A 2025 re introduction

It's well into January of another year and it's a big year ahead for Pudding Press Limited. Maybe it will prove to be a watershed moment, but we don't know just yet.

In the meantime it seems high time for a reintroduction to what are we about and, what do we do and how can we help?

• To start with we're a tiny (micro) indie publishing company specialising in horror, philosophy and young adult fiction, based in the UK. If (and only if) we make any money in the UK we pay taxes.

• We publish books in all sorts of formats from authors who might have a different take on things.

• Although we're tiny, we have a traditional publishing setup with an editorial structure, book design, cover design, marketing, distribution etc and authors get a good level of royalties. We front the costs of all of this and take the financial risk as traditional publishers do.

• Obviously this model is a struggle for such a tiny company and we don't give big advances on royalties for this reason, but if we ever grow we will. Ditto to marketing, circulation and distribution.

• Our blog tells you what is going on in the company but we're also building it into a resource for indie publishers and writers, so do follow it if you want to know about things affecting publishing.

• We are about the stories, so we are not planning to turn this into courses, an ebook or publishing coaching, so it will remain free and please use.

A couple of bits about working practices that seem to be very important in 2025. There have been lots of reports about returning to the office. We have an office but it is a minimal commitment and will likely stay that way. Our whole model is built around remote working and flexibility and it has always been great with nobody shirking or doing odd stuff.

• We don't have any full time employees but if we did our working week would be 4 days.

• Everyone who works for us gets paid, although being a tiny company and often strapped for cash we have taken inspiration from indies in other industries, and an example of this has been that we have occasionally paid backend contracts with early projects.

• We also work with lots of (paid) freelancers and (paid) interns, which is normal in the arts.

• We do occasional formal open briefs for students to work with us and gain insight into industries they want to know about but along with learning experience, commercial credits and promotion but we also pay these students some cash for their work as well.

• Everyone else who does any work also gets paid and it is always as much above living wage as we can afford.

• We are a human content publisher.

• We don't get funding from anyone (which is also why we don't rely on free work but that's a conversation for another day).

Nothing is ever perfect but above is what we do. Most people know that the UK creative scene is littered with free work and sector austerity. In order to avoid these things we have had to shrink ourselves too. This is very frustrating for the founder who would like to do a lot more and finds that publishing can be two steps forward and ten steps back.

However, we have a little experiment on in 2025. We have a few plans and we're going to try and prove that you can achieve great things in the UK creative sector without stepping on the faces of creative workers, and without founders having to have the private wealth to not bother about getting some remuneration for all the slog they put in as well.

Imagine a UK creative industry of sustainable abundance, where people can have a very comfortable life from their work, and produce things that are exceptionally high quality, where customers can buy something that has so much more worth to them than the money they parted with to gain it, and where we are not reminded daily that we are living in broke Britain, the low-wage economy of developed world.

Can we do this? Well .... we're going to try and have an evaluation at the end of the year. Someone has to prove it can be done. When big companies are often beholden to shareholders, a private company can experiment with these things. The company has been running for 8 years already, so we're hardly a start up but it has taken all that time to think carefully about the industry, about what we really are and what we want to do as a company and about the effect of the last 15 years of austerity choking off any shoots of joy.

Money is supposed to circulate, not be hoarded by billionaires. Yet all governments have managed to do for over a decade is tighten the screws on the supply even further.

In the meantime, here are some customer takeaways

• If you're an indie writer or publisher you can follow our blog for free for news, advice and ideas.

• If you ever buy a book, or anything else, from us it supports ALL of the above.

• You can borrow our titles from the library if you want to read them but not have to pay - and supporting local libraries is brill.

• If you want to get published, look out for our open calls, competitions and events - they are really special and we have got some exciting stuff planned for the year.

And that's all we have to say about 2025. Follow our progress if you want to know if it can be done, Spread the word if you want to help us out.