Or, how you can make £24k a year from small press publishing, ethically and sensibly, with minimal headaches and a 20-hour working week. No, really. Though it’s been a few years since I ran Valley Press entirely on my own, for some reason I find myself coming back to the…

Indie publishing has always delivered its fair share of horror stories; sadly, most of them involve booksellers and percentage points, rather than spooky clowns, sexy werewolves and so on. …

In this sequel to the now-legendary series ‘Small Press Publishing for Profit’, Valley Press founder Jamie McGarry shares his answer to a rarely-asked question: if your publishing house had fifteen full-time staff, what would they all do? Last year, when I wrote ‘Small Press Publishing for Profit’ (see parts 1…

The ideas in this post, written in September 2016, served me well for a couple of years, and got me to the point of being able to take on some permanent staff and turn my business into a Limited Company. I hope you find them useful. I’ve heard the following…

A follow-up to this recent post, which examined the performance of thirty-one small press publications, looking at units sold vs. profit for each. Below, I answer some questions that have arisen since the original article. Can I ask where the *other* genres, besides single-author poetry collections, appeared on your graph? …

A post in which Valley Press founder Jamie McGarry attempts to apply some of the thinking behind ‘big data’ — and data analysis in general — to the world of small-press publishing, using only four charts (we promise). Mention ‘big data’ to a high-flying publishing CEO and they will rub…

The long-awaited fifth and sixth installments of a series in which Valley Press founder Jamie McGarry reveals his tried-and-tested formula for making a living as a self-employed literary publisher. This week: what to do after you’ve broken even, and how to re-invest the results. Back in the spring, I wrote…

The fourth installment of a series in which Valley Press founder Jamie McGarry reveals his tried-and-tested formula for making a living as a self-employed literary publisher. This week: pricing books, print economics, and overheads. This series began by explaining how a ‘small press publisher’ could make £3 from the sale…