags: The king is dead, Long live the king

I just stumbled across an interesting Yahoo Group today. Here are the details:

This group focuses on book marketing, promotion, and publicity. In other words, How do authors go about finding readers and building their fan bases?

This is an international group of authors, publishers, editors, publicists and other involved in the book industry. Posts primarily deal with the final stages of book production and pre- and post-release marketing strategies. All questions relating to traditional, self-published print or ebooks are warmly encouraged.

Feel free to post tips, innovative promotions, new marketing avenues and, by all means, share your successes to inspire others. Please do not post excerpt texts, instead post a URL where your excerpt can be found.

Debate is a great thing provided we all remember that we're on the same side. Flaming is not allowed. We're all here to learn.

I just signed up for membership myself, so we might see each other over there.

Tags: Yahoo, Self publishing, Author Self help

Three authors who have just started using their free blogs are Steve Barton, Emma Carlton and Susan Wilson. Take a look, there's some good writing to be discovered.

Yes, it is that time of year again and royalty cheques are being sent out. And once more we can see the difference between self publishing authors who are actively marketing their books and those who don't - and it's in the size of their cheques. As many of you know, we are now giving away free author websites, with a personal domain registered and pre-loaded with an installation of WordPress, an easy to use blogging software, to help authors get a bigger readership for their books. We are now extending this offer to our existing authors. Just let us know you're interested and send an email to our support team. We'll get your domain registered and your site up and running in no time at all.

And yes, it's free. How about it?

PS: This is the last time royalties are being paid in September. From 2008 the pay dates are January and June.

Tags: Wordpress, blogging, Self publishing

I arrived home last night to an inbox that was, amongst other things, full of invitations to Quechup.com, a so called social networking site. Thing is, I don't really have any interest in yet another Facebook or LinkedIn clone site and so I declined the offer. Not wishing to appear rude I sent a quick note to the people inviting me, saying thanks, but no, thanks. Seems that was a good idea. This morning David St. Lawrence wrote back:

You are smarter than I was!

Do NOT follow up on that invitation. It is bogus and is the product of a spammer.

Here is the article I wrote about it yesterday:

SPAM WARNING - BEWARE OF QUECHUP
UPDATE: My inbox is full of email from people on my contact list who have received these bogus invitations from Quechup. I apologize for the inconvenience. See the story below:
The latest scam to hit the Internet is Quechup.com. 
They are generating spam that supposedly comes from your friends.
If you receive an email from me or anyone else inviting you to join Quechup, delete the email and DO NOT Sign UP.
I received an invitation supposedly from another blogger and while I was checking the site out, Quechup has mailed an invitation from me to everyone in my email address book, even though I expressly requested that they should not do so.
Quechup claims to be a "social network."
It is owned by iDate and is actually some sort of dating service. 
Don't go there and don't bother to check it out.
You will definitely regret it.

So, if you too have received multiple Quechup invites, don't bother following up, unless you're planning on spamming all of your contacts.

Tags: Quechup, Spam

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.

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.

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. 
   
3. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Hi XXXX

Thanks for sending us your book. Three things:

1. If you have already self published with lulu.com, and you have an ISBN number, then your book should be available to bookstores already. If not, then please consider upgrading your lulu.com account - I know that lulu offers the distribution services you require for a fee.

2. We are a self publishing company. That means that the author pays for the publishing services he or she needs. If you're unwilling to make this contribution then I suggest trying to find a traditional publisher who might be willing to publish your book for you. The first step in that direction would be to secure an agent who starts representing you to potential publishers - there is little reward in sending manuscripts unsolicited to publishers these days.

3. We are a publisher. That means that legally we can't just take a book you've published and pretend it is one of ours. If you wish to take advantage of our services then you need to re-publish your book with us.

4. Your book does not meet our formatting standards. Your book is justified left only, paragraphs are running together, the legal page is incomplete. The document formatting is incorrect for our books and there are potential problems with the fonts you've embedded. So even if point one to three would not apply we could not publish the book in it's current state.

Best regards, and best of luck,

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

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.

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.

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

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.