Tithebarn Press was founded in 2025 by Simon Bates, a former Routledge Commissioning Editor who has worked for academic and educational book publishers for the better part of two decades.
I founded Tithebarn Press to offer a more personal kind of publishing.
Having spent my career acquiring books for large publishers, I wanted to try something different – helping readers to find a range of books driven by curiosity and interest, and providing a personalised service to authors.
Tithebarn Press is grounded in the belief that other readers will be interested in many of the same things I am, and want to find well-written and rigorously researched books on a range of topics not necessarily confined to a single discipline.
Books are more than just content. They are labours of love both for their authors and for us. I wanted to be able to spend more time on each book I worked on, helping authors to write clearly and engagingly to keep academic work as accessible as possible.
About Me
I began my publishing career with Taylor and Francis in the UK, before being seconded to Singapore to develop a books publishing programme. Instead of returning home at the end of the secondment I stayed in Singapore with local publisher Marshall Cavendish, working with Oxford University Press on a collaborative programme. In 2014 I joined Routledge, founding a new Asia Pacific-based Social Sciences books programme that I developed for nine years, commissioning over 300 titles. You can see a selection of the titles I published at Routledge here.
In 2023 I returned to the UK, moving to the new town of Tithebarn – just outside Exeter, Devon – with my family. After leaving Routledge I took some time to think about what I wanted to do next. I missed working with authors and the excitement of building a new books programme, so I started to think about whether I could do those things on my own terms.
The more I considered the possibility, the more exciting it became, as I thought about what kinds of books I would like to publish. Not wanting to be too constrained by traditional subject areas, I alighted on the Thematic approach, which is at the core of Tithebarn Press. This approach allows a latitude not typically available in more traditionally siloed organisations, while still giving readers, authors, and me a clear sense of focus.
Tithebarn Press is grounded in my belief that readers are driven by curiosity.
At Tithebarn Press we maintain the same approach to peer review and overall rigour that you would expect from an academic publisher. We want readers to be confident that what they are reading is worth their time and can be relied upon to be accurate.
We work closely with authors throughout the writing process to ensure each book is accessible to non-specialist readers, with a minimum of jargon, but without simplifying the big ideas.
