The Small Press Operating Manual
The business of publishing other people's books
Free. No catch.
You know how to publish a book. Nobody tells you how to run a press.
Contracts. Royalty runs. Money that isn't yours. The conversation you have to have when an author doesn't deliver. Fifteen years of running Horrific Tales Publishing, written down so you don't have to learn it the expensive way.
What's In It
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Setting up — what your press is actually for, and the decisions that are hard to undo later.
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Acquisition — submissions, reading at volume, and what you're really assessing.
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Contracts and rights — net receipts versus RRP, escalators, reversion, and the clauses that give you options when things go wrong.
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Working with authors — expectations, editing, and what to do when delivery, quality or conduct fails.
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Production — editorial stages, covers, formatting, ISBNs and realistic timelines.
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Distribution — wide versus exclusive, print economics, and why I turn returns off.
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Record keeping — the four-list data model that makes everything else possible.
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Royalties — reading the statements, the seven-step process, and paying authors properly.
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Money — per-title P&L, cashflow, and real numbers from a real press.
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Marketing — product pages, metadata, advertising, and what has a two-year shelf life.
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Launching — day-one reviews, pre-orders, and buying readers deliberately.
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The annual cycle — the rhythm that stops you carrying the business in your head.
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Plus checklists, a glossary and free templates.
Who it's for
The small press publisher drowning in admin. A handful of authors, a catalogue that's outgrown your systems, and a nagging sense something's being missed.
The self-published author expanding into a press. You know how to publish your own book. Publishing someone else's changes everything.
If you already run a press with a finance function, you'll know most of this.
Why I wrote it
I set up Horrific Tales Publishing in 2011 to publish my own first novel. It became a press when other people's books started arriving and I said yes.
Nobody handed me a manual. I worked out contracts by getting them wrong, royalties by spending most of a day on them every month, and author management by making decisions I'd rather not have had to make.
Titles from the press have been nominated for Bram Stoker, British Fantasy and Aurealis awards. It's sold around two hundred thousand copies. I've also spent three decades in software, which is why this book cares more about process than most publishing books do.
This is what I wish someone had given me at the start.
Why is it free?
Because I wrote it for myself first.
Everything in this manual came out of running Horrific Tales Publishing, and the same fifteen years produced a piece of software called Imprint Royalties — a desktop app that handles the royalty side of a press, built because my own royalty runs were eating most of a day. I'd rather tell you that here than have you discover it in chapter eight.
It gets one honest mention in the book and no more. If the manual is useful and you never buy anything from me, that's a fine outcome. If it's useful and you later decide the royalty run is worth automating, you'll know where I am.
It's also on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle edition if you'd rather have it that way. Same book, and I'd never begrudge someone paying for the convenience.