Bestselling Authors
Click on the initials above to find author pages on this website or use the search engine in our Bookshop.
 Dear Deliria, Pam Brown's award-winning book
Here are a few examples of self publishing successes:
by Kate Shayler
The 2nd volume in her autobiography, this book follows on from The Long Way Home, which Kate self published at Fast Books. A Tuesday Thing "received much interest" at the Frankfurt Book Fair, especially from Scandinavian publishers. Click on the link to go to the Random House website.
by Matthew Reilly
Over 120,000 copies of Matthew Reilly's latest book SCARECROW were sold in Australia according to the Australian Publishers Association Bestseller Survey. Matthew Reilly's first book, CONTEST, was self published. Click on the link to go to the Pan Macmillan website.
Here's how it all began to happen for Matthew Reilly:
- He risked about $10,000 to print 1000 books
- He sold it from the boot of his car
- He went to his first bookstore, an independent, suburban shop. They took 10 copies and gave him some names of other booksellers. They gave him an introduction to a big city bookseller.
- The big city bookshop took 30 copies. And sold them. Then Matthew Reilly took in another 150. It went on display at the front of the shop.
- Pan Macmillan's commissioning editor Cate Paterson walked in, bought the book, read it, loved it.
Matthew Reilly's tricks:
- He sat on the bus reading his own book and people looked at the cover.
- He got an interview in the local newspaper
- He gave away a few copies at work and his workmates emailed their views all about the work network
- He printed UK and US prices on the back cover, just like "real" books do.
by Sandra Cabot
Medical doctor Sandra Cabot's idea for a book on women's health that combined holistic and traditional techniques was rejected by all publishers. Click on the link to go to Sandra Cabot's own website.
In 1996, she self published The Liver Cleansing Diet. This book has sold over 1.4 million copies in Australia. In the last five years, worldwide, it has sold half a million more. The Liver Cleansing Diet created enormous controversy: critics said her book was anti-science, irresponsible, dangerous, and she should be struck from the medical register.
The resulting media frenzy helped push up book sales.
Sandra Cabot also self distributes through her company Health Directions. The first book she self-distributed was Can't Lose Weight? You Could Have Sydnrome X and her experience was an interesting one. Health Directions has no sales force, and the company was in contact with hundreds of booksellers by phone and mail. She initially printed 50,000 copies and sold them mostly through bookshops.
She then followed up with another print run of 50,000 and she is now selling to Angus & Robertson and Borders, and the title took off even further when it was featured on Channel Nine and Who Weekly. Her secret is in how she primes her market: she talks to over 20,000 women a year all over Australia and they trust her. (Australian Bookseller & Publisher, May 2002)
Births Galore
Carol Barbar submitted her work to many publishers, only to be rejected. She had courage and faith in her book and came to Fast Books where we helped her produce just exactly what she wanted.
After selling out her own edition, multinational publishers Simon & Shuster took it on for a large, mass market edition.
Self publishing authors have their own web pages here
To find an author and their books:
- Tick the initial of the author's surname
- Go to the bookshop and enter their name in the author search field
How to have your own author page on booksandwriters.net
- Print with Fast Books. Choose us to print your book. For 12 months, you get your own page, a page advertising your book where you can add excerpts from book reviews, your own password to access all our databases - literary agents, publishers, book trade events, prizes & competitions, etc.
Every month, we add new titles that Fast Books has produced. Each book stays in the bookshop for 12 months after its publication.
We establish an author page for you that contains a short biographical note as well as a longer piece. Using your own password, you can edit this page. You will also have a page called "My Page" that provides the links to orders for your book, email promotions which allows you to create your own private email list and send emails to advertise your book. The email is, of course, in html format and includes an image of your book's cover.
Use this email feature to announce your book's publication date, advise bookshops of your new book, invite friends to a book launch, tell local community media of your availability for interviews.
You should also sign up for the "publishing" section.
These pages offer guidelines and forms for media publicity, marketing selling kits, closing dates for book prizes and awards, dates of writers' festivals and book fairs, names and addresses of bookshops, names and addresses of book review media, and many other things.
To sign up for these services, use your Mastercard or Visa on our secure ANZ bank server. From our home page, click on the navigation bar that says "Self Publishing is Easy", then on that page, on the left, "click here to sign up for access".
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