New Melrose Books website to be launched soon!!!

Adapting to the constant changes taking place in the publishing industry represents unique challenges for us all. Smaller publishers must  adapt and evolve to keep up with ever changing technology whilst continuing to provide a high quality service for our  increasing catalogue of authors.

Our completely new website to be launched shortly will provide details of all our latest titles together with our complete back catalogue of books and can all be  purchased online. Other new features will include latest news, coming soon and review sections and an authors section. Watch this space!

Promoting My Book 101: Think Ahead

If you’re a writer, you need to have a plan for how you want to be involved in the marketing and promotion of your book. This process should begin as soon as possible.

Melrose Books authors are advised to begin the process about six months prior to publication, sometimes earlier. Here’s why.

1. The idea of promoting your book, and yourself (something for another day), prior to publication is to gather an audience. This audience will be a foundation for sales. Larger audiences mean higher sales potential.

2. Lead time is important. It allows you time to build relationships, become involved in and engage with your market. It also allows you to build trust. Introducing a product the moment you meet someone is too much of a hard sell in today’s market, so you need to engage them first.

3. It takes the pressure off of you. Instead of rushing to get attention the week that your book arrives, you have time to coordinate meetings, events, interviews, reviews; it grants you flexibility; it allows you to build some kind of anticipation. And it makes you look professional.

Ask yourself some questions and do some research. Who are you writing for? What kind of person, or what group of people, will be the most interested? Where and how can you reach them? How does your competition profile with costs and covers? How is your book unique?

Create a list; it can be a life saver. Draw out your timeline: publication date, cover completion date, press notification dates, galley proof/review copy dates, blog posts, etc.

Think about what your online strategy will be. Are you prolific enough to be a blogger, or would a Facebook Fan Page be more appropriate? Do you have a sufficient focus to make Twitter worth your efforts? Perhaps having a webpage is sufficient? You don’t need to do everything, but to grab the largest potential audience you do need to be involved online…with a plan.

Just as important as timelines, your plan needs to have some kind of a budget and an understanding of how much time you will have to commit to marketing and promotion. If you have three hours every Saturday, that will dictate what you can and should do compared to if you have an hour available every day of the week.

Take responsibility, be patient, and think ahead.

Melrose Books wants you to design a book cover!

There is nothing that can attract a reader to a book like the cover. One glance at the colours and texture, the composition, the use of light and shadow, the style of a cover design and you know exactly what kind of read you’re in for.

And now, you have an opportunity to make that initial impact by designing a cover for one of our upcoming titles!

In the spring of 2012 Melrose Books is publishing Kit Cope Rides the High Country, a novel which sets out to single-handedly restore the Western genre. Written with a great deal of verve and vigour, fashioned with great affection and respect for the genre, author Alan Eltron Barrell’s manuscript bristles with intensity and authenticity. He’s looking for the same kind of energy and vision in a cover design.

Our artists’ call-to-arms is to your left, but more details on this unique opportunity after the jump.

Author Q&A: Charles Albert Booth on the Lockerbie Bombing of 1988

Charles Albert Booth has authored the definitive work on the Lockerbie Bombing of 1988. Confronted daily with the developments of the investigation, The Truth Never Dies is a comprehensive and eyewitness account of the events and their aftermath which examines the evidence and investigating its validity. Charles was the manager of the largest hotel in Lockerbie at the time of the event.

The Truth Never Dies is an in-depth and carefully researched memoir and critical study of the Lockerbie Bombing of 1988. To make sure we’re all up to speed, can you summarise the events on which you base your critical study?

To summarise the events on which I base my  critical study of the Lockerbie Air Disaster, naturally I must start by illustrating the vast loss of life caused by the disaster, and the suffering caused to so many, including the local community of Lockerbie. In summary, I do this by examining the following.

Six Questions with John Kinghorn, author of Beyond the HST

This year, we’ve begun a series of author Q&As, designed to give our authors an opportunity to speak on their new book in a way that will engage as opposed to simply spitting out a sales pitch. As we ramp up to a new set of Q&As in the near future, this week we’ll be running a few from earlier in the year. This book is the result of many years of study, as well as John’s background in electronic stystems engineering. Enjoy!

Beyond the HST deals with the future prospects of High Speed Trains in Britain, touching on critical points which are currently being discussed by the government and in the media–making this is a good time for the book to be released.  Did you see this shift in the rail network coming, or is this a bit of serendipitous timing?

How a smaller publisher adapts to an ever-changing industry: e-books

Adapting to the ever-changing landscape of the publishing industry represents some unique challenges for every publisher. Larger publishers have the challenge of having to lead the winds of change, but they have an advantage of having more manpower to throw into issues of research, cost analysis, design, development, implementation, etc.

For a smaller publisher such as ourselves, we still need to adapt to our brave, new world, but resources are limited. Our biggest challenges were in terms of overheads and man-power.

Electronic publishing has been around for a fair amount of time. Adobe’s PDF was one of the most popular formats to view on computer and that’s been around seemingly forever, but major publishers took real notice of e-books around the turn of the millennium. Once Sony, Amazon and Apple got involved, the market for e-books exploded with the proliferation of platforms dedicated to hosting that very product.

Last year, when I initially introduced the idea to Melrose Books, we had a few quandaries we had to deal with.

