Publishing Academy has been set up by Debbie Jenkins and Joe Gregory.

We’re an entrepreneurial team who started our first business together back in 1997 and have been having fun making our friends and clients rich through business, books and marketing ever since.

Debbie Jenkins (according to Joe Gregory)

Debs has an incredible grasp of marketing – especially breaking complicated stuff into easy chunks – and has a knack of dragging me into new and exciting (also known as “scary”) projects that would otherwise make me run a mile. Her official title could be marketer, author, professional speaker, entrepreneur, publisher or “the boss” – but I just know her as my big (and slightly eccentric) sister. She earned the nickname “Dangerous” Debbie back in the nineties due to her audacious no BS business and speaking style. She’s still just as dangerous but she’s not been in the limelight as much in recent years since moving to live in a cave in Spain (did I mention she was eccentric?) Her background as an electronics engineer and head-hunter (the company’s top fee earner in a very competitive field) gives her a unique take on business, people and systems in particular. The reason I’ve been able to continue working with her for almost 13 years now (some people wonder how we do it) is because she has an unbeatable work ethic and a real sense of fair play.  Plus, she seems to be a magnet for success – so it’s good to stay close!

Joe Gregory (according to Debbie Jenkins)

I dragged Joe away from his high-flying career in an artsy ad agency when he was just 19 because I needed someone who was good at making stuff up (I mean marketing copy – not lies!) and thought having an in-house design and branding expert would be good for business. I was right! With Joe’s help we’ve battered the competition in all kinds of fields – from online marketing (we were there at the start) to consulting (we grew our business in record time) to publishing (I still don’t know how we managed to publish and sell so many books in just a couple of years). Although I dragged him away from a steady job Joe admits he wasn’t really suited for the arty-farty life anyway. Of course, he’s the most creative person I know but that’s grounded in a real desire to make everything he does translate into helping people make and save money. He’s not into design for design’s sake – which is refreshing! If you were to ask Joe what he does for a living he’d probably say “I make books” (which could be confused with running a betting shop in the UK) but his skills go a lot deeper than that. He’s also trained extensively in Neuro Linguistic Programming since the late nineties and applies what he’s learned to sell more books, write faster and bring the best out of our authors – and to devastating effect too. Oh – I almost forgot – he’s fast – if I get an idea he’ll have it ready to go within days instead of weeks or months – this has always given us an edge!

A Bit More About Us

After we successfully self-published and sold-out of our first book entitled, The Gorillas Want Bananas, we soon caught the publishing bug and decided to pack up our lucrative consultancy business and do publishing full time. So we set up publishing firm – BookShaker.com in 2003 … and the rest, as they say, is history…

Our original claim to fame is that we managed to publish 37 books and achieve 5 best-sellers (making more than £30,000 in a single day with one book) within our first 2 years while carrying out all aspect of the business single-handedly. We did everything – including editing, typesetting, cover design, PR, sales copy, marketing and invoicing while keeping our overheads to a minimum. The way we were able to achieve so much without the need for employees is by systemising every aspect of the business (based on our Lean Marketing philosophy) and carefully managing our time. We’ll be sharing many of our secrets with you, if you’re interested, inside…

As this website goes live we have published almost 100 non-fiction titles through our Lean Marketing Press, BookShaker and NativeSpain imprints and we send our authors nice quarterly royalties of between 20% and 50%.

Where You Fit In

We make a nice living from books. We live where we want to live and spend our time doing pretty much what we want to be doing. We’d like to share how we’ve done it – and how others are doing it – with you so you can enjoy the same lifestyle as us while making the world a better place with your books.

We decided to make most of the content on this site members-only because we really will be sharing our biggest secrets and believe they are worth much more than the small membership fee required. We also decided to keep the doors closed so we can keep the dodgy vanity presses from getting their paws on our best info or preying on our members.

So, if you’re an author – whether self-published, published by a mainstream or reeling from the realisation that the “collaborative” press that promised you the earth was full of it and the mainstream publisher is just too busy to give your book the attention it deserves – then you’ll like what we’ve got inside.

See you there!