Rather than clog up this website or waste time repeating myself, I’ll answer most questions here, as they come up. If you have a particular question, search this page (Control-F) for the keyword and if you don’t find it, ask in the comment section below.
Q. I was reading a good, helpful, FREE article, “____”, and then I saw that the rest of it isn’t available because it’s now part of a book for sale on your site. Is that a trick?
A. No tricks. The particular article you referred to has been available on my website(s) for several years, in its entirety and free to read. When I had enough articles to create a book on that subject, the complete article was incorporated into the book as its own chapter. The article on the website was reduced to an excerpt, with a link to the book. If you truly find the article helpful, then I hope you’ll support my efforts by buying the book or sending friends to the link. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of other articles here, in full. Read them now because one day, they may be incorporated into books, too!
Q. What are your top sellers?
A. Currently, our top sellers are all in ebook format from our website(s):
Non-Fiction:
1. Attract Him Back,
2. Control Your Submissive Boy,
3. The Long-Awaited, Honest-to-God Secret to Being Happy
Fiction:
Q. What happened to Spilled Candy?
A. Spilled Candy Books is alive and well, but we look a little differently than we did a few years ago. So does the entire publishing industry. As an author published by several different NYC publishers and the founder of my own micro-publishing company focused on spiritual books, I’ve been dismayed at the changes in the publishing world over the past 5 years and the startling drop-off in sales, industry-wide, even before the economy tanked. Now I can sit around and be dismayed and wallow in how I can’t make a living writing just one novel a year or I can accept that our lives are in a constant state of change and be flexible enough to flow with those changes.
Because I’ve always been environmentally conscious, Spilled Candy was an early adopter of print-on-demand technology and digital downloads. We were a forerunner in ebooks, putting out our first non-fiction ebook in 1998, and first novel, Access, in 1999. Back then, long before Kindles and Apple i-Pads, we were visionaries who spent too much time defending our products as “real” books because they were in digital format rather than on paper. We’re not defending anything anymore. We’ve watched many other small presses go bankrupt because they tried to stick with traditional bookstore models that were no longer working. We’ve also taken a lot of criticism for not following expectations of a publishing house, such as not publishing anything I myself have had a hand in writing because that alone would constitute an “amateur” or a “vanity press,” no matter that we published as many as 15 other authors at the same time. Personally, if I can’t publish my own works alongside my authors’, then I wouldn’t be publishing other authors at all. I am first and foremost and will always be a writer. Spilled Candy Books met all the requirements for legitimacy, such as international distribution, sales, merchant accounts, warehousing, advertising, writers’ guidelines, royalty-based and non-subsidized contracts that were very author-friendly, and membership in several professional organizations for publishers; however, that was all so we could fit into the expectations of others of what “successful” meant and not for our own vision. We recognized even then that the model was changing, especially with long-tail economics infiltrating art-based industries, and trying to live within that model has been very tiring. After some family crises and personal health problems, I answered that wake-up call and skinnied down the publishing company to what I could manage with as little stress as possible. I began envisioning a company that could be automated as much as possible and allow me to be flexible and mobile rather than feeling weighed down by business-as-usual.
We are still publishing printed books in trade paperback, mostly through environmentally-friendly print-on-demand quantities, though we print far fewer books than we have since 1998. The bulk of our sales are (once again, environmentally-friendly) digital books, sold online through our websites. We’ve shifted our focus in subject matter over the past couple of years to include more Law of Attraction and mind/body/spirit topics. Sales are automatic and easy, without dealing with the hassles of bookstore returns, begging wholesalers to pay us, or explaining to authors why an irate customer must indeed provide his 3-digit security code from the credit card he’s using. And most of what we do now can be done anywhere in the world as long as we have a good Internet connection. We enjoy the people we work with, love what we write, and are thrilled to share our experiences with people looking for what we have to offer. No, we may not look like the typical publisher but then, we never wanted to. I’ve always excelled where I was most different, and this is working for Spilled Candy now. And this is what works for me as a person and as a writer. I won’t follow anyone else’s vision anymore.
Q. I want to submit a manuscript for publication. Where are the Spilled Candy submission guidelines?
A. Please see the last paragraph at http://www.thespiritualeclectic.com/spilled-candy/. Any changes to our submission policy will be posted there.
Q. Why are there so many books by Lorna Tedder?
A. Uh, because I’m prolific?
I actually do have books published by mainstream presses, though only one is still in print. Spilled Candy Books provides me with an avenue to make my backlist, blog-books, courses, and my newest work available to my readers, with as much as possible in one place.
