Category: Uncategorized

I’ve written previously about when to propose your book and of course you can always refer to our book proposal form as well as our guidance notes to help you complete it . After last week’s tips on writing your manuscript I thought it would be helpful to highlight some major do’s and don’ts for…

This is in an area where I’ve picked up quite a few tips over the years. As always with such things your mileage may vary and there is no right way to go about writing a manuscript. Getting advice from a publisher about writing is rather like getting advice from a Catholic priest about sustaining…

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…