Tag Archives: Graphic Design

Welcome to 2022

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Photos of Waikawa Bay, Picton. Palm Tree on the left looking out to the Sounds.
Picton, New Zealand looking out over Waikawa Bay

Hurray, 2022 is here, well in New Zealand and a few other countries… Looking forward to you all joining us and celebrating a brand new year where positivity will move us all forward in leaps and bounds. At least I hope so.

Lots to do and a business plan for this year to sort out before work commences on the 6th Jan 2022. We have five books to work on over the next couple of months with another touching down in April. It is going to be great fun working with these clients, they are awesome writers and people.

Business

Part of the plant this year is to take Monday’s off and do a course on Marketing. Though I have some marketing skills, I need to up my skills to move this business forward to the next stage. As many of you not, our business says Publishing House in the title. At this stage we don’t actually publish any client’s work, we only prepare work for distribution. I work as an Author Consultant and Formatter. This is due to the fact, USA business tax is complicated (to say the least) With saying this, we will eventually look into publishing in New Zealand, though the costs are much higher than KDP, Smashwords etc. This is because printers in New Zealand don’t understand the POD (Print on Demand) system or don’t use the system the same way as overseas. They have a single price for one book, it is set out… the more you buy the cheaper the books are. This means it can cost thousands to print books and is sadly out of many writers pockets, which is why we use places like KDP.

Sadly KDP can be tricky and terminate accounts and not pay-out royalties whenever they so choose. Considering those of us living outside an Amazon area/country, we only get paid after we’ve earned $100 USD, POUNDS, EURO etc. With this warning, please be careful out there and read all the policies of the places your distribute your work through.

As well as up-skilling my marketing, I am also updating my graphic art skills, mainly on GIMP, learning to do layers etc. I had a blast about ten days ago with a new client and their book cover. Slightly frustrating, though enhancing my skill.

New Clients

I have several new clients coming up this year, though will blog about them at a later date, when they are ready for publishing. An interview is a great way to introduce you all to new writers. Along with this I am hoping to have an Instagram day, where I will post about books once a week… first though, I need to learn how to use Instagram a bit better than I do. I’m not good with a phone and wish we could post via computer. I’ve heard some can, so will see what happens this year. We also need to finish updating this website and adding the links we are missing. If you see a broken link, please let me know.

Lots of learning. Weekends will be for family. We will have set hours, though we will also always answer Fb messages when we see them due to the time differences around the world.

Reviews

If you have books on Kindle Unlimited and they are in a genre we read, then please let us know and we will read and review. Reviews will be fair and only done if we can give 4 or 5 stars. Anything less and we will message you… the author, instead and let you know what issues we’ve found, be it formatting, or editing, etc.

Happy New Year and Welcome to 2021

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Happy New Year to all our followers and friends. It has been a wow of a year with many of us working from home. The toll on the human race is still growing though with vaccines, perhaps we can beat this virus and the many strains. Please be safe and take care of each other so we can grow and help each other. We are lucky to be based in New Zealand, where though we are on level one, our lives are closer to normal than it is for many other countries around the world. Be careful out there.

Thank you for continuing to be with us over 2020 and on into 2012. We look forward to sharing your work, books, interviews, educational articles and helping out clients – past, present and future. Let’s get those manuscripts built into books and uploaded to distribution platforms.

We have a great team here at Plaisted Publishing, our contractor list just keeps growing. If you know a small business contractor who works in Editing, Graphic Design or Marketing, please contact us. We’d love to help you help our clients and grow each others businesses. 

This year we will be introducing you to our contractors, each with their own expertise in a certain area of publishing. You will get to know them and what they can do for you if you are planning to publish a book. We do Interior Book Design in house and have over six years experience in Fiction, Non-fiction, Anthologies, Memoirs, Poetry, Children’s Picture Books and Family History Books/Family Reunion Books.

We also off help with Family History Research and have twenty years experience gathering information for various books we’ve made over the years for reunions and birthday celebrations. If you’d like to talk to us about Family History, please contact us here or email at plaistedpublishinghouse@gmail.com

We are also looking for Content Writers within the publishing world. If you write educational material for Independent Authors, please contact us, we’d be delighted to hear from you. It is important for us all to continue to learn and grow in the publishing world with the ever changing technology we use.