For many years, I did not publish many of my own titles through Spilled Candy so that we would not be unfairly branded as a self-publishing vanity press. (Silly me, so worried about what non-readers and non-customers thought.) We’ve routinely employed professional editors for my own work as well as our authors’ work and have had as many as 15 authors published at one time, not including me. Big publishers publish books written by their own editors all the time, but no one–up until late 2009 when the Romance Writers of America cut its “recognized publisher” list–would dare call the Harlequin behemoth a self-publisher. After having to admit in the past few years that my own titles have been the biggest moneymakers for Spilled Candy, I’ve decided to allow the light to shine more on what I bring to our readers and not intentionally try to be obscure.
Q. Are all the authors at Spilled Candy really just Lorna Tedder?
A. LOL, nope. Let me tell you about the fantabulous authors who currently write for Spilled Candy.
If you don’t already recognize the name, you can learn more about New York Times bestseller Maggie Shayne at her website (really, folk, I’m not THAT prolific).
We’ve published five of Kristin Madden’s books, with her most popular ones being her Pagan Homeschooling and the reprint of Pagan Parenting. If you get a chance to see Kristin at a festival or conference, you’re in for a treat. And if you are dealing with elderly parents or terminally ill loved ones, please take a look at her insightful and touching guide, The Shamanic Guide to Death and Dying.
S. Kelley Harrell, a shaman whose story of turning the trauma of sexual abuse into a spiritual awakening, can be found at Soul Intent Arts. Check out her Soul Intent Arts page on Facebook, and by all means ask her about her incredible distance soul readings, which I’ve discussed in my own books.
Drawing the Three of Coins provides sound business advice from Terri Paajanen, former metaphysical store owner and former coordinator for About.com’s Paganism/Wicca site.
Gail Wood, aka the Rowdy Goddess, is the author of two books other than her book of meditations on the Sacred Masculine, The Wild God.
Lady Sialia, author of Elements of Fun, is an English professor and first time author whereas Raven Michaels Lockhart, author of Control Your Submissive Boy, is a professional ghostwriter who uses only pseudonyms and lives in France–this book was a departure from the usual but fit a self-development tangent we wanted to explore.
Lauren Hartford is actually a four-person team of writers and teachers–and yes, I’ve had a lot of input with that team–who came together to write Celebrating the Tower Card, plus three more full-length novels (two are currently in production), two short stories, and one novella for The Priestess Diaries series.
Shannon Bailey, Gifts for the Goddess on a Cold Winter’s Eve co-author, is a college senior studying psychology. She writes academic essays at her Randomnista blog, and I’m hoping to persuade her to let me publish her sociology field work on paganism in America when she’s done with presenting the groundbreaking material at a few symposiums. Her sister, Aislinn Bailey, is co-author of Gifts for the Goddess on a Warm Spring Morn, and is a professional photographer.
Q. I don’t like your website or your books or your opinions. I think you’re gonna burn in hell.
A. I don’t care what you think.
Q. Would you read and critique a manuscript for me or help me get it published? Would you donate your time to [various world disaster reliefs] by raffling off a critique or judging a contest?
A. Sorry, but I don’t do that anymore, either for free or for pay. I’m an extremely slow reader, even after speed-reading courses, and it’s a tremendous chore to me. If you’ve read many of my articles, you’ll see that I used to work 100 hours a week and 40-60 of them were for charity. That burned me out eventually and now I put a premium on my time. There are, however, plenty of freelance editors out there who can help you. We’ll list a few we’ve personally employed or are familiar with in the near future.
Q. I’m looking for a job/would like to sell you typesetting services/want to re-design your website/etc.
A. At the present, we don’t have any openings and don’t anticipate any new services, especially not typesetting, printing, etc. If something changes, we’ll post it.
Q. Why don’t you ship print books to Australia? What about Canada?
A. We no longer ship printed materials outside the US because we had too many problems with lost packages, lengthy transits, and country policies. We used to re-ship–at our cost–any lost packages within the US, but this practice has proven to be too costly for our foreign shipments, which we cannot track. Customers often do not understand how long it can take for a package to reach a foreign destination (including Canada) and become upset with us when we have no more control over other countries’ postal systems than we do our own. Lastly, some of the subject matter of our books, particularly religious subject matter, is sometimes not welcome in other countries and never reaches its intended destination. We love our foreign customers and enjoy the social interaction but bottom line, we can’t afford the lost packages. We do, however, offer our books in digital format and encourage customers outside the US to take advantage of the downloads. Paypal has identified a few countries which they refuse to process for security reasons, but according to our web traffic stats, we rarely receive interest from citizens of those countries.
