Author: Simon Bates

For some readers, the answer to this might seem obvious, or irrelevant. At a certain point in your career you can have the confidence that whenever you’re ready to talk to a book publisher they’ll be ready to talk to you. For others, though, I know this can feel like a fraught question. Too early…

This is a question that, as a Commissioning Editor, I was asked with some frequency. It’s easy when your job is to commission books to take it for granted that writing and publishing books is a good thing to do. As a bibliophile my instinct is to see books as a self-evident good. That said,…

When we were first trying to articulate the kind of books we wanted to publish “rigorous” and “readable” was the most succinct form of words we could come up with. As you can see from how often our website and other public facing materials use them, they still are. So what exactly do we mean…

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…

I’ve long been fascinated by the paradox of the sea – and really this applies to any large body of water, be it a great lake, or a navigable river, as well as the open ocean – that it is at once a barrier and a conduit. From a military point of view, sea borders…

Migration I am myself a migrant. I am less of one than I used to be, if that’s possible to say, but I remain a migrant. I spent most of the first 24 years of my life within about fifteen kilometres of Oxford, and then proceeded to spend the next twelve and a half years…