IndieBooks partners with Endeavour Media

IndieBooks has partnered with Endeavour Media, the UK’s leading independent digital publisher, for the distribution of the digital editions of some of our books. IndieBooks will continue to handle the print distribution for all our titles while Endeavour will take over the digital editions of a selection IndieBooks’ growing catalogue.

Read The Bookseller press release here.

The following titles are now available in digital format, and, to celebrate, are free for this week only!

Explaining Cameron’s Comeback, Sir Robert Worcester, Roger Mortimore, Paul Baines and Mark Gill

Explaining Cameron’s CatastropheSir Robert Worcester, Roger Mortimore, Paul Baines and Mark Gill

White PantherJanez Janša

The Ballad of Curly Oswald, Curly Oswald

King’s Company, Jessamy Taylor

Quintember, Richard Major

*Please note that not all of our books will be involved in the partnership with Endeavour. If you are an author who wishes to submit a title for our consideration and does not wish to have your work digitally released this way,  it is not compulsory and you can still submit on our website.*

A Culpepperian Christmas (in January)

Last week we welcomed one of our most prolific authors, Richard Major, back to the UK. Richard is hard to pin down, teaching at universities in Italy, America, Australia, India, Slovenia and Hungary, and currently living in South Africa.

Since the beginning of 2017 we have had the pleasure to publish his titles Attu, begat and Parricide, as well as the much-anticipated paperback edition of Quintember, his debut novel, so it seemed a good time to celebrate.

We enjoyed two launches last week, one in London and one at Oxford university, where Richard studied Theology. We had great feedback both on the new cover style for the Felix Culpepper series (Quintember and Parricide) which will be carried forward to future titles, and for the handy, pocket-sized begat.  We also found out that Richard looks right at home reading from his novels under the light of a chandelier…

 

Magdalen College, Oxford

 

 

 

The Mitre, London

 

 

With Quintember and Parricide being just the tip of the iceberg of the misdemeanours of Felix Culpepper, we thoroughly look forward to working with Richard more in the coming years.

 

The new cover designs for volume 1 and 2 of the misdemeanours of Felix Culpepper

 

Media:

http://www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/richard-major-publishes-begat/

http://www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/alumnus-richard-major-shortlisted-for-the-peoples-book-prize/

http://www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/richard-major-publishes-illustrated-novel/

 

Back to the blog

We’ve been a little quiet recently as we took a short break to focus on upcoming publications, but we’ll be posting lots more into this new year. In the meantime we are excited to share with you some of the titles we have been working on!

White Panther by Janez Jansa
Quintember by Richard Major (in paperback)
Parricide by Richard Major
Coming to Terms: Cambridge In and Out by Charles Moseley
and Fame & Faces by Sophie Loussouarn

INDIEBOOKS 2018.jpg

We’ll be adding more information on each of these over the coming weeks so make sure to keep an eye out if there are any that take your fancy.

We also offer reduced prices on all our titles when you order directly from our website. White Panther, Quintember and Parricide are all currently available for pre-order for just £7.95, and Coming to Terms is available now for £10. Fame & Faces will be available for pre-order in Spring 2018 (you can sign-up to the mailing list here, for a reminder).

Happy new year!

 

Sir Reg: “Britain Backs Brexit”

Sir Reginald Futtock, the chair of the Government’s Brexit Advisory Committee and author of “Mr Brexit – the Man with the Plan” (out this September) has asked us to allow him to offer some reassurance to the country at this time of National Confusion.

I’ve been watching the results of the election from my villa in Cancun and feel the time has come to silence some of the more excitable speculation about our plans for Brexit.

Take it from me, this election has been a triumph for Brexit. After all, when you add up all the parties who back leaving the EU, it comes to over 600 MPs. The pro-EU parties have lost seats like a BA computer!

It’s hardly surprising. After all, we’ve been saying how Brexit will liberate our country and bring unparalleled prosperity (for the Few, and perhaps even some of the Many, though that doesn’t matter so much). Fortunately the People had a choice between one leader who was lukewarm for Remaining but has converted to Leaving; and another leader who has believed in Leaving since 1973.

