We have just lowered our author's prices for our North American customers, by up to $2.00 per book. This means higher profits for our authors and a lower cost of publishing your book.

Christmas is approaching fast and we have decided to all take a break and close our offices for a couple of days. We'll be shut from Friday the 21st of December 2007 to Tuesday the 1st of January 2008. See you all in the new year.

Amazon have released the Amazon Kindle, the first of what promises to become a long line of electronic reading devices. Personally I am of two minds. On the one hand I'd like to carry my entire library around with me in a device the size of a paperback book, but I also really like the look and feel of books. Especially a good hardback book just feels different from reading text on a screen. Right now the kindle comes with a black and white screen only which for me personally is an instant deal breaker. We'll be offering books formatted for the Kindle in the near future. In the meantime I don't think paper books will go away anytime soon. For starters, they work without batteries and that's worth an awful lot in itself.

We're currently testing out talking avatars on some of the pages on our site. They are supposed to give a quick audio overview of what the page is about. What do you think? Useful? Corny? Funny? Annoying? Let me know.

From today on our entire website is hosted on carbon neutral servers. Our web host has calculated the impact of everything that they use and leave behind in the course of their daily work. Without the option to put up solar panels or connect with a green power utility this means purchasing Renewable Energy Credits. Finally, to neutralize those unavoidable emissions, our host company has invested in Emission Reduction Credits which guarantee that the remaining impact is effectively erased.

Here at Spire Publishing we also do what we can to minimize our environmental footprint. Simple things like switching off the light when we leave an office, using both sides of a sheet of paper and recycling everything that's recyclable. Printing our books in the country they will be sold in reduces transport emissions and using email and video conferencing whenever possible reduces our need for travel. We are very aware of our environmental responsibilities and do our best to run our business in a sustainable way.

I know, I know. Every year Christmas seems to be coming earlier. My wife and I went to IKEA this last weekend (what were we thinking, IKEA on a Sunday) and all the Christmas stuff was already out. A couple of days after Halloween.

However, in our world of book publishing there's a real reason for posting this. Every year we get a rush in late November, with authors self publishing their book in time for Christmas. And every year there are some which we have to disappoint because they are simply too late. It takes us about four weeks to get a book into print and that assumes a flawless, proofed and formatted manuscript.

So please, if you have a book that you want published before the new year, do it soon, otherwise we won't be able to guarantee delivery in time for the holidays.

We're currently beta testing a forum where our authors can meet and exchange experiences and ideas. If you are interested in trying the software before the official launch please send me a quick email.

Happy Halloween to all our authors and readers. We had everything from a very small Dark Lord to a guy with no costume at all claiming to be a ninja turn up, demanding the annual sweets tribute.

To celebrate the occasion we're releasing a Halloween discount code. Submit your book before the 10th of November 2007, quoting code SPOOKS, and get $100.00/£50.00 off the Professional Publishing Package.

Refer other authors, friends and loved ones (even strangers) to Spire Publishing, and earn cold hard cash. You will get referral credit for anyone who publishes a book with us and uses your affiliate code when submitting their book.

Here's how it works:

• Refer an author to us who then publishes a book using the Spire Professional Service and receive $50.00/£25.00.
• Refer an author to us who then publishes a book using the Spire Essential Service and receive $30.00/£15.00.
• Refer an author to us who then publishes a book using the Spire Print Ready Service and receive $25.00/£12.50.

Want free books instead? Here's how:

• Refer an author to us who then publishes a book using the Spire Professional Service and receive 20 free copies of your own book.
• Refer an author to us who then publishes a book using the Spire Essential Service and receive 15 free copies of your own book.
• Refer an author to us who then publishes a book using the Spire Print Ready Service and receive 10 free copies of your own book.

You need to join the Spire Affiliate Program for this offer to take effect. Offer valid from September 27, 2007.

Writing a blog is one of the best ways for authors to get feedback about their book. You can test story lines, you can test characters, you can communicate with your intended audience. That's one of the reasons we give every author who publishes with Spire Publishing his or her own website and blog. But what if you're not yet ready to publish? What if you're still writing your book? What if you just want to make some of your writing public, with no intention of ever publishing it? Well, fear not, we have the solution.

We are offering every writer, regardless of whether he/she publishes a book with us, a free literary blog. The blogs are located at yourname.spireblogs.com and are powered by WordPress, an easy to use and highly reliable blogging platform. Send a mail to info@spirepublishing.com and we'll set everything up for you post haste.

We frequently publish a series of discount codes on this blog. All codes are public between 2 and 24 hours, then they are removed. Please take a note of the coupon code and when ready to publish enter it into the 'discount code' field in the 'Publish Now" page.

Too late - code removed

Keep an eye open for future discount codes.

Tags: Secret Discount Coupon

Thanks for your responses to the free author website offer - it's been overwhelmingly positive.
Just a reminder on how this offer works: Every new author who publishes with Spire Publishing will get his or her own website, complete with a unique web address (normally the title of the book published) and three to five email addresses. We recently extended that offer to authors who had published with us in the past. I am almost certain that we're on top of all of the installations, if you haven't received your domain details by now please let us know and we'll check your site for progress.

This offer is running until the end of September, so if you haven't responded yet you've got two weeks left.

The latest changes will be mostly invisible - at least we hope they will be because that's what is supposed to happen. We updated the design for this blog page, which is visible of course, but the remainder is mainly designed to make the site easier to find for search engines. If you find any glitches please let us know, especially if you're using Internet Explorer.

Tags: CSS

We're constantly walking an information tightrope when it comes to our website. On the one hand we want to make the traditional black art of book publishing as simple and transparent as we possibly can - on the other hand there really is a lot of information to read and digest.

The new front page should keep things as simple as possible. If you follow the four steps listed you'll be able to publish your book without ever reading another page of our site - you'll be missing out on a ton of interesting and useful (we hope) information, but you'll have your book in print. Let us know how you like it.

Tags: Information architecture

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.
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• 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.
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• 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.