The story
The Challenge
Akakia Publications has 40 years of book publishing experience, but its old site looked and worked like it was frozen in 2011.
- Dense, icon-heavy navigation sat over a busy background pattern of book spines and competed for attention with promotional banners for a lottery-style writing contest and a TV segment
- Empty grey placeholder tiles sat next to real products, with inconsistent formatting and no clear categorisation across listings
- The site did not explain royalty terms anywhere, so first-time authors had to guess how much of their own book’s profit they would see
- There was no way to get an instant quote, so each serious enquiry needed manual back and forth before a prospective author knew what anything would cost
Our Approach
Kickass Online rebuilt the brand and the platform together.
- Rebrand: Kickass Online designed a new logo and a clean, leaf-based green identity and carried it across the homepage, shop, and each product page.
- Instant quote calculator: A live cost calculator sits on the homepage, so a prospective author can enter page count, size, and copy count and get a price in seconds.
- Transparent royalty messaging: The site explains the 70% net profit split in detail, including what gets deducted.
- Full-service breakdown: Ten individual services, from typesetting and cover design to ISBN allocation, copyright registration, and Amazon distribution, are laid out with their own icons, so an author can see which services they can pick and choose.
- Full e-commerce rebuild: Kickass Online built a WooCommerce shop that holds hundreds of published titles across dozens of genre categories, with filtering by category and price, and retired the empty placeholder tiles and inconsistent listings of the old site.
The Solution
A self-publishing platform that looks and works like the professional service it is. A first-time author can get an instant quote, see how their royalty is calculated, and browse a large, well-organised catalogue.
The Result
The rebuilt platform now runs a catalogue of 358 published titles across more than 40 genre categories. A wall of verified five-star Google reviews sits on the homepage, and the 70% royalty split is explained in full before an author commits.