CGW Publishing is an independent publisher specialising in business and non-fiction books for authors who want to build a service business around their intellectual property. We work with a wide range of expert business authors, and we work with carefully selected creative authors too.

Contact CGW Publishing

CGW Publishing

07402 555300

CGW Publishing is an independent publisher, specialising in helping business authors to develop a service business from their intellectual property.

We also work with selected creative and fiction authors.

Christopher Greenaway and Amelia Hartley built a successful management consultancy practice around their books and other information products, and now they work with authors who want to realise the potential of their own intellectual property.

CGW Publishing offers much more than a traditional publisher with a full writing, publishing and business development service for authors who want to get their ideas into print and then develop those ideas into a profitable business.

Our books and authors:

Paul Boross

The Pitch Doctor

Big Sky

The Pitching Bible

Trudie Thompson

Lloyd Thompson

Professor Brian Lieberman

Dreams Do Come True

Michael Heath

Professor David Clutterbuck

The Fit Mentor

Ronna Smithrim

Christopher Oliphant

Radical Acceptance

Accepting the Radical

Hugh Jackman

The Mystery of Christ

The NLP Practitioner Manual

Peter Freeth

Choosing a CRM Vendor: Best Practices, Pitfalls, and the Myth of the Turnkey Solution

Andrew Schultz

Corporate Godfathers: The Career Management Handbook From Hell

Segreto Uno

Merica Cox

Balm of Gilead Ministries

Protecting Your Greatest Asset: Your Mind

Suzanne Hobson

Derbyshire Poet

Reflections of Life

Christopher Greenaway

Amelia Hartley

Write For You

Stepheni Smith

Little Angels

Revelation

Buy all of these books and more from:

Amazon

Apple iBooks iTunes iBookstore

Waterstones

Blackwells

You can also hire our writing services on these websites:

Elance

www.elance.com

People Per Hour

www.peopleperhour.com

Freelancer

www.freelancer.co.uk

www.freelancer.com

CGW Publishing offers the following independent publisher services to authors:

Freelance Writer

Ghost Writer/Ghost Writing

Publisher/Publishing

Editor/Editing

Proof Reader/Proof Reading

If you don’t plan to publish many books then you can use self publishing services such as CreateSpace, iUniverse, blurb, Xlibris, Author House, Llumina, Vervante or Lulu, which is a service that sits in front of a printing company called Lightning Source. Lulu offers basic formatting, ready-made cover designs and ISBN number allocation, as well as an online book shop.

Some services charge a set up cost, others offer free set up but hide inflated printing and distribution costs, recouping their set up costs from book sales.

Self publishing means that anyone can publish a book with no critical assessment, but in reality their book doesn’t reach a significant readership through book shops, so themselves critical review process takes place at the point of sale rather than at the point of writing, editing or publishing.

If you are considering self publishing, it is important to at least have someone else proof read and edit the book, as it is very easy to overlook mistakes when you’ve been staring at text on a computer screen for hours.

Self publishing removes all barriers to entry, apart from money, so there are no quality controls or checks on books entering the market. This can leave readers with the perception that all self published books are of poor quality.

Having a publisher means that your book has been evaluated and edited to be of publishable quality, and that gives your book credibility.

Some of the authors we work with write their own work and we edit and publish it, whilst we ghost write and publish for others.

We help authors convert their intellectual property and creativity into income, not only through short term book sales but by building a solid business foundation that helps the author to exploit their hard work and expertise as much as possible for as long as possible.

For example, one of our clients had delivered a lecture for a number of years on a particular subject and wanted to publish a book in the same field to build his reputation.

His idea for the book was fine, but the format and message was very different to that of the lecture. To continue with both as they were would mean that he would be dividing his attention between them and one would not directly complement the other.

We rewrote his lecture and adapted his book so that each conveyed the same message. The lecture sells the book, the book sells the lecture and together, they create the credibility that grows his brand and therefore his business.

We don’t work with just anyone who wants to write a book. Our target clients are people who are building a service business on their own intellectual property and who we can work with to integrate writing and publishing into their marketing and business development activities.

A traditional publisher buys the rights to your book and pays you about 3% of profits for that. In return, they do whatever they want with the book in terms of appearance, marketing etc.

The publisher may pay you an advance against royalties, based on their expectations of book sales. They still expect you to sell the book, with signings, media interviews etc. Equally, they may never put your book into print at all.

