As all writers know finding a publisher can be as easy as finding hens teeth or for that matter the elusive mythical being known as 'An Agent'. I actually managed to find two. The first was all you could possibly ask for and a book was born, smacked into life and sent off to the shelves in bookshops, where it sold in increasing numbers right up to the point six months later when the administrators moved in.

The second publisher did a nice cover and although still solvent never actually did much more and so we parted company and I went off to seethe quietly and write yet another 'Great Novel' entitled 'Mr Boots.' It was that or clean the fridge, drink far too much gin or write really rude letters to the DOT.

And then one day, after receiving the twentieth very polite letter of rejection signed by a real person in actual ink, a very good friend of mine, who should have known better, said why don't you self publish?

I had a book, I had people who were still asking the local bookshops for copies of the next one, even from such far flung places as Malawi and Canada, and after all how hard could it be?

The problem was that I needed someone to edit it, typeset it into a form that the printer would accept and then project manage the whole...including finding said aforementioned printer.

And then a friend of the friend pointed me in the direction of Frances Hackeson who used to work for MUP and Priory Press was born. Since then I've learnt all about trade discounts, accountants, invoices, frontcovers, blurb, the vagaries of the press and the fact that you can't get a photographer on a Sunday unless you do something very wicked and possibly involving vegetables.

I even went on a book tour, it was supposed to be based in the Midlands but the guy that arranged it, thank you Francis, had a strange take on geography and I ended up in Middlesex, Kent and Suffolk as well as Hertfordshire and West Yorkshire. 1800 hundred miles in ten days in a red Nissan Micra called Mr Bumble. I met a lot of very interesting and delightful people an equal number of complete loonies and discovered the Huddersfield roundabout, something I still get nightmares about.

And then I had an idea....why not publish other people's books?

As long as I stuck to accepting manuscripts that I would myself actually buy off the shelf what could go wrong?

But what to do first?

For some time I'd noticed that there was a lack of local short stories in the shops, I spoke to various friendly merchants who said yes they would sell it but that the stories had to be good enough, in fact it had to be a 'proper book'.

Adverts on local radio and in the local press resulted in 42 manuscripts with twenty shortlisted. Bob Harrison from Manx Radio helped choose the final 12 and the first Volume of 'A Tail for all Seasons' was launched in November 2008. And do you know what surprised me more than the sheer quality of some of stories, the fact that over half of the chosen final twelve were established writers in their own field.

It did really well and another volume is being collected as you read this.

I also started receiving Manuscripts from other established authors, really good ones to and after due consideration it was decided to start publishing other people. Each title chosen would fund the next and each had to be fiction, paperback, well written but a little bit different.

Our first one off the starting blocks was 'The Angels of Mona Terrace' by Steve Wood, the details of which you can find on our published pages.

Then we published the second volume of 'A Tail for all Seasons' by various authors.


We now have three more books lined up for this year: The Tidemaster by Linda Mann, A third volume of 'A Tail for All Seasons and a new book Of Light and Shadow by Steve Westcott, not sci-fi or humour for which he is known but a stunningly good tale of dark shenanigans in the world of the cloth.



Linda Mann worked in the offshore finance sector for ten years until settling on the Isle of Man where she is now married with three children.

She was a member of the Isle of Man Arts council and Chairman of the Film and Literature panel for four years but she now concentrates on writing, including skits for the satirical news programme ‘The Headlines Again’ on Manx Radio.

She has written four supernatural crime novels – Mist, The Tidemaster, The Corsican Trap and Mr Boots ; plus a futuristic comic caper with barges "The Chronicals of Edwin Snipe" – available or forthcoming from Priory Press.