Publishing

• Sourcing exceptional editorial content
• Engaging design
• Image sourcing
• Social media promotion
• Print
• Distribution via Royal Mail

• Brochures, magazines and programmes
• Leaflets and inserts
• Adverts
• Banners
• Books – biographies, novels, poetry, novels etc
• Illustrated books – photo books

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

So goes what is considered a cliché for a badly written, overly melodramatic piece of prose. It was actually a real opening line, written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1830 novel ‘Paul Clifford’, and was much later used by Charles M. Schulz in the popular comic strip Peanuts, with the aspiring author Snoopy often portrayed typing ‘a dark and stormy night’.

Not all aspiring authors are this bad. In fact, most of them are very much better. But getting your book in print is a tricky business. The original way was to write a book, or at least part of one, and then send it on to a literary agent or directly to a publisher, although many publishers won’t accept manuscripts directly from writers. The agent would then try to find the right publisher for you. But even that isn’t easy. Famously, JK Rowling’s agent had the manuscript for Harry Potter rejected by 12 publishers before it was picked up by a fairly small publishing house called Bloomsbury.

Now of course there are several avenues for self-publishing and there are many companies that will offer different services, depending upon what you want. Most will charge you a fee to produce your book, allocate an ISBN (an International Standard Book Number enables you to sell the book commercially) and make it available to buy via print-on-demand or Kindle/e-book though Amazon and other book wholesalers for a year or more. You will usually get a few copies yourself, with the option to print-on-demand more copies should you wish and the typical fee is around £750.

If you have your book in a print-ready format, you can use Amazon’s own Kindle Direct Publishing service whereby you can upload your manuscript and cover for free and then go on to sell your book via Kindle or hardcopies on a print-on-demand basis. You choose the price (which you can change at any time) and then Amazon will give you up to 70% royalties on all copies sold.

But what if your manuscript is not in a print-ready format? What if you only want to print a few copies for friends and family?
This is where we can come in. Vantage Publishing is here to help you create your book at any size. We can typeset and layout the book, insert images, design a front and back cover and offer an ISBN and barcode should you want one. We will send you proofs at all stages for amendment until final approval. For this service, we charge a fee starting from just £150 plus VAT.

We can also then print copies of the book for you, with prices dependent upon the size of the book, the format (paperback, hardback), the quality of the paper and the cover and the quantity required, which can be from 5 copies upwards.

Since we started this service in 2019, we have created over a dozen books, including a cookery book, a children’s picture story and several autobiographies. If this service is of interest to you, please get in touch with us now!

Call Stefan Reynolds on 01483 416601 or email stefan@vantagepublishing.co.uk