With a traditional publisher, royalties are typically capped at the figure you receive as an advance, so if the book is more successful than the publisher anticipated, the author doesn’t benefit.

A self publishing service such as Lulu or CreateSpace is a service to you, so you pay them to format and print the book. Lulu charge you 20% of your sales profits and inflate their printing charges by about 35%. If your book is 150 pages long and sells for £10, your profit from Lulu will be £4.80, and from CGW your profit will be £6. You also have to pay Lulu $75 for them to list your book in the ISBN database.

If you self publish and you want to see your book in book shops, the retailers still need a discount.

You have to do everything yourself to sell your book; marketing, sales, order processing, distribution, postage, which eats into your profits.

Traditional publishers seem to do all the work for you, but as you can see from their royalty figures, they’re actually doing all the work for themselves. They are not really publishing ‘your’ book, they are licensing your copyright to create their own product. If they make you famous, you sell more books, which is very good for the publisher.

With self publishing, you actually become a publisher yourself, so you keep the full copyright, but you also have to do everything that a publisher does if you want your book to be successful.

CGW’s service is somewhere between the two. We work in partnership with you, helping you to market both your book and your business.

Instead of paying you just 3% of the cover price as a royalty and using the profits to market our business, we pay you the majority of book revenue so that you can market your business, if you choose to.

Let’s say that for books that you sell direct to your clients at your seminars or other events, your overall share of the cover price is 60%.

You can either keep all of that 60% or you can spend some on marketing. You can use the book to market your business and vice versa, so you’re not only marketing the book, you’re including it in your overall marketing plans.

For books sold through book shops, your share of the profits from book sales might be around 40% because of the retailer’s discount.

Typically, retailers would expect between 20% and 30% as a discount on the cover price.

A retailer’s business is based on selling books at a profit, so we have to give them a discount in order for them to want to sell the book.

Business books rarely provide the author with a significant income in themselves. Even Stephen Covey's '7 Habits of Highly Effective People', one of the most well known and best selling business books in print today, generates income which is small compared to his income from time management products. The book has made Covey a 'household name' and that enables the Franklin Covey corporation to sell other products and services.

Our experience and expertise in helping authors to write and publish a book and then create a service business around that is based on us running a successful management consultancy for 10 years, publishing 5 books and using those books to build credibility for our business and our team.

Examples of how we support our authors include:

Public speaking events to tell the ‘story’ and promote the book

Book launch events in partnership with book shops or affiliated companies

Training courses to teach the methods contained within the book

Licensing the intellectual property to other trainers or consultants

Building a database of readers for marketing the next book

Using news media to promote the book

Using the book as a direct sales tool

We have spent many years developing ideas and packaging those ideas as valued business services and information products.

This doesn’t mean that we turn the author’s idea into a book or audio CD, it means that we help the author to develop a broad yet coherent range of activities that develop a consistent brand. Every activity builds on and complements the others as the author’s service business grows from a solid and stable foundation.

The author’s personality is central to their brand. Too many people try to hide behind a ‘corporate’ image and are reluctant to take the credit for their own work, mainly because they don’t believe that they have credibility.

By aligning the author’s different activities so that they complement each other, the author gains the credibility that they seek and the whole brand and business grow stronger and faster.

If you have a book inside you, we don’t just help you to get it out, we help you to turn it into a successful business.

Glossary of Publishing Terms

Advance

A payment of royalties made by the publisher to the author in advance of book sales instead of after book sales.

Agent

A representative who acts on the author’s behalf to find a publisher and negotiate publishing contracts.

Author

The person’s name which appears on the front of the book. The author may have written the book, or they or their publisher may have engaged a ‘ghost writer’ to do the actual writing work.

Book

The physical product of the publishing process.

Case Bound

Another name for ‘hard back’ binding.

Contract

A legally binding agreement between two or more parties which sets out rights and obligations, scope and term. In other words, what one person gives the other, what they get in return, covering what activities or markets and for how long.

Contributor

Someone who has input to a book, for example an illustrator or contributing author. A contributor is usually listed in the book’s official data record, unless they are a hired ‘ghost writer’.

Copy

1. A single physical book, i.e. a copy of a book.

2. Text, usually on a web page or in a newspaper or magazine.

Copyright

Every unique piece of writing is recognised as the work of its author who has sole rights to produce copies of his or her work. Copyright is the legal recognition of an author’s right to his or her creative work.

