Why Nespola exists

When we first started looking at self-publishing education, we saw the same thing everywhere we looked.

A creator with a YouTube channel would sell access to a course — a collection of pre-recorded videos explaining how Amazon KDP works. Sometimes there was a community forum attached, sometimes a private Facebook group. The promise was always the same: passive income, financial freedom, build a business from your laptop.

The delivery was always the same too. You bought the course, watched the videos, posted a few questions in the forum, and tried to figure it out. Some people made it work. Most didn't. And the ones who didn't rarely talked about it, because they blamed themselves — not the program that left them without support.

We know this because we were those people.

We didn't start Nespola as teachers or coaches. We started as publishers who got almost everything wrong.

We all came to Amazon KDP independently, drawn by the same promise everyone else heard: you can build income from books without being a writer. The math sounded simple. The reality wasn't.

Our early books were built on bad niche selections — topics that felt interesting to us but had no market demand. Our covers looked like they were made in PowerPoint. Our launches had no strategy — we published and hoped the algorithm would notice. It didn't.

We spent money on people that gave us information we could have found in a YouTube video. We joined communities where the most active members were affiliates selling more courses. We did everything the "gurus" told us to do, and the results were mediocre at best.

But we didn't quit. We kept publishing. We started tracking what actually worked and what didn't. We ran experiments. We studied the data. And slowly, painfully, we figured out a system.

Three things changed everything for us.

• The first was niche selection. We stopped guessing and started using data. Instead of publishing books about topics we liked, we published books in markets where buyers were already spending money and competition was manageable. This single shift turned unprofitable books into profitable ones.
• The second was portfolio thinking. We stopped thinking about individual books and started thinking about collections of titles that work together — diversifying risk, cross-promoting each other, and compounding royalties month after month. A single book is a lottery ticket. A portfolio of six or twelve titles in related niches is a business.
• The third was accountability. We realized that the difference between the publishers in our circle who succeeded and those who stalled wasn't talent or motivation — it was whether they had someone checking their work, holding them to deadlines, and catching mistakes before they cost money. The ones who had a partner made progress. The ones who were alone stopped showing up.

These weren't revolutionary ideas. But nobody in the publishing education space was putting them together into a real system. Courses sold information. We needed something that sold outcomes.

We decided to build what we wished had existed when we started.

Not a course. Not a community. Not a library of videos you watch at midnight and forget by morning. We wanted to build a company that actually publishes alongside its clients — that stays in the room from the first niche selection call to the twelfth published book.

A company where you don't just learn how to publish — you publish, with a team beside you that knows your portfolio as well as you do.

We wanted it to feel more like joining a startup than buying a product. Strategy sessions. Milestones. Daily check-ins. Accountability sprints. The kind of structure that makes progress inevitable, not optional.

That's what we built.

We called it Nespola.

The nespola is an Italian fruit — the medlar. It grows across southern Italy and Sicily, and it has an unusual quality: it cannot be eaten when first picked from the tree. The fruit is hard and sour. It needs time. You lay it on straw and wait. Days pass. Slowly, patiently, the nespola softens and sweetens until it becomes something worth savoring.

There is an old Italian proverb: "Col tempo e con la paglia maturano le nespole" — with time and straw, the medlars ripen.

Publishing works the same way. A book portfolio does not produce results overnight. It needs the right conditions, the right care, and above all, patience. One book ripens into two. Two into six. Six into a business that compounds, month after month, long after the initial work is done.

We chose the name because it captures what we believe: the best things are built slowly, with intention, and they reward those who are willing to wait.

Today, Nespola operates through the PublishingOS— our done-with-you publishing solutions that serves students across multiple countries.

Our free Skool community has grown to over 10,000 members, making it the fastest growing publishing community on the platform. Our students have published hundreds of books on Amazon KDP. Our founding team — Tommi, Nic, Manu, and Mark — still works directly with every person who joins the program.

We run three programs: Velocity, Accelerator, and Prestige. All three are six months long. They differ in scope and ambition, but they share the same core method: data-driven strategy, done-with-you execution, and relentless accountability.

We have built free tools because we believe publishers deserve better resources, whether they work with us or not. And we continue to refine our systems every single week based on what we learn from working on our students' portfolios and our company portfolio.

Our goal is not to become the biggest publishing education company. It is to become the most respected one.

We want "book portfolio" to become a mainstream concept — as natural as "stock portfolio" or "real estate portfolio." We want every serious publisher to have access to the tools, the strategy, and the support they need to build an asset that pays them for years.

We are building more tools. We are expanding our content. We are developing new ways to serve publishers at every stage of the journey — from someone who has never published a word to someone managing a catalog of fifty titles.

If you are reading this, you are early. The nespola is still ripening. And we would love to build with you.