We will also be opening a page to favourite weblinks for educational purposes. If you know of a great website please email us the link and we’ll check it out prior to posting the link on the page.

At present we are updating out website. We will have a library of all the books we’ve assisted with over the last six years along with a list of Author Names. Eventually we hope to also add a profile of each author as well and send those links out to each client so they can share and celebrate each others work.

Our magazine has been on hold for the just over two years now. We hope to re-establish the magazine with a new title, new and easier layout with less formatting work involved. We hope this magazine will be every two months. Here is hoping all this scheduling will work. By the end of this year, we may need a PA…

Distribution Platforms we use
Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
Lulu
Ingram Spark
Smashwords
Draft to Digital

Looking into using
Kobo
Barnes and Noble (Nook)

Here is hoping for a wonderful year. Take care and be safe. 

Claire Plaisted
Business Owner

Partner in Crime Book Services

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I’d like to introduce you to one of my Contractors for Editing. Partners In Crime Book Services. They do a lot more than Editing, and they are excellent with their work. What they do shows a top business you can trust, it highlights a wonderful Mother and Daughter team.


Partners in Crime Book Services is a family-owned and operated small business, run by longtime promoter Annie Smith and her daughter, USA Today bestselling author Lily Luchesi.

Founded in 2019, PIC has grown from promotion to offering a myriad of services for authors and publishers, including:

The aforementioned book promotion (which includes blog posts, groups, pages, and Twitter)

Editing (proofing, developmental, and line included for a single price)

Formatting

Graphic design (covers, banners, teasers, and logos)

Newsletter management

Social media management (Facebook pages and groups as well as Twitter)

Facebook event management

Giveaway management

ARC reader management

And special bundles for new releases or publishing packages.

One could say PIC was formed back in the 1970s when Annie and her late mother would promote musicians. Her mother, Mary, founded the first fan club for The Black Crowes, alongside another fan, when they were starting out in the industry. From there, the two women did local PR in Chicago and West Hollywood for bands such as Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses, Cinderella, Poison, RATT, Enuff Z’Nuff, and more.

Annie also ran Aerosmith’s fan club; her job was drawing and making up the puzzles for their newsletter, which was some of the earliest newsletter marketing.

Promotion ceased in the early 1990s when Annie had her daughter. Then it picked back up with a new crop of bands beginning in 2005, with bands like My Chemical Romance, The Used, Aiden, Kill Hannah, Vampires Everywhere!, New Years Day, Falling in Reverse, Street Drum Corps, and Stitched Up Heart, Pretty Awkward, as well as others.

Annie and Lily were first on board with Hollywood Waste Records, an imprint of Century Media Records, as their Trainwrecks (the name of their street team). After a few active and entertaining years in the music scene, the duo took a break as Lily began to focus on her writing career.

Applying what she knew firsthand and from Annie’s past, Lily took to marketing her books right away, using Annie as an unofficial PA to find readers across all forms of social media, as well as ARC readers and street team members.

With advice taken from others who were in the industry longer than she, Lily began learning newer marketing techniques, such as Facebook events and newsletter swaps, and how to brand herself as an author. She also began teaching herself graphic design to create teasers eye-catching enough to garner reader attention online.

In 2011, while still working in the music industry, Lily also ran a successful book blog under her birth name, and via those reviews, she built a rapport with authors, even giving advice on their ARCs and how to improve them. That was how she began editing when one of them asked her if she would look over his short story before publication.

Lily edited for three years before quitting to focus solely on her books and improve her craft, as well as did blurb doctoring and critique.

In 2019, during a time of personal change in their lives, it was brought to Annie and Lily’s attention that they could begin offering their services for a fee to authors in need. From there, Partners in Crime Book Services began to blossom. (The name for the company came from Carson Cole Allen a musician in the bands Escape the Fate and Me Vs. Myself, when he called them partners in crime while they were doing music promo.)

Their first clients came from Lily’s former publisher, and from there the business grew and grew, taking off from extremely humble beginnings to garnering clients from around the world, in various genres and with varying needs.

The duo love what they do; seeing their clients succeed brings them joy beyond words.

Find PIC online via:

 Facebook – Partners in Crime

Website: Website – Partners in Crime

Twitter: Annie Smith, PA