This site opened in July 2023 with one post and no books. Today it lists seventeen books by four authors. All of them came out the same way: self-publishing on Amazon, in paperback and on Kindle. This post replaces that first welcome. It explains what self-publishing means for a small press and how a book is made here. It also says what has changed since the first title went up.
What self-publishing means for a small press
Self-publishing usually describes one author who publishes their own book. Here it describes a company that does the same thing for its own authors. MindSparkPress Ltd is not a service. We do not publish other people’s manuscripts and we do not sell packages to writers. We choose a subject, an author writes the book, and we take it to Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing.
That choice changes almost everything about how we work. There is no print run, because every paperback is printed when someone orders it. There is no warehouse and no distributor. There is no sales season, so a book comes out when it is ready and not before. And there is nobody between us and the reader. The reviews arrive on the Amazon page, and we read every one of them.
From one page to seventeen books
The pages on this site tell the story in order. The first two books were a workbook on healing childhood wounds by Lily Mindwell and a guide to a year-round vegetable garden by Benjamin Greenfield. In September 2023, Jeremy Payton added three volumes of ancient texts in modern English. They were the Apocrypha, the Books of Enoch and the Gnostic Gospels.
In 2024 the catalogue grew fastest. Megan Rush started her cookbooks for people whose diet is set by a medical condition. The first was for the air fryer after bariatric surgery. Then came the gastric sleeve, the gastric bypass and diabetes. Jeremy went on with the Book of Giants, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Thomas and the Book of Revelation. Lily wrote a workbook for couples. In 2025 Megan added a cookbook for diverticulitis, and the four authors kept revising the earlier editions.
Four authors, four subjects, seventeen books. Each author owns one field and writes only about that. It keeps the books honest: nobody here writes about diabetes one month and Gnostic gospels the next.
How a book is made here
Every title starts with a question that people search for and rarely find answered in plain words. What can I eat in the weeks after a gastric sleeve? What does the Book of Enoch actually say? How do I keep a small garden producing in winter? If we cannot name that question in one sentence, we do not start the book.
Then the author writes, and the writing gets edited more than once. We test a cookbook against the rules a doctor would give. We check an ancient text against the sources it comes from. A workbook must have exercises the reader can do that week, not only theory. When the manuscript is done, we lay out the interior for print and for Kindle. Then we design the cover and write the Amazon page. Self-publishing puts all of these steps in our hands, so there is nobody else to blame when one of them is weak.
Publication is not the end. Because we can replace the files at any time, we treat every book as a living edition, and we keep working on it. When a reader points out a mistake in a review, we fix it. When a recipe needs a clearer note, we add it. The book a reader buys today is usually better than the one from a year ago, and the same Amazon page shows both sets of reviews.
What self-publishing does not change
It does not change the reader’s test. A book still has to be useful within a week of buying it, or the reader returns it or forgets it. It does not lower the bar on accuracy. A cookbook for diabetics can do harm if it is careless, and a lazy translation can twist an old text. And it does not make marketing optional. A good book with a bad description sells nothing, and we have learned that the hard way with more than one cover.
What it changes is who decides. We decide what to publish, when, and at what price. In return, we accept that the reader decides everything else, in public, one review at a time. We quote those reviews on this site exactly as readers wrote them, including the ones that ask for more.
Where to go next
The company page says who we are and where to find us. Each author has a page here with all their books: Jeremy Payton, Megan Rush, Lily Mindwell and Benjamin Greenfield. The blog lists every book page on this site, each with a description, a look inside and a link to Amazon. The articles themselves live on the authors’ own sites, where a blog can go deeper than a book.
The photo chosen for this post in 2023 shows an empty frame held up over an empty road. That was the right picture then, because nothing was in it yet. We have kept it, and we still like it, but the road is less empty now.