Origin Story

Today, Green Hill is Australia’s trusted self-publishing company, but we didn’t get there overnight. We have seen a dozen or so ‘me-toos’ come and go over the years, some breezing in from North America, some from the UK, and plenty from Australia. All vanishing as fast as they come.

We’re here to stay, and this is just some of our story.

1. The story of Australia’s trusted self-publishing company

Green Hill as we know it today didn’t get here by accident, though its conception was quite spontaneous.

The chance meeting

In 2011, our Founder, David Walters, was working in a design agency when he ran into an old acquaintance in the building’s corridor. After exchanging pleasantries, David found this man was having a tough time. He’d been “put out to pasture”—encouraged to go into retirement. He was almost 80, but this had a devastating effect on his psyche. He wasn’t anywhere near ready and had underestimated how this change might impact him. 

He’d not long since been one of Australia’s most charismatic and powerful public speakers, in high-demand, and attracting crowds wherever he appeared. His presentations deeply impacted and helped thousands of people and there he was, feeling a little lost and profoundly unneeded. 

‘Come see what I’ve got in the boot of my car,’ he urged. It was a scruffy, hand-scrawled stack of paper—stories of his life and his philosophy. 

Remarkable. 

‘Let’s see if we can publish this.’ David responded. 

The book was a winner! The old acquaintance revived and started travelling the speakers’ circuit once again. At one talk, he sold 250 copies of his book. 

The backroom

From this, Green Hill was born, and as Ingram’s new Melbourne print plant fired up, we became one of their very first customers in Australia. Ingram’s new product offering was a revolutionary new concept—Print-on-Demand (POD).

The publishing industry in Australia changed forever. Publishing was democratised, essentially taken from the controlling hands of a self-interested and complex hierarchical publishing industry and put back in the hands of authors.

Emboldened, Green Hill set up two desks in a backroom. Gina was the designer and David handled the rest: book strategy, marketing, sales, print, and distribution. While there were two desks, there was only one chair. But that didn’t matter, because David had a day job and then worked nights—from 8pm – midnight—for Green Hill.

Two gleaming Mac computers joined the team as the struggling PC’s failed to cope. A second chair joined as well. One book led to two, and two led to five. In time, there were nine authors and a backlist of 15 titles.

At the beginning, it was low tech; The two PC computers weren’t networked, our project management systems was “The Wall” (a literal wall covered with Post-it-notes charting the progress of each project). It was organised chaos.

The Offices

First Office

In 2015, the team grew to three and we moved into our first office space. It was a broken-down, quaint, “Harry Potterish” building in the old Port area. Downstairs was a meeting area and a sink, while the upstairs housed our four tiny offices. In times past, it was a bank, then a shipping agent.

Hot in summer, freezing in winter, it was our public face. Our logo was on the window.

At first we loved it, then we grew to despise it—it wasn’t big enough, professional enough, or well maintained.

Along came Danilo, our IT expert. We started to automate and systematise our publishing capability. Authors started coming from all over but primarily from Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Lisa from Hobart became our senior editor, Irma our gun typesetter, Anita our first office manager, and Jenny our ‘author on-boarder’.

Second Office

After a downpour and a small flood, we had to move.

At the new building, we ended up occupying most of the top floor. There were radical changes in the wings; The Macs went first and back came the PCs—this time, powerful ones. Next, a local server was installed, and our analogue Kanban was digitised with an advanced workflow management software.

Jessica then walked in straight out of Uni. ‘Are there any jobs in publishing here? I can do almost anything!’

She quickly became our transformative General Manager.

Third (and current) Office

As our team grew, so too did our need for space. Enter: our third and current office.

We are now in 250 square-meters of office space. It’s a professional space with about 1km of fibre optic cable hooking all our IT together.

We are flying. Gina, is the Executive Director and David has is now in charge of print and business development. Our team has also evolved – all highly competent in their own fields of expertise – book design, printing and administration.

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2. Our products and services

Green Hill is Australia’s trusted self-publishing company offering a full range of publishing services. We offer a wide range of services, making the publishing of a book possible end-to-end, from start to finish, or as we like to put it, from mind to market.

Our production system

We assign a team to your project and track that project daily to make sure everything promised is delivered.

We have an efficient project management system where every communication (e.g. email communications) are documented for future reference. We don’t write messages on Post-it-notes or scraps of paper.

Agile is expensive and slow, Waterfall is rapid and cost effective.

If required, every author has access to their own online communications portal where all the information critical to the book publishing project is collated and displayed, including past communications, contracts, deadlines, costs, and project progress.

Just try to find your true book project’s status if you are working with a North American company (US or Canadian) who use offshore call centres to field enquiries. You won’t be able to.

More about project management for self-publishing book production can be accessed here: Self-publishing book project management

Our products and services include:

• Indexing – options of human indexers and embedding technologies
• Interior book design and typesetting
• Library distribution
• Marketing collateral (including graphic identities and print products)
• Marketing advisory and execution
• Non book-trade distribution
• Print (including digital and offset, in Australia and abroad). We are Ingram, Amazon and Author Freely POD printing services specialists. Childrens book board printing – small run (just 500 copies minimum)
• Book publishing project management
• Public relations
• Publishing company services – publication workflow automation—Microsoft and XML based systems
• Rights management and trade fair representation
• Social media advisory including Goodreads
• Traditional bookshop distribution (book-trade)
• White-labelled services to the self-publishing, hybrid, and traditional publishing industries, including branded author portals

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