About Haythorp

Haythorp Books is dedicated to getting books by new authors onto bookshelves and into bookshops.

We give writers the opportunity they need to see their names and their works in print.

Haythorp Books commissions books from new writers after carefully assessing their quality. Authors of manuscripts which have an accomplished writing style and a worthwhile and potentially popular focus will be selected for potential publication.

We are a hybrid publisher, meaning that we sell titles into physical and online retailers, with sales and distribution agreements (not to mention skill at producing high quality books) but ask our authors for a fee. This fee is necessary to ensure that the books we publish are commercially viable.

Why Hybrid Publishing?

Our hybrid structure makes us different to the majority of publishers operating in the UK and abroad. The ‘trade’ market for books aimed at general readers largely divides into commercial publishers on one end and ‘vanity presses’ at the other.

Commercial Trade Publishing

In general, the big commercial publishers are looking to take on the big-name or established authors who have a good chance of hitting the bestseller lists, such as much-loved television personalities and household-name historians. Typically they pay advances of royalties to authors (though big advances are quite rare these days).

Vanity Presses

A vanity press will generally accept a wide variety of manuscripts in return for the payment of a fee. The books published are often of variable quality. Vanity presses have been accused of using high-pressure sales tactics.

Self Publishing

A third option for authors is taking charge of the entire publishing process themselves. This means finding, hiring and paying a cover designer, typesetter, book publicist and printers. The difficulty with self-publishing is that it is generally time-consuming and complicated. An analogy would be building your own house. If you have all the skills and are on a tight budget, self-publishing can be a good choice. But you are unlikely to have the sales and distribution agreements that can offer your book across multiple channels.

High-quality books

At Haythorp, we pride ourselves on publishing only books we like and rate. As part of the Canbury Press family, we have sales and distribution agreements in place across the book trade, in the UK and abroad. We aim to turn publishing from pain into pleasure.

We seek the highest sales, working with new authors to maximise all opportunities available. We pay authors royalties on books sold and can advise on publicity and PR, helping you all the way from manuscript to marketing.

Essentially, if we like your manuscript, we will help you turn it into a book you can be proud of, handling all the aspects of publishing and bookselling that can daunt first time authors.