In the world of music there are hundreds of quality bands that have trouble getting noticed or signed by the major labels. It became quite common for bands to produce and market their own music and so the concept of Indie music was born – independently produced music. Indie bands soon led to indie labels and now it’s quite common for niche labels to have a handful of bands on their books and do really well without the backing of the majors.

The same thing is now starting to happen with publishing. The major “traditional” publishers are behemoths that operate like factories. They take in manuscripts at one end, push out a heavily marketed book at the other and promote it for a very short time (maybe six weeks), then move on to the next project. If your book isn’t standing on its own after six weeks, you’re done. Even with major publishers, authors have to do an enormous amount of self-marketing to keep their books selling. And that’s assuming you even managed to get your work through the slush pile and picked up for publication in the first place. Having a quality book to sell doesn’t mean you’re going to get it published. There are thousands of great books out there that can’t find a publisher and an equal number of truly awful books that get trad print runs in the tens of thousands. Such is the nature of publishing in the modern world.

That’s where indie publishing comes in. Self-publishing has a terrible stigma attached, and it’s understandable to some degree. There are some terrible self-published books out there; really badly written, full of errors, some simply not even making sense. But there are some true gems out there too. The same can be said of indie music – there are some woeful bands out there peddling their stuff, but indie music doesn’t have the same stigma as indie publishing. That’s simply because the music world is not as stuck up and elitist as the literary world.

So, there’s a very relevant place for indie publishing, if it’s done with professionalism and dedication, and now we’re getting to the stage where the technology is there to really make it happen. That’s what Blade Red Press is all about.

Blade Red will specialise in fantasy, science fiction and horror, with an emphasis on dark fiction, and produce quality books using Print On Demand technology and online retailers like Amazon as a distribution and sales network. The books will also be available to order through brick and mortar bookstores using their ISBNs, are fully returnable and indistinguishable from any other book on the shelf. All hail modern technology.

Blade Red is an opportunity for emerging speculative and dark fiction writers to have a chance to get their work out there. We’ll have a small and select catalogue of quality work. We won’t just publish anything – it has to be good. We also plan to organise an annual anthology of short stories to give emerging writers another avenue to get their work out there. More on that in the future.

Authors with Blade Red will be encouraged to promote their own work while we promote the catalogue as a whole. The books will never be out of print (another benefit of Print On Demand) and the more work we all put in, the better results we’ll have. There won’t be author advances, but there will be the large majority of sales profit going back to the authors. Blade Red Press is not about making a fortune – indie publishing doesn’t work like that. Blade Red Press will simply pay for itself and the authors will make their money from their book sales after that. More reason to get out there and promote their work. Blade Red is about giving writers opportunities.