Rebranding: Why My Publishing Company Needed a New Name

The last month has been a rebranding exercies for me in terms of the publishing arm of my business. I have changed the name of my hybrid publisher AIA Publishing to Alkira Publishing. Why? Because someone stole our name and has used our good reputation to gain legitimacy for a business that doesn’t appear to share our integrity or care for our authors. Here’s the story of how I got to the point of having to make such a radical rebranding move as to change the business name.

The problem

The first I knew that someone else had started using the name AIA Publishing was when I received an email via the contact form on my website from a person I’d never heard of who was asking for their money back. This person wasn’t one of my authors. I had never worked with them in any capacity, nor had I ever taken money from them. I told them they had the wrong person and forgot about it.

Until it happened again with a different person, and this one was very angry because they’d been promised a money-back guarantee, but they couldn’t even get onto the people to even ask for a refund.

Ouch!

At this point, I internet searched for AIA Publishing. I’d done the same when I set up the business, and at that time no one else used that name. This time, however, I came up with someone running courses who was using an URL that was the same apart from the addition of one period.

They must have known we existed because when they applied for the URL they would’ve discovered that that URL aiapublishing was taken! They would have had to add in the period or choose a different name. Why would you choose the exact same name as one already being used by another business? I would never do that. Clearly it was naive of me to assume that others wouldn’t either, but that assumption was why I never considered trademarking AIA Publishing.

My attempt to rectify the problem

Their business hadn’t been running long at that point, so I tried to contact them to ask them to please use a different URL and name for their course. I discovered why people were contacting us. Their URL led only to a log-in page. No information, no way to contact the owners, nothing. No wonder I was getting emails from upset people. I contacted them through their Facebook page and never heard back, confirming my poor impression of their business.

And without having the name trademarked I couldn’t threaten legal action. There was nothing I could do.

The confusion deepens

But the emails kept coming, several a month. I even had a bit of text ready to copy and paste into my reply, telling them the difference in the URLS.

Then someone who was on one of my email lists contacted me and said that a couple of men were on YouTube pretending to be us and running a scam.

Double ouch. Pretending to be us? I didn’t watch their video, but the person said they were promising ‘big money’ from selling audio books. How many people make ‘big money’ from selling a book? I’d never make such a promise.

So I put a big red box on our contact page, asking people to check that they had the right business and explaining the difference between the URLs.

Still I got contacts from their upset clients having all kinds of problems. I really felt for them. Clearly the red box wasn’t enough, so I put a checkbox in the contact form asking them to verify that they had read the red box and to confirm that they were contacting the correct business.

Still – unbelievably – I got emails from their disgruntled clients.

I laugh now at how ridiculous our contact form became, but I thought the emails a relatively minor inconvenience, and the alternative – changing a name – seemed too daunting. It’s a major rebranding exercise.

Was our reputation suffering?

And then I discovered a 2 star rating on Google business given by someone with whom I’d never worked – not an editing, cover design or publishing client. And I found blog posts titled things like ‘Is AIA Publishing a Scam?’ in which the writers shared their frustrations. Clearly the other business’s customers weren’t getting what they were promised, and clearly anyone researching us could read just one of those SEO titles and avoid us, thinking they were talking about us.

Triple ouch!

At this point, I realised – perhaps belatedly – that to avoid them staining our reputation, I’d have to change our name. I was reticent to undertake such a major rebranding exercise, but I also realised that the AIA part of the AIA publishing didn’t say very much unless you knew what it meant – Awesome Independant Authors.

What’s in a name?

Finding a new name that’s speaks to something in your business and that someone else hasn’t already taken isn’t easy. I wanted a name starting with A, not too far from AIA in the alphabet in case anyone was looking for us under the AIA Publishing name. I gave up when I couldn’t come up with anything not already in use, then I realised that the AI in AIA Publishing could be seen as meaning Artificial Intelligence, and we have nothing to do with that. We pride ourselves on the very human care we take of our authors and their books. Clearly it was time for a change.

Out with the old, in with the new. I just had to find what the new would be.

Eventually I discovered the Aboriginal word Alkira. I means sunny, bright or happy place. And that describes my publishing business well. We’re a happy refuge for authors trying to navigate the shark-infested waters of independent publishing. There are businesses and even trademarks with Aikira in their name, but no Alkira Publishing. Until now.

Now AIA Publishing is Alkira Publishing

And I plan to trademark the newname. I’ve already registered the business name in Australia, but that’s not the same as trademarking it.

Outdated branding

I’m glad I’ve done it. We changed our logo and changed our name but kept the rest of the branding the same. Same colours, same mission, same people, everything. This change hasn’t changed the brand so much as deepened it. It’s a much better name than AIAP ever was. The AIA came from my Awesome Indies Book Awards days back in 2012. Then it was simply AIA, now it’s AIAB, a change I requested when I stopped managing it. I set up that evaluation system for independently published books, then decided it was better to help authors publish well than evaluate them after publication when it was too late for most of them to fix any issues. I ceased all involvement with them a long time ago, so really the AIA was outdated.

Do you like the new name? I love it, and I love the new logo as well.