An Invitation to Join an Exciting New Publishing (Ad)Venture

I'm part of an exciting new publishing initiative, open to anyone to join, which aims to multiply the opportunities for authors by grouping together publishing and marketing services to help writers reach a higher profile more cost-effectively.

The need for a new approach to publishing by authors

New technology is transforming publishing, due to the spread of print-on-demand and the ebook revolution, matched to social media and the plethora of channels and platforms through which creative content can be delivered.

As a result, self-publishing is now not only attractive but desirable. Such books accounted for more than 20% of crime, science fiction, romance and humour ebooks sold in the UK in 2012, according to Bowker, a trend that will undoubtedly be shown to have continued in 2013 once the figures are out.

Publishing models are changing too. Nielsen BookData says ebooks will overtake paperback sales in 2014. Many companies have sprung up to make it easier for authors to publish their own work, offering print-on-demand and ebook services. Mainstream publishers such as Faber and Penguin have also bought up one or two of these companies and added such services to their traditional ones, revealing that they realise this is the future.

Authors consequently have more power and more choice, but some companies are charging over the odds for their services. It can be bewildering deciding who to choose as your publishing services partner.

You want value for money and an efficient service. And, since marketing - especially social marketing - is such a huge part of the publishing process, then choosing a company that understands and succeeds in this area is essential. Making sure you stand out is the central challenge.

But what if a publishing service included you as part of its strengths?

That's part of the concept behind an exciting new not-for-profit publishing co-operative venture I've helped to form. Launching this month, it's called Cambria Publishing Co-op.

It places itself squarely in the new publishing model. The main idea is that anyone, wherever they live, can join and receive discounts on services offered by other members as part of the benefits.

Because it's not-for-profit and a legally registered co-operative, it helps to ensure that members don't get ripped off.

In this game there is strength in numbers. So, the more trade service providers and authors band together, then the higher the collective profile they will achieve.

Cambria Publishing is collaborating and partnering with academic institutions and other agencies to provide a ‘scale’ of operations not achievable by smaller individuals and businesses operating alone - a ‘community’ of like-minded people with complementary skills.

I myself have run a publishing concern as well as being an author, a commissioning editor and book and book cover designer. My other partners have between them a similar level of experience in other areas of modern publishing from print magazine, books and eBooks, to creating websites, blogs, video channels and social media.

Founding members

They include Cambria Books, which has a thriving list of titles aimed at commercial and specialised markets, and Cambria Magazine, a long-standing, independent and well-respected cultural title with 80,000 subscribers around the world.

Cambria Books publishes books for older children up to adults, fiction, poetry and non-fiction, and welcomes submissions. Existing books for teens include Bel Roberts' Surfing Through Minefields and my own Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect (for both of which yours truly designed the covers).


Although both companies are based in Wales, as is the head office (at the University of Wales, Trinity St David's), membership of the Co-op is open to anyone, anywhere. The whole point of the publishing revolution is that it transcends geographical boundaries.

Besides the magazine, we are partnering with Denis Campbell's UK Progressive and Americymru, who both have large audiences in the USA and make copious use of social media, to promote our authors and services, with YouTube video interviews with authors.

Who can join?

Membership is open to all creatives such as writers, authors, artists and those that publish content and make use of the trade skills and services that make this possible.

Examples of trade members include: book and book cover designers, artists, illustrators, marketeers, publicists, social media marketing service specialists (Vine, FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube etc.), readers, proofreaders, editors, publishers, printers and any others who provide services that enable a publishing business to function effectively.

Why join?

Members of the co-op will receive discounted services. Entry membership costs just £10 for which you get:

• a newsletter;
• discounts on published books and freebies;
• invitations and free entry to events/launches.

Other membership levels (Trade, etc.) and benefits are listed here.

We hope you will join us! Click here to find out more. If you have any enquiries, email my partner Chris Jones.

If you know of anyone who might be interested, pass it on!

We are becoming hybrids part 2

[continuing last week's train of thought]

The whole trend [of endlessly replacing consumer technology with newer versions] is driven by business and 'lust for the new' which we have been conditioned into.

If I can take you back to where it started - end of World War I. Soldiers back from the war, here and in the US. After the rebuild, most households had the basic necessities, and manufacturers were worried that they would go out of business as their markets dried up.

At this point, a nephew of Sigmund Freud began using Freuds's ideas about the unconscious to design advertising campaigns that made people believe for the first time that it was not enough just to have a washing machine, but that the washing machine had to be aligned to their sense of self-image.

It was he who made it ok for women to smoke, for example, by photographing some glamorous women smoking at the end of a Women's Emancipation march in New York in the early '20s. This associated in women's minds freedom with smoking. Of course smoking is addictive so they weren't being freed at all. Glamour is a smokescreen for sordid reality. This is what my short story, Perfection, posted last year here, was about.

Fashion is the supreme example of this. It's not enough to wear clothes, but the clothes must say everything about you and you don't want to seem out of date and you have to look cool. Fashion has existed for much longer, but the concept was in the 20th century systematically applied to other products.

Manufacturers love this as it means that markets will never dry up as long as people remain insecure... and their advertising makes sure that they do remain insecure.

Innovation is the other side of this. You have to buy the latest phone and computer after a few years because your old one, even if it works perfectly, will no longer be compatible with everyone else's. Some analogue products work better or are more appropriate than their digital counterparts (watches, radios), but the strong current towards convergence is sweeping them or has swept them all aside.

So the waste mountains pile up, and we ae actually running out of the natural elements which are used in these products. Last week's New Scientist looked at all these metals - such as iridium, galiium, etc, - and found that most will run out in our lifetime. Perhaps human ingenuity will come up with something to replace them, but it does demonstrate graphically that the corporate-driven growth and pace of change is - to use that over-used and tired word - unsustainable. It has severe limits.

We don't like limits. We like freedom. But we rush headlong into a tangle of self-delusory madness and the very opposite of freedom, because we don't realise how, by imagining that we can buy freedom with every new product, we are actually increasing our dependency on ties that will really constrain us.

One constraint I am concerned with is this human-hybrid tie-in with technology. We are/will be unable to function without it. And how many of us understand it? - forced to use (as in your case Sharon) - or even hypnotised by (as in your friend) - the glitter; uncomprehending (if I can say so without sounding patronising) of the specialists who invented and designed it - who seem almost a different breed of human.

'Consumers' cruise the shopping malls of the developed world on their days off, looking for the next fix, using text messages to alert their friends. Elsewhere, one billion people in the world live in slums and own next to nothing.

We are in the last days. I'm sorry, I never wanted to be a doomsayer.