And now the People have spoken, they can clear off again while we get back to the serious business of negotiating our way out of the European octopus and into the arms of the Chinese.

Jiānqiáng wěndìng

 

Guest Post: Sir Reg Futtock on Brexit Day 1

We’re delighted that Sir Reginald Futtock has taken time off from his busy schedule planning Britain’s post-Brexit economic miracle to share his thoughts in the first of a series of guest posts…

So, Day 1: and though I claim only part of the credit, so far so good. Yes, a few fly-by-night, here-today-and-gone-tomorrow outfits such as Lloyds of London have announced plans to shift jobs to the continent. But balance that against today’s spontaneous outpouring of national joy as we British throw off the oppressive yoke of the Brussels Eurocrats.

Brexit march

A typical scene of British people expressing their hatred of the EU. (Credit: Ed Everett)

Yes, there will be sacrifices. With the devaluation of the Pound, a decent bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild now costs well over £1,000. No doubt you will have noticed similar price rises in your own weekly shop.

But be reassured: the hard work of building the economic miracle continues. My Brexit Advisory Committee is looking at a range of soft, hard and harder-still options, of which ‘Eye-watering Brexit’ is the current favourite. In this scenario, we’ll have to replace up to £230 billion of annual exports to the EU. That’s a lot of boxes of speciality tea and pots of damson jam we’re going to have to shift to the rest of the world over the next few years. But it can be done.

It reminds me of my time at British Leyland. For all the sneering and jeering about the Austin Allegro by elitists such as my old friend and fellow embroidery enthusiast Jeremy Clarkson, we sold over 600,000 of them. (Almost entirely in Britain, as it happens, but that’s a detail.) With the right products, the right spirit and a large dose of tax breaks for the country’s wealth creators, we can Make Brexit Work!

And if you can’t wait for my book to come out in August to discover how you too can benefit financially from Brexit, then look out for my next guest post.

 

 

Curly Covers; or, the Secret Talents of Authors

One of the fun bits of publishing that readers don’t usually see is the process of working up the cover design. We produce a design brief and the artist or designer will provide some rough ideas which we can discuss and also share with the author. Our forthcoming title The Ballad of Curly Oswald is set in a hippie commune in the 1970s, and the mix of domesticity and drug culture was one of the themes that showed up in the very first concepts.

BCO image1 BCO image3 BCO Cover Mockup v1

Ignoring our designer’s wayward spelling for a moment, this is the stage where we start to think what we do want by seeing examples of what we don’t – from this batch, we said no to the fonts but yes to exploring the idea of an abandoned caravan, which picks up the theme of the narrator, Curly Oswald, recalling his lost childhood, and the idea of an abandoned caravan that had been his childhood home waiting to be rediscovered in the depths of an English forest.

But then the mysterious author – we still have no idea who Curly is or where he or she is based – offered us some idea of her or his own. (We should perhaps have guessed they might be good, as the Curly character grows up to be a designer himself.)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Screen Shot 2017-03-30 at 10.59.05

The left one perhaps falls into the ever-present trap of trying to tell too much of the story (what we call the Agatha Christie Cover syndrome – that’s for another post) but we simply couldn’t improve on the one on the right (save some tweaking of the title).  And you’ll be able to judge for yourself when the book is out next month. (Pre-order yours now!)

Mr Brexit: the Man with the Plan

Screen Shot 2017-03-28 at 15.00.38We’ve heard a lot about Britain’s destiny as a Global Powerhouse outside the European Union – but not so much detail on exactly how this will happen. So in the week that Article 50 is triggered, IndieBooks is proud to announce a new book that maps out Britain’s glittering economic future. And who better to pen it that Sir Reg Futtock, the Prime Minister’s newly-appointed advisor on Post-Brexit Prosperity.

For fifty years, Sir Reginald’s career has been synonymous with British business: from launching the world-beating Austin Allegro to taking RBS up to and beyond the pinnacle of international banking. Now he is bringing this wealth of experience to helping Britain plan for success in the post-Brexit world.

