We Make Your Success Even Simpler
Making your Submission
We welcome your submissions all year round, yet they must meet our specific criteria to be considered.
We will only contact those with books that interest us and do not offer feedback on books we do not accept for publication support.
- Your book must be submitted in PDF or Word and consist of several chapters to help us appreciate your style.
- We ask you to fill in the SUBMISSION form with as much detail as possible to help us to understand your book and goals better.
- We ask you to be patient as we have many submissions to review, and this on average takes several months to review and respond to those we wish to talk with further.
Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd is a hybrid model publishing company for the purposes of achieving affordable and realistic goals for our authors. Hybrid publishing companies behave just like traditional publishing companies in all respects, except that they publish books using an author-subsidised business model, as opposed to financing all of the upfront costs themselves. In exchange, a higher-than-industry-standard share of sales proceeds returned to the author.
Comprehensive Editorial Support
This is where we give your book the professional polish it deserves with our hand-selected team of highly experienced and specialised editors. We’ll work on the complete scope of book editing for your work from start to finish; proofreading, copy editing, line editing, and developmental editing. We consult and navigate with your input during the entire process.
Copy Editing
Copy, in the publishing world, refers to the text. So, copy editing could just as easily be called text editing. It’s a word-by-word edit that addresses grammar, usage, and consistency issues. Our editors will check for typos and spelling errors along with correcting grammar, language, and syntax errors. They will also pay particular attention to punctuation such as commas, semicolons, and quotation marks.
Our editors work on a copy of the author’s manuscript, using the track changes function and adding comments to explain any changes or make revision suggestions. The author can then go through each of the changes and accept or reject them one by one and make any revisions where necessary. We also discuss in conference with you the details of our suggestions.
Structural & Line Editing
Line editing is a more intensive structural edit that focuses on the finer aspects of language – the flow of ideas, transition elements, tone, and style. Line editors expand their efforts to suggest changes to make sentences crisper and tighter by fixing redundancy and verbosity issues, while improving awkward sentence and paragraph construction without a full rewrite. Our editors will look at the manuscript using a holistic methodology with a review of key aspects of the manuscript: the narrative, vocabulary, structure, characterisation, style, and development.
Developmental editing
Development editing means the book gets a full, substantial, structural, developmental edit. This will often include everything that’s involved in proofreading and copy-editing, plus a detailed critique of the essential elements of the story (in the case of a novel), which include:
Setting - Timeline - Characterisation - Plot - Story structure - Pacing - Presentation - Marketability.
Proofreading
Proofreading gets its name from the “proofs” typesetters produce before the final print run. The text has been laid out into pages, complete with photos, diagrams, tables, etc.
Award Winning Cover Designs
We design all your required formatting elements - eBooks, paperback, audiobooks, hardcovers through to your marketing collateral.
Our industry-experienced designers target your desired audience with a unique, beautiful cover and internal design. Our book designer creates the cover and visual designs for your published book.
Comprehensive Publication Process
We take care of all of your publishing requirements from eBook to POD (print-on-demand). We facilitate placing your book in the best sites and retail stores worldwide, with local access to some of Australia’s major retailers, as well as print-on-demand services. This means you can decide how many books you want to print and when.
Awareness of the production schedule for your book is important; knowing when each part of the design and layout process is coming helps you determine when it’s appropriate to ask any questions you might have—and to gently offer your own ideas while there’s still time for them to be taken into consideration.
Our close attention to detail will give your book a truly professional feel. Paper density and quality, typesetting font and styles, binding and trim size are just the start of the intricate details that a professional publisher knows. We make sure that your book is bound perfectly, that appropriate paper stock and embellishments are used, and that it is typeset so your text is legible and appealing.
SCHEDULING
Once a title is scheduled for publication and a release month has been set, the work begins in earnest. The time from a book’s acquisition to the day it hits shelves is typically anywhere from one to two years. It depends on how timely your topic is, how many titles are under contract in your category and when we think your book will have the greatest chance of success in the market.
