I’ve written an article explaining the difference between the two choices faced by all new authors. Have a good read through, as your choice impacts both who you approach as well as how you should approach them too.

The difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing.

Most of the authors we’ve helped never met us face to face. Is that strange? Most of our publishing business is conducted remotely through a mixture of calls, email and WhatsApp.

For those authors who are understandably weary of paying money to a business without first shaking hands, I offer the following comfort:

• We are paying members of PASA (Publishers Association of South Africa.)
• Find a host of happy authors testimonials on our website here.
• Hear from our Facebook author community.
• An author NDA is available to download for those of you who always use protection.

We want you to be happy. A happy author makes for a fun publishing process.

That said, it would be silly of us to guarantee success or book sales for any author we help. Whilst we promise to try and make your publishing experience as enjoyable as possible – we can’t promise you will be able to retire on royalties from your first book. Even covering the costs of the publishing process for your first book can be a very slow process.

The authors who enjoy our help the most are those that have done their homework before starting. We encourage all authors who want to partner with us to first spend some time exploring our website to better understand how self-publishing works. This helps ensure there are no nasty surprises.

If for some reason, you are not enjoying the publishing process – please let us know right away. Your feedback means we can potentially correct your book process.

Many first-time authors lack confidence and simply need encouragement. Don’t worry, we’ll not turn you away. The team and I commit to helping you publish your book, no matter your writing style or experience. We don’t believe in turning serious authors away. Worst case we might recommend quoting you on a thorough edit before we proceed to publishing 😉

What we need: ✔

• You have finished writing the draft of your manuscript.
• Manuscripts written in Microsoft Word format are preferred to PDF files. Although PDF may be possible to work with, it increases the time needed to publish, and your corresponding quote.
• We would need to see your entire draft manuscript. Sharing a sample OR a summary is not enough for us to accurately confirm your publishing costs.
• We prefer to have your manuscript as a single, combined Word document. Avoid sending separate files for each chapter of your book. This makes us grumpy and will result in extra charges to cover the coffee needed.

What we can’t work with: 🚩

• We also can’t accept any manuscripts written in ancient or obscure software apps that are unable to export to a common format such as Word. I’m looking at you, Corel Draw.
• We can’t accept manuscripts that are handwritten.
• Physical books or printouts won’t be sufficient for us to quote you. We need you to share your writing with us over email. Every now and again someone will visit our offices holding a collection of papers…😭

This article was written specially for the author who is about to publish their first book.

For new authors, ready to publish, the best way to get in touch is by submitting our website contact form (found here.) Our specially shaped submission form prompts you for the exact information needed to give you the best book help possible. Note, for accurate quotes I will need to see your draft manuscript in Word format.

For anyone else, drop us an email to 

As seen on our website, we offer an author every step needed to produce, polish and then publish a professional book. Here are the most common self-publishing steps we can help you through. 

• Author (business & marketing) coaching sessions, in person or online.
• Editing of your words
• Crafting a sales blurb for your book
• Unique illustrations for your book cover or interior
• Cover designs for both eBook & print. (Cover portfolio.)
• Getting your interior ready to be printed (aka typesetting)
• Creating a compatible eBook format (aka eBook conversion)
• Publishing your eBook to Amazon and other leading online platforms
• Publishing of your paperback to Amazon’s print on demand platform
• Author website design. (Website design portfolio.)
• Publishing an existing audiobook into various online platforms, including Amazon’s Audible.

Why yes, yes we do. For those authors needing a complete guided book publishing process from beginning to end, we offer speciality publishing packages.

1. The Warrior | Our eBook only package
2. The Wizard | Our paperback only package
3. The Spellsword | Our combined eBook and paperback package
4. The Juggernaut | Our top package including all the steps from the Spellsword together with an author website and author coaching.

Absolutely. No pressure if you only need a single step such as editing or perhaps an author website.

No. I found there were too many variables to safely include the editing cost in our upfront package prices. For example, how long is your book? What level is your writing, do you need a light edit or proofread OR if English is a second or third language, perhaps a heavier edit is needed?

For this reason, editing is quoted for separately, and only once we have seen your draft manuscript.

No. We do however help an author get everything ready that the book printer will need. The printing process is not our area of expertise. We’ll gladly refer you to a trusted printing partner, depending on where in the world you live.

Absolutely. Over the last decade I helped more than 460 authors. For those of you wanting to benefit from this wealth of publishing experience, I will be happy to share a cup of coffee. Let me know exactly what your objectives and book-needs are, and I can quote you on our first consultation.

