End of Year Blog Post from the Publisher 2025

End of Year Blog Post from the Publisher 2025

Hello everyone,

Thank you so much for being part of the Grace Bell community this year. I am grateful for the support, prayers, and kindness that Grace Bell Publishing (GBP) has received since opening earlier this year.

Starting a publishing company has definitely felt like climbing a really high mountain. It feels like I am only just beginning the ascent. It is beautiful, fresh, and a lot of hard work!

I am grateful for finding a wonderful distributor, Woodslane. They have been kind and supportive of Grace Bell Publishing.

As a new company, GBP is moving very slowly with the build up of our portfolio of books. Earlier this year, we opened to submissions from authors and illustrators. It has been lovely and encouraging to see many beautiful stories. I am still reading through them all! As a publisher, I’m a bit of a snail, and since business is a marathon, not a sprint, we will only be taking on a few (1-3) titles to begin with. Hopefully we can scale from there.

For readers not familiar with the publishing industry, GBP is a traditional publisher, which means we pay the author royalties and we pay for the printing, design, editing, etc. of the book. This is actually a huge outlay of cost, and a massive leap of faith when taking on a manuscript.

GBP will be publishing books for both the general book market and the Christian market. Some titles will be secular. The key word is wholesome. I want readers to feel hope and joy when they read GBP titles. As a publisher, I want to publish books of light.

This year, GBP was mostly focused on getting the business established. It took far longer than expected. (Back to the mountain analogy, it is like when you think the summit is just ahead, but you realise it is another bend!)

Another lovely part of getting the business up and running has been making new acquaintances and catching up with writing friends. I have enjoyed getting to know some of the Omega Writers and the Christian Booksellers Association of Australia.

To end the year, we have a Black Friday sale running across November, with 25% off products, perfect for some Christmas shopping. The code is Grace25.

Looking ahead to 2026, our first kid fiction titles will be released, starting with Oopsie Gardeners in March 2026. Oopsie Gardeners is GBP’s “first pancake” and was written in-house. When I cook pancakes, the first one always turns out a bit off, so when I was thinking about producing the first GBP book (our first pancake!) I was feeling far too stressed to take on someone else’s manuscript. Hence, Oopsie Gardeners was developed as our first pancake, and it is definitely not perfect but it is a really funny chapter book. My favourite part is when the Oopsie Gardeners put real prunes on the bushes instead of pruning the bushes.😅

Thank you again for being part of the Grace Bell community.

Merry Christmas! 

Justine