The schedule is also set to build interest and potential sales from the anticipation of the book being released. The minimum timeline we work in is 12 months, allowing for the production and the pre-sale period where the book information is available 6 months before the actual release. This is the most important part of the process to create the success we desire for your book.
Full Promotional Marketing
The exceptional marketing team will make your book known about and available worldwide, with support for your book launch and signings at Australia's leading book retailers, as well as libraries and wherever you can gather excited readers. Our experienced team support your promotional materials, highlighting the key sales points that readers and retailers are looking for. Best of all, we also offer your book to reviewers, media and awards to help get your credibility established.
There are three major components to your book marketing process: advertising, promotion and publicity. Advertising includes paid placements of a book in print or other media. Promotion is the creation of anything that draws attention to a book, from corrugated floor and shelf displays in bookstores to bookmark and T-shirt giveaways. Publicity is the art of generating print and media pieces about an author and the book. The key to selling copies at a high sell-through (meaning people actually buy the books off the shelves) in today’s marketplace is to generate lots of publicity. The key to effective publicity is to focus on the area that will generate the most sales for your book.
Marketing is not something that starts or stops at any given time. Ideally, it’s an integral part of your writing career that begins long before you land a book deal and continues for as long as you call yourself an author.
Successful marketing is all about creating the appropriate combination of advertising, promotion and publicity within the assigned marketing budget to generate interest that results in sales. Be prepared to partner with your publisher to promote your book, keeping us informed of your own efforts and listening carefully to the in-house expertise so that together we can present a unified marketing plan. Success is a combined effort of planning, timing and budgeting for all involved.
Great Return For Your Talent
Our team will administer key aspects of marketing and promotion with aims to maximise our sales and return from all sale channels.
We will use all means available in traditional and modern day marketing techniques, and focus our efforts on marketing your book to the book trade through catalogue placement and promotions. You will also be supported with extended opportunities and will need to consider your own plan and budget for anything additional to help you gain further sales and market awareness.
Seasonal lists of titles are typically sold months in advance of publication, so most titles being presented are months from the actual publication and release date. This gives us, the publisher, plenty of time to assess all orders, make adjustments as necessary and print the right number of copies for distribution to the marketplace.
A targeted distribution with a high sell-through trumps having your book placed inside every single store in the country. What makes distribution such a delicate dance is that books are always returnable to the publisher’s warehouse if bookstores can’t sell them. So while you want your book to be readily available to your audience, there’s also a danger in printing and distributing too many copies. Selling large quantities to booksellers without proper marketing support is equivalent to a low sell-through and a high rate of return.
DISTRIBUTION
The most misunderstood and misconstrued term in the wide scope of publishing is distribution. For the largest trade publishers, selling and distribution go hand-in-hand. Proper distribution is not simply listing a title in the database of a large book outlet or mailing postcards to bookstores around the country.
Actual distribution begins with the process of sales presentations, coupled with skilfully matching booksellers with books that sell copies at a very low rate of return. Different genres—as well as the publishing formats of hardcover, trade and mass-market paperbacks—resonate with consumers who shop in specific locations. Distribution in the truest sense is matching the category, format and price to the right outlet in quantities that make sense for both the publisher and bookseller.
ON SALE
The cycle is now complete: books have been produced and distributed, copies are for sale online and on store shelves, and marketing plans are, hopefully, bringing enough attention to particular titles that consumers are buying books. It may seem daunting, but it’s actually both repetitive and consistent. As an author, understanding how your book marketing works its way through the process gives you a head start. Never forget that publishing is a business, your manuscript is a product and you, as the author, are a commodity.
When you sign that contract, your manuscript is packaged, priced and promoted with aims to make money for all involved. Your publisher has acquired your work to build profit from your writing. It’s not so much about great writing as it is about a good book that can generate interest and potential revenue, and how much value you as an author and your writing bring to the market. As long as your writing can create audience and you continue to produce entertaining, informative manuscripts on schedule, you have a very good chance of maintaining a career as a writer. This can take many years, so you have to keep at it. Having a product in the market is the first step, ongoing marketing is the first step to aiding the growth of your brand and potential sales. We will work with you all the way to support your goals for our book.
