It’s been one of those weeks! Up to my eyeballs in planning for the remainder of the year, plotting strategies for books to be published, marketing, updates to websites, a million and one pieces of paperwork… I’ve been fuelled by coffee and choccie biccies and running on broken sleep as Tango, our resident scamp of a cat keeps deciding he needs to go outside for the loo at 3am and will not shut up until we let him out!
Delays to our book deliveries from the printer has been a cause for much nail biting and strongly worded emails. I know these things happen, but when you have copies to send out to authors, legal Deposit and various reviewers etc, constant excuses just don’t cut it. It unfortunately means that after singing the praises of our printing company for so long, we may have to look elsewhere again. The problem with our current company is that they’ve turned to being a one stop shop for authors (which is great an’ all) as they try (I assume) to compete with the likes on Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. But instead of creating something different for publishers and authors, they’ve pretty much built the same thing as their competitors, which helps no one and especially alienates the professionals like us who need very different options in terms of wholsesale and sales reporting to a self-published author as we have retailers and their discounts, overseas sales and royalties for various authors to worry about. It’s a shame as they had the potential to really make a difference in the industry and they have great green credentials, but instead of working on making their wholesale stronger etc, they gone the other way. Ah well, on wards and upwards!
Did you have snow this week? We’ve had it all in the form of snow, sleet, and now endless rain, although it was lovely to see it snow on my birthday (yes, I am a huge kid!).
It was also lovely to see we’ve been nominated for the British Dyslexia Association Annual Awards 2023 for our innovation in creating our dyslexic-friendly books. It’s really appreciated that people think we’re making a difference. When we started Scorpius Books, no one was creating books for adults with dyslexia and the majority of the publishing industry seemed to dismiss it as ‘well, there’s ebooks and audiobooks’, completely ignoring those people who want to pick up a paperback just like everyone else. So we decided to be the first publisher in the UK to do so, and the feedback we’ve received since has been amazing and really inspiring to know we’ve helped people find a love of reading when the rest of the industry clearly didn’t count them as worthy readers. If we can help someone with dyslexia find that joy of walking into a bookshop and finding something just for them, then we’ve done our job well.
