Author: Simon Bates
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What does the future of book publishing look like?
I’ve been working in publishing long enough to know that anybody who tells you they know what the industry will look like on a ten or twenty year time scale is probably either deluded, or trying to sell you something. Quite probably both. In fact predicting the future in publishing is actually quite paradoxical. The…
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The end of our first calendar year
The start of 2026 marks four months since the public launch of Tithebarn Press. The change of year feels like a good time for reflection on how far we’ve come already and where we’re hoping to get to this coming year. If we’re tracking progress over 2025 then we really need to go back to…
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Merry Christmas
I’m taking a little break this week to spend time with my family, with just a couple of bits of manuscript to look at. A significant proportion of my regular readers won’t be celebrating Christmas, but for those who are — whether you’re roasting chestnuts on an open fire, or throwing another shrimp on the…
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How to write a good editorial blurb
I should begin this week’s update by being clear about my terms. In recent years the word “blurb” has commonly come to refer to what most of us in the industry call “endorsements”, that is to say recommendations by third parties that are reproduced on or in your book in order to help sell it.…
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How to choose a title for your book
It probably won’t surprise you that this can be one of the thorniest questions for publishers and authors to discuss. Authors often get very set on a particular title that appeals to them, whereas publishers typically have a very prescriptive view of what a title should and should not say. Alternatively, some authors don’t have…
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What we do with your manuscript
We’ve been talking about proposals and reviewing for some time now, and so I thought this week we’d go into a bit more detail on manuscripts. Specifically, what it is that we at Tithebarn Press do with manuscripts once they arrive. I should stress that whereas in some of my recent updates I’ve talked in…
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How to be an ideal proposal reviewer
Last week I wrote about why you should say yes as often as you can when asked to review book proposals. This week, on the basis that if a job is worth doing it is worth doing well, I thought I’d write about what this actually involves, and how to be a model reviewer. As…
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Why you should consider being a reviewer
Over the past few weeks we’ve talked about how the proposal review process sits at the core of academic book publishing. The entire process depends upon academics giving up their time to enter into good faith criticism of book proposals. This week I wanted to talk a little about why reviewing is a good thing…
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Responding to reviews
Last week I wrote about what the review process is for, this week I’m going to talk about the response stage. This is the part of the process where we send you your reviews, and ask you to provide us with a response. This is a vital stage in the process, and also illustrates how…
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Why do we review book proposals?
One of the things we’ve had to consider quite carefully at Tithebarn Press, is what the function of reviews is in our publishing and how we go about undertaking them. I’m delighted to say that this has been especially on my mind lately as our first formal book proposals are now coming in. It’s an…