We work from Cape Town, South Africa. Our offices are located within the CBD.

We primarily work online, in the clouds. This means it doesn’t matter if you live in South Africa or the United Kingdom, we’ll still promise you the same five ⭐ publishing service.

We’re available during standard business hours. Messages, emails or phone calls made outside of reasonable business hours will be answered the following working day. Our publishing team need their beauty-sleep. (Some more than others.)

As much as we’d love to meet every author that contacts us – this would mean several meetings every day! Most of our communication will be conducted through a mixture of emails, phone calls and the occasional carrier pigeon. Face to face meetings are only arranged on request and may need to first be quoted for. Please don’t just turn up unannounced at our office door! it frightens us 😭

There are numerous options for a new author to find, convince and convert new leads into readers. Every book is different, and every author has different needs. Most marketing advice begins within a paid-for consultation between the author and I. We do strongly lean towards a digital/ leveraged approached to marketing, where results are easier to measure. For this reason, any author with big plans for their book would be smart to start by staking their claim online with a simple book/ author website to promote themselves and their new book.

For more old-school marketing activities such as television and radio interviews I will gladly refer you to well-connected book publicists.

Yes, find our website design services for authors over here.

Our author websites are both simple and easy to understand for the author looking to explode online exposure. We design all our websites to be responsive and mobile-friendly, using the popular WordPress platform. This means that the author looking to make their own changes and updates to the website will benefit from a wealth of online tutorials, if needed.

Our WordPress author websites are by default designed with the Divi Theme. If you needed us to use something different, please just ask.

Short answer is, no.

The long answer? Would you really want to be in a bookshop? The royalties earned from appearing in your local bookshop are often peanuts, whereas self-publishing online within a store such as Amazon can pay the author up to 70% of your book’s list price. (Yeah, we are a tad biased here.)

No. We don’t have the recording studio or access to professional voice over artists needed to craft an audiobook. We can however refer you to the right people. Drop us a message and we will point you in the right direction to record your audiobook.

Once you have the recorded audiobook ready, we CAN help distribute your audiobook online into the leading international retailers.

Why, I thought you would never ask 🙂

Let’s chat about how we can help you publish your paperback on Amazon’s print-on-demand platform. Once-off setup costs with no reoccurring bills. As new orders are received by Amazon, they are funded fully be the reader.

Great question! (Seriously…)

The easiest way for us to share a discount is by allowing us to help you more. The more self-publishing steps we guide you through, the easier it becomes for us to absorb any potential discount.

Another option for attracting discount would be if we were able to help you publish more than one book. If – for example – we were helping publish your 2^nd book it would mean that we would be able to reduce the overall cost of the publishing process for that second title.

More advice for authors looking to lower the cost of publishing a book.

Here is how I would recommend you save on editing costs. This also helps you ensure a more enjoyable editing experience.

1. Work only begins after receiving a minimum of a 60% deposit of the total amount quoted.
2. For payments less than ZAR 4500 ($300) we insist on receiving full-payment, upfront. Chasing small, outstanding invoices from a customer is a kak way to spend our day 🙁

See our full terms of business? 

We accept the following forms of payment:

• EFT. Our bank details can be found at the bottom of all our quotes.
• Credit Card. A small surcharge may be levied to cater for additional fees.
• PayPal. This payment method also adds a 5% surcharge to cater for additional bank fees.
• International Wire Transfers/ Swift transfers. This method will also attract a surcharge to cater for any associated bank fees.

Cheques or (ATM) cash deposits aren’t recommended. These methods risk delaying your publishing process and makes us sad, as the bank takes a large fee from each payment made this way.

Definitely. We’ve worked with numerous publishers (small, medium and large) to digitise their content with the aim of getting it into online stores such as Amazon.

Yes you can.  We love partnering with like-minded brands aimed at empowering self-publishing authors. Drop us an email and let us know what you need.

Of course we will -> you deserve it! ⭐

Any author you refer our way will earn you a % of the net profit earned from their publishing experience. Just make sure that your friend lets us know who sent them!

Yes you can. We’ re always looking for friendly new partners to better help our community of authors. Share your details, including a portfolio of work that we can look through. Due to the amount of queries we receive, I would really recommend you give this article a read before messaging us. A bland email with nothing but a CV attached risks being overlooked.

I recommend finding us on LinkedIn over here. For our other channels, please follow the links from the bottom of our website footer section.