1. Because we allow all of our authors to retain not just copyright but all subsidiary rights to their work, we couldn’t begin converting our back catalogue because those subsidiary rights included electronic publishing rights and digital rights management. How would we approach our past authors about signing over their electronic publishing rights/DRM?
2. Keeping in mind that we need to limit overhead without sacrificing quality, which platform (or platforms) would we use to host our e-books? Parties like Amazon and Apple, or would we sell internally?
3. Would we outsource conversion, or would we do it in-house? If done in-house, how do we do it, and which file types will we need for our selected platform of choice?
4. This is just the tip of the iceberg, really…we knew there would be even more questions once we ran into obstacles and the further we got into the process.

How we answered our questions, after the jump…

Author’s Evenings at Clare Cottage with Melrose Books

Bernard Lockett speaks on the music and influence of Gilbert and Sullivan

On the third Wednesday evening of every month, Melrose Books and Clare Cottage team up to provide an Author’s Evening. It’s a unique opportunity to meet with an author in an intimate environment, engage with them on their topic of expertise, hear about their experiences as an author and have a drink and a nibble to boot.

Bernard Lockett, this month’s host of Clare Cottage’s Author’s Evening, is a three-time author (with a fourth on the way) and is no stranger to public appearances. On Wednesday he’ll be talking about the music of composers Gilbert and Sullivan, the forerunners of today’s musical theatre. Leonard Bernstein has said that they were his greatest influence in writing West Side Story, and Rogers and Hammerstein have said that their shows were based on the pair.

‘What we have in Gilbert and Sullivan is musical theatre at its very best with large choruses, splendid individual songs, comedy, dances, and often more soulful moments too,’ Bernard says. Brought up on Gilbert and Sullivan, his own parents had been to many of the original first nights in the 1870s and 1880s. ‘I just like the fun, the music, the comedy and equally the pathos all to make a marvellous theatrical evening.’

The presentation kicks off at seven, so if you’re in the Peterborough or Stamford/Helpston area tomorrow, join us for what should be an entertaining and informative evening. Bernard is a Trustee of the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, and his third book, Here’s a State of Things, lovingly captures the mood of the 19th century in addition to serving as a fitting tribute to the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, and to the original D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. Here’s a State of Things is also available through Kindle.

Clare Cottage is operated by The John Clare Trust, and while being the birth and family home of poet John Clare and now something of a museum, the site has also been developed into a cultural, educational and environmental hub suitable for visits by any age group. Visit the website for a great deal more information on this historical and educational multi-purpose venue.

Upcoming events for Melrose Books authors

Bernard, right, speaks with another Melrose Books author at the marketing seminar on 10/05/2011

A quick breakdown of a few events we have coming up in the next couple of weeks, for anyone looking to get out and enjoy the beautiful spring weather.

Saturday 13 May 2011 - Former Essex police officer and current Essex storyteller Mike Benning will be signing books at Waterstone’s in Bury St. Edmunds, the Butter Market location, from 11am. His book, Island Joggings, is an amusing series of anecdotes inspired from a trip to the Caribbean. You can read more about his book at our website, or you can check out our blog post regarding his recent publicity. Ask him to tell you about the rum cake.

Wednesday 18 May 2011 - Bernard Lockett will be the special guest at Clare Cottage for their monthly Author’s Evening. Bernard, who has appeared on numerous programmes with the BBC and spoken with groups such as U3A, WI and others, will be speaking on one of his favourite subjects in the history of the universe: the music of Gilbert and Sullivan. As a Trustee of the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, his presentation is a comprehensive, informative and entertaining look at the history and music of the two men, and the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. It is all tied into his third book, Here’s a State of Things, and naturally involves music.

Tuesday 24 May 2011 - Nicci Pugh, author of the nursing memoir on The Falklands War White Ship – Red Crosses, will be speaking to the U3A in Truro, Cornwall. Nicci’s presentation, titled A British Hospital Ship at War, is an informative and fascinating look at life on board a floating hospital working in the South Atlantic Ocean during the war. Including many original and previously unseen photographs, Nicci covers the conversion of Her Majesty’s Hospital Ship Uganda from an ocean cruise liner to a hospital ship, and she also discusses the work of The South Atlantic Medal Association.

For information on these or any other events from authors of Melrose Books, get in touch with us at any time.

Promoting My Book 101: Be a professional

“It takes a lifetime to build a reputation, and just a few moments to ruin it.”

Criticism goes hand-in-hand with being a published author. And if you are a published author, then you know perfectly well that it’s not all constructive criticism. Inevitably someone will come along whose review (for example) is scathing, apparently for no other reason than to simply be scathing and to tear down everything you have worked so long and hard to build.

More after the jump…

Travis Little, Brendan McCann to launch books this weekend

Something we encourage our authors to think about in the leadup to publication is a book launch. A lot of times this will be at a local bookseller or at a community venue, but I also like to get our authors to think outside the box. A couple of years ago, for example, we had Adam Shaw launch So, Your Girlfriend’s a Vegetarian? at Tibits in London…a vegetarian restaurant.

With the launch of Travis Little’s Entangled and Brendan McCann’s From Belfast to Hong Kong, both authors are doing something a bit different. Little is holding his launch at As You Like It, a trendy eating house/bar/terrace that features “3 sprawling floors, 4 stunning bars, an elegant terrace” and more. McCann, meanwhile, will be giving his audience a performance in Ireland; singing, dancing, a bit of bagpipe and, more likely than any of the other three combined, Brendan telling an anecdote or twelve.

Congratulations to both authors from all of us at Melrose Books! Enjoy your launches!