In the coming months I plan to write here about how Tithebarn Press (TBP from here on out) is developing, expand on each of our core Themes, and keep you all updated on what’s in the works. For now though I’d like to start by saying a bit more about why I’m starting TBP and what my vision for it is.
Having had a year or so away from work, not quite finding the right new role to take on, I found I was really missing the time I used to spend talking to authors and helping them to develop book ideas. I’d increasingly catch myself wondering whether I could somehow do it anyway, without the imprimatur of an established brand and the support of a publishing machine. The appeal was obvious – not having to toe a corporate line, not having to adapt my commissioning to a remit set by somebody else, having my hands on all the levers – but the apparent pitfalls were legion. Then one day I talked myself into a different approach: what if all the obstacles I anticipated were surmountable? If I were to try this, what would it look like and how would I get there? I poked about here and there on the internet, talked to some old friends and asked some former authors to share their thoughts about publishing. I concluded that yes, actually this just might be a thing that I could do.
With the question of how – to at least some degree – answered, I progressed to what. My first instinct was to try to commission books that I would like to read, because I suspect there are many prospective readers like me. Literate, curious people who are interested in ideas, and how things work beyond their own particular specialisations, who want to read books that aren’t dense with jargon and obscure terminology, but are rigorously argued with good standards of evidence. I’d published books more or less like this while I was at Routledge, and while they were often my favourites, they tended not to get the attention from the machine that I’d have liked. Big presses tend to be good at selling textbooks adopted for specific student courses and modules, and monographs that can be produced cost-effectively and sell sufficiently within mainly library and subscription channels. Books that fall between these two stalls, however, can be very challenging, neither sufficiently served by the near-automatic systems in place to sell library titles, nor justifying the more intensive involvement of textbook sales teams. An operation putting out thousands of new titles per year just doesn’t have the space to highlight all of those titles that aren’t optimised for its most effective channels.
It seems to me that there is space for a smaller operation, focussing on small numbers of titles that are all in this space – not simply library books, but not really textbooks either. There’s another question of course – what will these books be about? Just whatever I personally happen to find interesting is, alas, not really a sufficient proposition. I knew I needed to have some degree of specialisation, but at the same time I wanted room to be eclectic. That’s why I’ve opted to try for a thematic approach to our publishing programme. What this means is, as you’ll see elsewhere on our site, we don’t publish within specific subject divisions, but instead under a series of big themes. Over time I’m hoping we’ll expand these (and I’m very keen to hear suggestions of new themes we might add), but to begin with I’ve selected the themes of Power, Laughter, Seafaring and Migration. You can find more about each of these on their respective Theme pages on this site, and I’ll also be taking a deeper dive into my hopes for each of these in future blog posts. What’s important to say about these themes collectively is that they are intentionally conceived as broad and cross-disciplinary. I have ideas about the kinds of books I’d like to find for each of them, but I’m also excited to find new projects within each of them that I would never come up with on my own.
The last thing to mention, both because it’s part of what excites me about TBP and because I think it’s an important part of what we bring to the publishing ecosystem, is our level of support. Every book we publish will have my personal involvement in a way that just wasn’t possible when I was just a Commissioning Editor. While I’m always happy to let authors who know what they are doing do their thing, I’m now much more available to provide advice on structure, tone and theme, as well of course as providing copy-editing support later on in the process. That makes every book we publish a labour of love for me almost as much as for its author.
Watch this space for more on how we’re progressing, what services we’ll be offering to authors, more details about the Themes we’re looking to explore and of course news on titles as they’re forthcoming.
