Category: Meet the Indie Publisher

BookBlast celebrates independent publishing

Interview | Andrew Latimer, co-founder, Little Island Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
No, neither. My parents are more interested in the business side of things – as in, “does it make money?” I’m running out of synonyms for “not yet”! Instead, I have an incredible English teacher to thank for my impecuniosity. He went through the entirety of Paradise Lost with me, line-by-line.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
I think so, although it took me a while to realise it. I went around the houses first – journalism, academia, writing – but found that publishing was a good fit for my temperament.

Has your vision from when you started Little Island Press two years ago changed?
In that we now publish fiction and essays – yes, in a big way. I started Little Island with only poetry in mind, but could not pass on some incredible projects, and our purview gradually widened. Yet, in another, more fundamental way, nothing has changed. We’re still committed to bringing together the best in literary innovation, design and production. “Real books,” as some have commented. Continue reading Interview | Andrew Latimer, co-founder, Little Island Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Rosemarie Hudson, founder, HopeRoad Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
No, I only started my career in publishing twenty years ago; previously I spent most of the time in the film industry.

Has your vision from when you started HopeRoad 7 years ago changed?
No, in that I still want to continue to publish authors and writings from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. It’s a big, rich vision that will last my lifetime.

How do you balance originality and profitability?
Our remit is to publish books of quality – to add a third word – that would otherwise not see the light of day. Profitability is something one can depend on when selling shoes, for instance – but book sales are mainly a gamble. Perhaps most publishers would agree with this! However, I believe in every single title we publish and gain great satisfaction from seeing these books in print and also from working with talented writers. We are still looking forward to that “big win”, but in the meantime, with occasional help from Arts Council England, along with grants for our translations, we are able to keep going, and to keep our standards high.

Continue reading Interview | Rosemarie Hudson, founder, HopeRoad Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, founder, Istros Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
I actually come from a working class family, and my parents didn’t even have bookshelves when I was growing up. But there was a good library nearby and at some point in my childhood I realized that books are one of the best things about life on this planet (at least in the man-made world).

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Despite the fact that my tutor at university predicted I would go into publishing, it wasn’t something I considered until later on. In my twenties I wanted to travel and worked a variety of menial jobs in order to fund that. Afterwards, I trained as a teacher, but my main subject was always literature. When I decided to found Istros, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world: a coming together of the disparate strands of my life into a meaningful whole.

Continue reading Interview | Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, founder, Istros Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Carolina Orloff, co-founder, Charco Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My father owned and ran a large bookshop right in the centre of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I am from originally. It was a bookshop that had been in the family for three generations, and where the likes of Borges, the Ocampo sisters and Bioy Casares had current accounts. Both my parents were and are great readers and I grew up surrounded by books from a very early age. No doubt my love for literature grew from that. I even started writing at an early age, and had a book of poetry published when I was thirteen.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Definitely in literature, in some form. I’ve always studied and worked with literature. I did an BA in Literature, followed by an MA in Translation and a PhD in Latin American Literature. I then lectured on literature, translated literature, examined literature papers and even wrote articles and books on one of Argentina’s most celebrated writers, Julio Cortázar.

Continue reading Interview | Carolina Orloff, co-founder, Charco Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Sam Jordison, co-founder, Galley Beggar Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
Yes, my parents were very encouraging. Always recommending books and passing things on to me, reading to me as a child, finding new things for me to read, feeding my Roald Dahl habit . . . My Mum was a librarian too.  

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Depends how you define start!  I started out writing books and working as a journalist (mainly writing about books) – and those experiences led me into publishing. But I’ve wanted to be around books ever since I realised I couldn’t sing and would never be Mick Jagger.

Has your vision from when you started Galley Beggar five years ago changed?
Not really. Our hope has always just been to publish the very best quality books we can. I guess the thing that has changed is that we now hope to really be able to nurture our writers and keep publishing them, and keep doing the best editorial and production jobs we can for them . . . So we’re looking at careers as well as individual books. But that was something we aspired to quite early on. I suppose the change is that we have a track record now, so don’t have that element of surprise or coming from nowhere. But I still feel and hope we offer something different. Continue reading Interview | Sam Jordison, co-founder, Galley Beggar Press | Indie Publisher of the Week