ESSENTIAL BUSINESS

About Essential Business

We are a small, independent publishing company. We're often asked why we would set up such a venture in what is an enormously competitive market. In this podcast, our founder and managing director, Julie Stanford, talks about the background of our company and explains how our books and workbooks came about.

Julie has run her own businesses for over 25 years and believes that it takes a certain type of person to run a business. That is, people with drive, courage and the ability to keep going when most people would falter or stop altogether. She wants our books to help those people gain crucial information quickly and easily, when they need it.

She's a woman on a mission!

MP3 File

New ways of learning...but let's not throw away the old

I'm currently researching new online software for e-learning.

We want to add another dimension to our workbooks and worksheets, so being able to offer readers the ability to complete the material online is exciting. Online stuff is certainly great, it's interactive, brimming with video and flash animation and audio files, and I enjoy looking at new ways of helping people learn about business, but...

 ...I hope that nothing will ever replace books. I suppose I would say that, currently being a publisher of printed books, but I'm also an avid reader and there's something about holding the book, turning the page, reading into the early hours; about the intimacy and relationship between book and reader, that a web page simply can't replace.

Or am I just embarrassingly old-fashioned?

Move over Kindle; I'm in the middle of a cracking paperback. 

I'm loving Issuu

One of the challenges of being a small, independent publisher is getting our products known about. We don't have the clout to get our books into the big bookshops (particularly not on those very expensive tables that greet and tempt you as the walk into the shop!) and I'm no celebrity, so can't use fame (or infamy) for some much-needed PR. In other words, we have all the marketing challenges of any small business! Hence my excitement when I came across Issuu, a free web resource where I can upload any document (PDF, Word file, text file) and have it published as a page-turn document, like this:

Open this publication

So now, when we publish something new, I have a way of showing an example of the book. I don't have to rely on beguiling copywriting (not my forté...I leave that to our writers!). I can 'show and tell' instead.

Small publisher, big ideas. Now helped by Issuu.