In Mr Brexit: the Man with the Plan, Sir Reg will set out why we joined, why we left and who will be the winners and losers as Britain returns to Splendid Isolation. This book is not clogged up with facts and evidence: instead, Sir Reg uses his own experiences, from sacking 31,000 staff at Marconi to bribing members of the Saudi Royal family, to explain how Brexit can achieve its essential purpose: ensuring that Britain’s wealth-creators remain in charge.

Although Sir Reg has a busy schedule caddying for Don Trump and grovelling to a range of foreign despots, he has promised us the book will be ready for publication in August.

 

What Brexit Means For Us

Flag_of_Europe

One of our authors was asking the other day about the impact of Brexit on IndieBooks. So we thought we’d share our answer.

The most immediate impact is that our books will be more expensive to print. Almost all the paper we use comes from sustainable forests in Scandinavia, and paper is the biggest single cost in book production, and with the Pound down 20% since Brexit, that paper will rise in cost accordingly.

The second is that Brexit will have a profound effect on the economy, reflected in the eye-watering projections for the UK national debt: and if people have less money in their pockets, then book sales will suffer just like everything else.

The third is that our export sales will be worth more to us, again because of the fall in the value of the pound. That’s welcome – but though we’re always trying to export more, it’s still not going to do much to offset the negative impact.

The biggest impact, though, is cultural: the sense of the UK cutting itself adrift from the rest of Europe. Even if there were no financial cost, we’d still think it wrong to leave the EU because of the barriers it creates. It’s one reason we’re delighted to have three new European authors joining us in 2017, and why we’ll be promoting our books much more in the rest of Europe too.

And if you want to know why it happened, then watch out for ‘Explaining Cameron’s Catastrophe’,  in which Sir Robert Worcester and his colleagues explore the wealth of polling data to reveal why people voted as they did and what it means for the future. This follow-up to ‘Explaining Cameron’s Comeback’ is due out in January 2017.

 

 

Our Brexit Titles

screen-shot-2017-01-09-at-14-01-54Today’s Guardian has a fascinating piece on publishers’ plans for post-Brexit books. So we thought we’d give a preview of the two – perhaps three – IndieBooks Brexit-linked titles due out in 2017.

In the lead is ‘Explaining Cameron’s Catastrophe’, the follow-up to last year’s guide to the 2015 election, ‘Explaining Cameron’s Comeback’. Political analyst and pollster Sir Robert Worcester leads a team of academics and experts exploring how the EU referendum came about, how the campaign was fought and – crucially – what lay behind the outcome, with insights into the state of Britain and what it may mean for the future of politics. As always the team are working on the data right up to the print deadline but it’s currently due in the shops at the start of April.

And with Article 50 about to kick off the most important negotiation in British history since 1973, what better time for us to reissue the UK Government’s official guide to EU negotiations, the imaginatively-titled “Negotiating in the European Union”. It gives the inside story on alliance-building, multi-lateral negotiations, procedures, tactics and even the best restaurants to recover in afterwards, and is illustrated by the FT’s cartoonist Banx. This is due out later in January. Let’s hope Boris has his copy to hand.

And finally, for all those who found ‘Five on Brexit Island’ a bit of light relief, we’re hoping to sign up our own tongue-in-cheek guide to Britain’s post-Brexit future entitled ‘Mr Brexit: the Man with the Plan’.

More to follow on all these and more.

Our Xmas Present to You!

To say thanks tattu-cover-midrezo all our readers and contributors for your support in 2016, we’ve just published Attu, a short story by Richard “Unbearably exciting and witty” Major about a playboy President who announces the end of the world. It’s a mix of black humour and political satire with a hint of romance – the ideal antidote to too much Festive Good Cheer (or anxiety about soon-to-be President Trump).
Attu is available as a free e-book over the Christmas holiday. Just click here and download from the Kindle store in the usual way, but you won’t pay anything and you get to keep it. You can tell all your friends too – but the discount only lasts until the end of Boxing Day, so hurry!