Charleville

Mulga Mob Publishing/Books from the Bush Came From Where?
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Some years ago my best little mate, my daughter Kylie, died.
Kylie was a bush kid from the far outback... She loved writing stories she could share with other children. Kylie's schooling was by distance education.  We were often on the move between bush jobs, so she frequently did her lessons sitting under any convenient shady shrub or tree or by firelight. Her stories reflect her own experiences of life in the Australian outback. .
When Kylie developed a terminal illness she showed great courage, thinking always of others. She asked that after she died, I would have her stories published so more children could enjoy them.
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Publishing Quest
     So then began a quest to find a way of having Kylie’s stories printed in a standard paperback format, with a nice glossy cover. I had already designed, formatted, illustrated the content and the covers so really needed to find a printing business that would take a print ready file and only charge per unit. The file was ready to be fed directly into a commercial printing machine.

      I investigated dealing directly with a number of printing firms, but the cost of having a small print run was too much for my very limited budget. I looked at the many publishing firms that advertise online, but at that stage none offered a print only option. Along the way I met a lady who had spent $40,000 to have her book printed in the smallest print run she could negotiate and still had hundreds of copies unsold!

    Then I chanced upon a company that offered printing for as many or as few books as you wanted (cost on a sliding scale). The price was affordable, the finish looked great, the help desk staff very supportive.

    In the interim I had put Kylie’s stories on the web as e-books distributed through iBooks/iTunes, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Roberson, Amazon and so on and there were quite a few downloads.

    Now, I could have the printed books to distribute as she wished. However, when I offered them to the local library, I was informed of this “ISBN” that published books must have for a bar code to be entered into the library database. In the search for an inexpensive way of getting an ISBN I found that the simplest way was to pay the fee to register as a publisher myself and that way the cost of an ISBN was very small and what is more I actually owned the rights to the book’s ISBN.

    At about this time, an lady (Jocelyn) who was a bit past the age of "three score and ten",  came to ask for help with her computer. She was in the throes of writing a book about her son who had died some years earlier. She had looked around for a publisher but the cost was….!! So she’d, “Thrown the problem out to the Universe, and …“ 

    As with Kylie’s books, I first offered Jocelyn’s book as an ebook in order to get feedback. So at 78 years of age Jocelyn started a new career and she now has several books to her credit.

    Thanks to reach of the Internet I have been privileged to be contacted by other people who had a story to be told, but very little disposable income to make a printed book happen. The upshot is more people realizing their dream of publishing their own book.  One bloke from the Gulf country of Qld. phoned me every week for a year – he talked and I typed! After selling 500 copies just in the immediate rural area, he is working on a second book!

    There is a story behind the story within each book you see on the "Books From the Bush" website. As Mulga Mob Publishing I am able not only to fulfill Kylie's dream but that of others who have a story to tell, but no way of meeting the considerable costs of getting published.
(Check our rates here Mulga Mob Publishing )