This week I’m going to take a break from offering publishing advice and instead give a short update on what is happening here at Tithebarn at the moment. Suffice to say it’s been an exciting first quarter so far.
To begin with, I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve signed our first two authors. More on the first of these in a moment. I won’t announce the details of the second project just yet, but if all goes to schedule we should have more news on that later this year. It feels great to be starting to put a publishing line up together and we should have a few more titles to announce in due course. We have a third proposal that’s just going out for review this week, and several others in active discussions.
Unrelated, but also very excitingly, I’ve just finished our first Tithebarn Press Online Publishing Seminar, discussing the ins and outs of academic book publishing with scholars at the University of Sussex. I hope everyone involved found it helpful, I certainly enjoyed it and we had an active and engaged Q & A session at the end. It was a simple format, with a one hour session, beginning with a slideshow presentation from me, focussed mainly on the early stages of planning and proposing an academic book, followed by an open question and answer session. On the latter part I now need to train myself out of saying “good question” in response to just about every question (I mean, they were good questions). If anyone reading this would be interested in having such a session in their faculty or department, do drop me a line on seminars@tbarnpress.com. We offer these for free as a way to expand our network and visibility, and I do my best to stay objective in my characterisation of the publishing industry and our competitors. I’m happy to coordinate across time zones however we can, I don’t think there’s anywhere that’s completely impossible.
Finally, as alluded to above, we have our first final manuscript in house and I’ve been copy-editing it over the past few days, having already given my more content-oriented feedback on the initial draft a few weeks ago. I’ll do a more full-throated announcement once we have files at the printers, but for now I’m delighted to be able to reveal the title and author, drumroll please…
The author is Malcolm Murfett, Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. Malcolm and I go back quite a few years, having worked on the Cold War in Asia book series that we founded together when I worked for Routledge. His support for what we’ve been trying to do here at Tithebarn has been tremendous, and we’re very privileged to be publishing his new book.
Said book is entitled Eden’s Alternative to Appeasement: The Anglo-American Strategy that Might Have Been, 1937-38 and will be published under our Power theme. As the title suggests, Malcolm tells the story of Anthony Eden’s attempts to organise an Anglo-American pushback against the Japanese in the Pacific while he was Foreign Secretary in Chamberlain’s cabinet. It’s a great historical “what if?” insofar as it offers the tantalising possibility of the democracies giving the Anti-Comintern dictatorships more reason to take their warnings seriously, before Germany’s invasion of Poland. It’s not a navel-gazing counter-factual though, but rather an exploration of the way foreign and security policy was negotiated not just between two great powers, but among the individuals representing different factions and hierarchies within those powers. Needless to say, it has many echoes of our own times.
We’ll have much more on this soon — including a book jacket and a release date — but I wanted to share this news with you now, both because it is exciting and because it explains why I don’t have time for one of my longer thematic updates this week.
That’s all for now, I’m off back to my copy-editing. If this news has inspired you to submit your own project to Tithebarn Press, then please do drop us a line on proposals@tbarnpress.com.
