If you’ve read through our brief summary of why you should publish with us, you’ll have seen a reference to our personalised approach to publishing. Sure, that sounds great – who wants an impersonal approach to publishing – but what do we really mean by it?
You work one on one with me throughout
I am the commissioning editor, content editor, copy editor, typesetter, cover designer, inventory manager, marketing manager and salesperson for your book. That means there is one person you need to talk to about any aspect of your publication at any stage in the process. In the future, of course, I may not do all of these things personally, but even then I will have oversight of anything I’m not directly doing myself.
We’re ready to talk to you no matter what stage your project is at
We’re happy to engage with authors (and book editors) as early or late in the writing process as you are comfortable with. If you want to bring us something more or less fully formed that’s certainly fine. On the other hand we’re also happy to have a conversation about something you’re thinking of doing, but aren’t totally sure about yet. I’ve often found just having that initial chat with a commissioning editor can be clarifying for authors who have an idea but haven’t quite decided how best to pursue it. So whether you have a vague idea, several specific ideas to choose from, a draft proposal, a fully worked out proposal, or a full manuscript draft, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Because we’re directly engaged throughout, we’re both more joined up and more able to vary procedures
When I’ve worked for big publishers, the necessity to manage high volumes of throughput, through lots of pairs of hands efficiently, tended to make processes quite inflexible. Feedback on content or structure of a manuscript really needed to be resolved well before delivery. Manuscripts absolutely needed to be delivered all at once. Copy editing was a separate process using an editor who would normally only focus on technical language errors with no space at that stage to make structural or content changes unless absolutely critical.
At Tithebarn Press, we’re able to adjust how we work to suit you, at least to a greater extent. We can give content feedback at any point prior to delivery of the final manuscript, but will also offer it during the editing process if we feel the need. If you want to submit individual chapters for editing one by one, that’s an option. If you don’t want to prepare your own index, we’ll do it for you while also going over a final check of the proofs, something that most presses would leave up to you.
We’ll establish your needs early on, and work to support you as appropriate
The most obvious example of this is if you’re a non-native English speaker, in which case we’ll work with you to ensure we’re able to edit your English to a suitable standard, while accurately conveying the meaning you intended. If you’re keen to adapt your work to meet a less specialised readership than your immediate colleagues then we can help with that too. Or perhaps you’re at the other end of the scale, someone wanting to write a little less conventionally and confident in your own voice. We can give you the freedom to write the way you want to without imposing arbitrary constraints.
We don’t have rigid categories of books that we need to place your project within – it can be what it needs to be
For good practical reasons, large commercial presses will categorise every book, perhaps as a “monograph” “core textbook” “premium textbook” “supplementary textbook” and so on. As an author you often won’t be aware of this, except when you come up against the constraints those categories impose. That might include maximum and minimum lengths, whether the book is released in paperback, whether it gets a designed cover, what the maximum and minimum prices are and what marketing support the book receives.
Our smaller scale means we don’t have to think like this. Instead each book can be its own thing, and we make decisions about pricing and marketing based on the specific circumstances of the book and its author. All of our books are released in paperback with a designed cover, of course, but there’s also no absolute maximum or minimum lengths. We will tell you if we think a given manuscript (or proposed manuscript length) is too short or too long, but only on the basis of its own needs and those of its readers, not because “this is a monograph and those need to be between x and y length”.
We won’t always be able to give you everything you want, but we can always be clear about why
It comes back to the first point I made here in a way, but it bears further emphasis. There will always be things authors would like their publishers to do that their publishers are for whatever reason unable or unwilling to. There will inevitably be times when we have to have those conversations with our authors too. However, because we’re small and flexible, any such decisions will always be made on the merits of the case, and not because of the need to maintain uniform policies across the board. We can and will also be transparent about why we have made the decisions we have.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of what our personalised approach means, but I hope it gives you some sense of the scope of what this means. As always if you have any questions, please do feel free to email simon.bates@tbarnpress.com
