Introduction: Why This Book and What Will You Get From It

Why Did I Write This Book?

It had long bothered me that many of the excellent manuscripts I’d edited over the decades never found a publisher but languished instead in a bottom drawer. It struck me as a terrible shame. So I decided to do something about it. Not coincidentally, I was grappling with cancer at the time and needed something positive in my life. I needed to make something right

Perhaps this is not the best reason to start a publishing company.

The past eight years have been a learning curve with considerable frustration, many dead ends and the occasional stunning success. Learning how to be a publisher has been jaw-droppingly inefficient.

I want to make it clear that I’d spent an awful lot of time on the internet researching how to be a publisher. I’d done my due diligence.

Yet, I learned that what worked for small publishers (that were nonetheless larger than I was) didn’t work for me. Typically, small publishers had access to skilled workers, agents and distributors. They had access to funding and economies to scale. I didn’t.

Self-publishers were a different animal. Too frequently they operated without a filter, and suggestions for improvement were beyond basic: get a proper cover, get it edited, tell a story, etc.

Occasionally I’d be in that long dark teatime of the soul and grumble: Why is information for micro publishers not out there?

So, I’m sharing what I know in the hope that all of you out there will have an easier ride of it. This guide lays out in simple terms how to go about the job of publishing at a very small scale.

What is a Micropublisher?

Micropublishing is publishing at so small a scale that it doesn’t even qualify as a small business. To qualify as a small publisher in the UK you need to publish 12-15 titles a year and/or have an annual turnover of at least £50,000 ($70,000USD). It’s similar in the USA and Canada. In a good year, I manage about five titles and have a turnover of around £10,000. I’m too small to be a small business. I’m micro.

In the USA and Canada, a micropublisher might be called an “indie”. But the word indie has become meaningless. Any publisher that doesn’t belong to the Big 5 is called an indie, and there is a rather large number of substantially sized indies. Bloomsbury (which published the Harry Potter series) was a medium-sized publishing company and now is strategically swallowing up small fry. But it’s still an indie. Micropublishers have nothing in common with that kind of indie. Literally nothing.

So I’m not going to use the term “indie” or “small business”.

Besides micro publishers like me, there are other kinds of micropublishing: a writer’s group, where a clutch of authors gets together and publishes themselves under one umbrella; a college which has creative writing and/or art classes and wants to produce a few books a year to showcase their students’ talents; and businesses for marketing purposes.

Many businesses publish a few titles a year to help to discreetly and organically promote their products. For example: glossy artbooks about wine from a vineyard; intriguing house designs from architects and interior designers; highly illustrated stories from a co-op of illustrators; non-fiction about overcoming adversity from a wellness NGO; the history of gems from a jeweller. There is no expectation that these books will make money. They’re about showcasing and promoting and nudging.

TRUE STORY: I edited and then helped the author to self-publish books. He had a PhD in mathematics from Imperial College, a post-doc from Harvard and worked as a consultant in the IT industry. According to him, too few people with a degree in data science truly understood the maths. So he set up a little publishing company and produced a book of mathematics a year appropriate for mid-level professionals in the industry. While the books would undoubtedly help those in the industry, he was also raising his profile in the industry and promoting himself as an expert.

So this book of mine is helpful to all sorts of “publishers”.

Equally, let me lay out clearly what this book is NOT. It is NOT how to write a murder mystery or a romance. It is NOT a book about how to adroitly use Kindle Select versus Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Or how to get likes on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram. It is NOT a guide to syntax, diction or editing mark-ups. Or how to use InDesign to create a PDF. There are loads of books, blogs, videos and podcasts available on those topics, some of which I’ve found to be useful.

This is – to the best of my knowledge – the only book on micropublishing. And I wrote it because there is a resounding silence about the specific needs of micropublishers.

I would go so far as to say that we have more in common with other tiny businesses than we do with even small publishers. I’ve had useful conversations with a man who started a travel agency, a fashion designer selling her own work, a couple who fix crumbling old iron fireplaces and an opera buff who created an opera company. These microproducers are encountering the same kinds of problems that I am, and we share useful tips about how to succeed.

Publishing is project management. It’s the journey that a work takes from its creator to its buyer. Along the way, the micropublisher has to learn how to work with creators, be an accountant, oversee a project from beginning to end, learn new technology, market to a niche and strategise for development. And that’s just for starters. It’s challenging, to put it mildly. And fun. And deeply fulfilling.

If you’re a micropublisher then this guide might offer information appropriate to your reality: terminology, processes, strategies. Throughout, I’ll be telling you what I’ve done, honestly and openly. I’ll share my successes and failures in the hope that you can build on the former and avoid the latter.

If you look at the Table of Contents, you’ll see exactly what I am telling you: the big picture and the little, the money and the marketing, the organising and the fun. You might already know some of it. In which case, skip that chapter.

Step by step, this book will take you through the growth necessary to create a vibrant micropress based on your own goals and skills. Your micropress will not look like my micropress, Claret Press. It will instead be exactly the kind of publishing house that you want it to be. So this book is not an IKEA pictogram where we all end up with the same Billy bookcase. Instead, it assumes that you are thoughtful and can apply the knowledge to the specifics of your own situation.

My experience has been that people in publishing are the nicest group of people you’ll ever meet. We are not each other’s competition. The Big 5 and Netflix and video games are our competition, as is the sheer exhaustion at the end of our day. I hope that the readers of this book will gain something from it and become more efficient and effective publishers, producing and selling to an improved standard, with more joy and less frustration, greater success and fewer mistakes.

My best wishes to all of you.