This month is the tenth anniversary of both Spiral Publishing and Frank Kilgore’s book Far Southwest Virginia: A Postcard and Photographic Journey! To celebrate, we’re offering ten percent off everything in the store for the rest of the month. That includes merchandise, Far Southwest Virginia, and all of our fiction titles.
No code needed since the discount will be automatically added to your cart.
It’s just our way of saying thank you so much for your support over the years! We’re looking forward to the future more than ever!
Just in case you’re curious, below is a bit of history about how we got here and where we’re headed next.
Hope to see you along the way!
Way back in the early 2000s, I helped my uncle Frank Kilgore publish two science textbooks for high school students in the coalfield counties of far Southwest Virginia. I learned a bunch about page layout and design, scanning and touching up materials from many different sources, and working with print providers on big print runs.
Those projects came out through our nonprofit group Mountain Heritage, Inc., so that was the publishing imprint. They also weren’t for sale, which meant we didn’t have to worry about getting set up with retail channels and such.
That all changed beginning in 2012, when Frank decided to update his successful book Far Southwest Virginia: A Postcard Journey, written with Kathy Shearer.
He wanted to expand the book to include photographs, glass plate negatives, and other memorabilia, using the same landscape format of eleven inches by eight-and-a-half inches. During our two years of work on the project, I suggested switching to full color as well, since so many of our images would look great that way.
Between all the scanning, placing over a thousand images, and changing the format of the book, I had a lot of new and exciting skills to develop! And that’s before getting into setting up a website, getting ISBNs and barcodes, and listing the book with online retailers.
By the time we were ready for publication in November of 2014, I’d also started doing a lot of fiction writing and other creative projects.
Since we weren’t publishing this book through the nonprofit group, it was a perfect time to finally start a publishing company.
Believe it or not, the name was easy. I’d always loved spirals in nature, from galaxies to a gorgeous Romanesco broccoli we saw in a farmer’s market in Germany. Even our DNA is a type of spiral called a double helix.
So I registered a domain or two, created a logo, and Spiral Publishing was born!
I couldn’t have imagined ten years ago that we’d have over a hundred titles available between Frank, me, and my sweetie Jason A. Adams. So far that includes ten novels, fourteen novellas, twenty-six collections for fifty major publications, and over a hundred short stories.
One of my favorite challenges was in 2021, when I decided to write and publish a short story every week for the whole year. Quite a stretch, since I would have told you back in 2016 that I just wasn’t a short story writer. I succeeded, with one to spare! I’m still getting those stories added to our website for direct sales, so keep an eye out.
Several of the stories I wrote in 2021 made it into collections published that year, too.
And that year was the perfect example of one of the things I love most about indie publishing. I learned so much putting so many books together and digging into new inspirations, and I continue to learn constantly as the industry changes just about every day.
Our fiction titles cover just about every genre you can think of, too. From fantasy and science fiction to mystery and romance to contemporary fiction with no speculative elements at all, and everything in between.
I’ve got a new novella launching on November 15 to the usual retail outlets and already available on our website, and more novels, novellas, collections, and short stories on the horizon.
This year we also launched our online webstore, so folks can buy ebooks directly from us, and we’ll be adding print sales throughout 2025.
And we’ll be adding more merchandise to go along with our expanding line of fabulous Magic Cat mugs, pillows, and notebooks!
Thank you so much for reading about our publishing company and projects, past, present, and future. Readers keep us going and getting us back to the page to tell the next tale.
Be sure and take advantage of ten percent off through the end of November, and happy reading!