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New independent publisher Blue Mark Books will release its fourth title, alongside paperback editions of its launch titles, in September.
Blue Mark Books was founded by Toby Fountaine in July 2013, and its first three titles were published in hardback in January 2014. The company is run almost entirely by Fountaine, with input from book cover designer Mark Ecob and advice from his friends in publishing. Fountaine, who quit his full-time job as a solicitor in March 2014, said: “It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. I’ve always been a massive reader and I got to the stage where I thought, ‘there’s no real reason why I shouldn’t set up a publishing company’. I’ve done everything—editing, designing the website, marketing and typesetting, which is done in-house. It’s been a huge learning curve.”
Fountaine initially looked for titles through friends but has since received “around 200 submissions”, including some from agents, although to date the titles he has bought have been unagented. He explained: “Basically I choose the books I like and what I think is good, although I have four or five friends in publishing who help me read submissions. Literary fiction is what I’d like to do.”
Blue Mark’s launch titles that are now being published as paperbacks are literary novel Forgive Us Our Trespasses by Emily Hunter (£7.99), whaling novel Tisala by Richard Seward Newton (£8.99) and legal satire Bugle and Yarrington by James James (£8.99), which was reviewed positively in the Times. Joining the list in paperback original is Lucy Brydon’s Shanghai Passenger (£8.99), a “witty, gritty, satirical novel on life in modern Shanghai”, blurbed by Animals author Emma Unsworth. Fountaine commissioned the book after meeting Brydon at a publishing networking event. He said: “I’ve got high hopes for it. It’s a classic coming of age story but it’s also interwoven with a retelling of the ancient story of Zhuangzi’s ‘Dreams of being a Butterfly’.”
Fountaine hopes to publish four books a year and he already has two lined up for 2016, one of which he described as “a kind of Fleet Street satire about the phone hacking scandal”.
Blue Mark titles are stocked in London branches of Waterstones, Foyles and “pretty much every indie in London”, after Fountaine took copies into bookshops across the capital and hosted a launch at Daunt Books, inviting Waterstones buyers to attend. Fountaine explained: “[Getting titles in shops] is the hardest bit because there’s so much competition. I’ve sent goodness knows how many books out but not one bookshop turned me down in person. Where I failed was getting [titles stocked by] Waterstones nationally. They said hardbacks wouldn’t sell outside London.”
The initial 500-copy runs of the three hardbacks have sold out and the four paperbacks will be printed with initial runs of 1,000, although Fountaine hopes to sell more once he is able to finance another print run. Blue Mark titles are also available from Gardners and Bertrams.