Book publishing in Adelaide
Providing a quality book publishing service for Adelaide’s and South Australia’s self-published and indie authors
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Publishing a book can be complex. If you are an Adelaide author or within a reasonable distance of Adelaide, you have the opportunity to visit our studio/office to find out everything you need to know about successfully publishing your book.
With our national head office in Port Adelaide, we’ve helped thousands of authors across Australia and hundreds of South Aussies take their book from mind to market. Just make an appointment and drop in for a free consultation.
From Victor Harbor to Virginia, Burnside to Barmera and Croydon to the Coonawarra, we have authors who have published with us from all over South Australia.
Possibly the worst thing you can do is to start your publishing journey by spending countless hours trawling through internet sites. Often authors enrol in expensive US-based “how to publish your book” online courses that leave them more confused than before.
Authors can be lured into any one of the hundreds of scam companies based in the US, Canada, and the UK, or even foreign companies posing as being Australian based.
Despite all the effort, authors end up with a sub-standard books – books that don’t do justice to their well crafted content.
Collectively, the staff of Adelaide’s Green Hill has have over 100 years of book publishing experience. We’ve seen it all, from books that fail to books that have gone on to be amazing success stories.
Great books are a combination of great content, great design and great print and Green Hill Adelaide can make successful publishing happen.
Your Content is Critical
Producing your book’s content is the cornerstone for publishing success.
Book concept
Your book concept is critical – what is the book about, how will it be rendered and presented, and why will someone be interested?
As an author you need to “conceive” your book. Conception is often used to describe becoming pregnant. This is where you are able to form or give shape to an idea in your mind, like becoming pregnant with a child. Successful authors have an idea, and incubate or develop that idea in their mind’s eye.
Here’s an example: An author has an idea for an environmental book. She narrows this down to sustainability in an urban setting – sustainability in a standard house block in a suburb of a big city. The author takes this one step further – it’s a book about living on a quarter acre block and developing a garden for food. There’s more – how does keeping chickens help with this? Chicken eggs are a source of protein and fertiliser for growing fruit and vegetables. This book is how keeping chickens can help you become independent and environmentally sustainable.
The author sees this as a self-help book with practical advice, diagrams, checklists and photography. Visually the book is image rich. There’s a lot of detail and the pages vary in layout, a little like a magazine.
The diagrams explain things visually – a plan for a chicken run, a pie diagram showing what to feed chickens and in what proportion, and suburban maps showing how someone can develop a network of like-minded people – swap eggs with someone down the road for fruit or firewood or swap eggs for baked goods two streets away.
The book concept determines what words and images (and in what proportion) they are needed. It should make the book desirable to buyers and readers, building interest and compelling them to acquire it.
The content
Content comes in two major formats: text and images. The text and images go a long way to putting together a book that is useful and desirable.
Text must be well written and images (including diagrams and photography) well thought through, clear and adding value to the text. Often a good image or diagram is “worth a thousand words”.
If the book is a novel it might be 100% text. If its a self-help book, images will be important in informing the reader.
Editing
Does your book need another set of eyes?
Often authors are so close to the content it may be impossible for the writer to critically review what they have written. It probably goes without saying, editing is a crucial component of a successful book. But more often than not, most first time authors really don’t understand the importance of editing.
Complicating the matter is that there are many types of editing.
Here are some important links that will help you understand editing.
Design the book
Design is a critical part of the publishing process. Good design will trump fancy print. However it’s clear that a print embellishment here and there can also make a real difference, along with the right choice of paper.
Are graphic designers book designers? No, but they can be. Are book designers graphic designers? Yes, always. They have graphic design skills and add an understanding of the nuances and challenges of book design. A good book designer will be able to recommend papers and treatments along with ink and binding options. In actuality, these are creative components of the book, influencing the look and feel of the final product.
Start the design process by briefing the book designer. This entails instructing the designer of your needs and parameters. Knowing the limitations of the print budget is important information.
Often good design is achieved through ‘open brief’ instructions to the designer that are quite broad. The last thing you want to do is to be heavily prescriptive; so prescriptive that the book designers aesthetic sensibility or creative prowess is curtailed.
Here are some important links that will help you understand book design.
Print your book
When everything is ready, you can opt to do it yourself by working directly with the printer or passing the responsibility to a print arranger like Green Hill partner company Fox Merit. You can print in Adelaide or look for just the right printer that will print to your specifications and price interstate or in Asia.
Here’s some useful links to help understand book printing:
Need quick advice about publishing your book?
It's free, It's jampacked with practical advice. It's written for Australian authors who want to cut through the hype and clutter.
A quick read of just 8,000 words, The Little Book of Publishing Tips will equip aspiring self-publishers, or indie authors, with the essential knowledge they need to successfully publish a book.
This little book outlines the business and financial side of publishing, the legal issues to navigate, tips on writing and editing, how to handle the design process and marketing and selling of your book. There' even a section on how to identify a vanity-publishing scam.
To get your free copy email us at
support@greenhillpublishing.com.au
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