Welcome back to this continuing series aimed at those looking to start, and successfully run, a small publishing house. In part one, I defined the term small press publishing, offered some thoughts on why it may be a worthwhile pursuit, and explained my background/why I was writing this series. …

Hi folks. I’m back, with a new series of insights, ideas, best practices, “how-tos” and business plans, all intended to help with the seemingly-impossible task of successfully running a small publishing house in this crazy decade. For starters, let’s look at the “big picture” and then zoom back in. What is small press publishing? For…

or, ‘what Jamie thinks you should do, and in what order, to make books happen in this crazy modern world’ Those familiar with my output on the subject of small press publishing will be bracing themselves for a lot of financial talk in this article, at least one graph, and…

Last week I posted ‘A One-Page Business Plan for a One-Person Publishing Company’, and since then there’s been the usual deluge of comments, queries and requests in my inbox. Rather than answering everyone individually, I thought I’d collate all the extra information into a new post — so here we…

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? …