This changes everything

Lumina Publications aims to bring light and joy to the world, not only through enlightening and entertaining people, but by supporting charities.

Last year I was just starting out and I wasn’t making any money (writing novels was a rather expensive hobby, in fact!). The only way I could actually support charities was by giving them my own money based roughly on the sales of copies of paperbacks and e-books. This was my way of motivating myself to try to sell more books – profit alone just doesn’t do that for me (and I was such a long way off profit…).

However, the Audible deal changes everything (for this year at least). They’ve given me a helpful lump sum which means I can now invest in marketing and hopefully everything will take off. I can also make some useful donations.

As for the partnership scheme, I originally thought it would be a nice idea to pair each book with a charity that was relevant to the story (and I had some lovely comments to that effect). When the Daniel Spargo Mabbs Foundation agreed to be a guinea pig for this by partnering Summer at Tillingford Hall, I was really pleased! However, I struggled to find a partner for A Little Treat on Honey Street. I won’t post here about what happened, but it was slightly upsetting and kind of put me off!

I came to realise that small charities don’t have the staffing to deal with a corporate partnership-style arrangement (such as McVities have with Mind for example), especially as the amount of money I’ll be able to give them would be nowhere near enough to justify allocating extra staff time to the project.

So I’ve decided, for the moment, to make it all much simpler. For now, I will be giving a chunk of my profits to charities – especially the Daniel Spargo Mabbs Foundation. I may invite applications from charities related to the themes of the book and will make separate announcements about this. But, whatever I do, I will not create a situation where hundreds of charities are wasting hours creating massive proposals that go nowhere. Having been a trust fundraiser myself I’m only too aware of the huge reduction in ROI this archaic system creates.

I won’t rule out trying out the partnership scheme I originally came up with, but when I can offer large enough donations to make it truly worthwhile for the charities involved.

On publication day, Summer at Tillingford Hall was posted on the Audible Home Page just above a book by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) so, who knows…