Copy Writer

Nothing to do with copyright, a copywriter is someone who writes text for magazines, product packaging, web sites and so on. This general text is called ‘copy’, not to be confused with a copy of a book.

Creative Commons

A form of copyright licence where the author grants a licence for anyone to freely copy and distribute their work. This is usually restricted to non-commercial applications.

Deal

A more informal name for a contract.

Distributor

A company that sits between the printer or publisher and the wholesaler. They handle distribution of book orders to either retailers or to other specialist wholesalers, such as those dealing in academic text books. A distributor might also handle imports of books into a specific country.

The terms ‘distributor’ and ‘wholesaler’ are often used interchangeably.

With Print On Demand, the printer usually acts as the distributor.

Editing

A service offered by publishers and independent editors to check and modify text for overall flow and readability.

Ghost writer

Someone who does the actual writing of a book, even though the author credit will go to someone else. The majority of celebrity autobiographies are written by ghost writers. Ghost writers generally receive no royalties from book sales.

Imprint

The Imprint for a book is usually the publisher’s name, however some publishers have different Imprints for different product ranges. An imprint is like a manufacturer’s brand name for a product, so one manufacturer might have different brands for products sold in different markets or to different target audiences.

ISBN

International System for Book Numbering. Every book sold anywhere in the world through the normal distribution methods needs to be identified with a unique ISBN number.

Jacket

The loose printed paper cover that is often used to make hard back or case bound books look more attractive.

Literary agent

See ‘Agent’.

Litho

Short for ‘offset lithographic’, a method of printing using metal plates which place ink onto the paper via a rubber ‘offset’ roller. Because of the high cost in setting up the printing plates, lithographic printing is used for large print runs, typically in the tens of thousands.

Manuscript

The plain text of the book as written by the author. It contains none of the page formatting required for printing as a book.

Margin

1. The gap between printed text and the edge of the paper.

2. The profit made when buying something and then selling it at a higher price.

Offset

Another name for litho printing.

Pen Name

A pen name, pseudonym or nom de plume is a name chosen by an author who doesn’t want to write under their own name, perhaps to write on a subject that is different from what they are normally known for, or to avoid publicity.

Perfect Bound

Another name for ‘paper back’ binding.

PP

Printed Pages, the number of pages in a book. Sometimes the actual number of pages in a book can be higher than the number of printed pages because the book is printed in blocks of pages which are sewn together in groups. This is why you will sometimes find a few blank pages at the end of a book.

PPC

Printed Paper Case, another name for a hardback book that has a full colour, printed cover.

Print on Demand

A method of book printing where an electronic copy of the book is kept on computer for printing only when an order is placed for the book.

Proof

A copy of a book which is produced to check for mistakes in either the original text or the printing process.

Proof reading

A service offered by publishers and independent proof readers to check text for mistakes. Computer spell checkers have difficulty correcting words which are spelt correctly even though them are nut the write ward for the sentence.

Publisher

A company that takes an author’s ‘manuscript’ and turns it into a ‘title’ or printed book.

Publishing house

A company that publishes books and other information products. Usually used to describe the large, traditional publishers.

Retailer

A company which sells books. An online book shop such as Amazon works in exactly the same way as a High Street book shop.

Royalty

A payment made from a publisher to an author in return for the author granting a copyright licence to the publisher.

Short run

A print run of a small number of books. The cost per printed copy is high because the set up costs are spread across fewer copies.

Signing

An important marketing tool, a book signing is an event, normally organised in partnership with a large book shop, where the author might give a talk, read some of his or her book and then sell signed copies. The most important aspect of the signing is not book sales on the day itself but the opportunity to create marketing activity around it, for example in the local press and radio.

Supply chain

The network of different companies that are required to publish, print, distribute and sell a book. A particular supply chain can be seen by following the path of a single book from source to consumer.

Title

Another name for ‘book’, the word ‘title’ is more commonly used in the publishing and book retailing world. A consumer would normally use the word ‘title’ to refer to the name of a book (the title of the book), whereas a publisher or retailer would use ‘title’ to refer to the book itself (the title IS the book).

Title page

The first page of a book, showing the book’s title, author, publisher and year of publishing.

Title page verso

The second page of a book, showing information about the book including the publisher’s details, ISBN number and a copyright notice.

Wholesaler

A company that buys books in bulk and sells them on to retailers.