As well as running an award-winning independent publisher ourselves since 2003, we benefit from working with hundreds of publishing professionals around the world. This privileged viewpoint means we get to see the woods for the trees – to see the patterns in how publishers of different shapes and sizes tackle and overcome the problems we all face. These blog posts are a collection of insights gathered from this wide range of experiences, coupled with our technical expertise.
APIs, ONIX & data feeds
GraphQL at Christmas
Pretty exciting times over here at Consonance Towers, as we gear up for the launch of our new metadata...
NewUnshackle your data and free your time with GraphQL
It’s 2022 and instead of technology making your job easier it’s just adding another layer of inescapable...
The ONIX Standard is not very standard
Here at Consonance we send ONIX to around thirty recipients, and I think it’s fair to say that no...
Publishers hack their own bibliographic data
Well, that’s an intriguing headline.
Perhaps an even more stunning headline is Publishers Hack Their...
How APIs can make publishing more efficient
As a rule, application programming interfaces, or APIs, aren’t easy to talk about.
For instance,...
Case studies
Liverpool University Press
We have had the pleasure of working with LUP since 2015 when they migrated to us from a legacy platform...
Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing
Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing are just three years old, but the founders come from rich stock...
Improving your publishing through technology
Discussions in Consonance
When the lockdown started, one of our first remotely-held planning meetings was to brainstorm what...
Money on the table
Michael Tamblyn’s keynote at the BISG got a lot of heads nodding here at General Products. Here’s...
How many authors is too many?
How big is your company’s contact database? How many authors has your company ever published? How...
This is not the formulaic project management of other industries
As publishers ourselves, we know that one of the big challenges of running your company is to manage...
So where are we with the frontlist?
It's the question everyone in publishing dreads.
Like Anna, an editorial assistant at...
A quick look at data visualisation and analysis
I’ve recently been harking back to my roots as a veteran Business Intelligence architect, which was...
How to avoid making a rod for your own back with data
Technical debt is what you accrue when you write bad code or take some expedient shortcut or just...
Stay small or scale? Be clever about your size
In a barney with Amazon about terms, being massive makes for a fairer fight: if retailers are going...
Six things to do the moment you get back from vacation (disclaimer – you might have to resign)
So I’m just back from a glorious holiday up in Scotland with the boys. We piled onto the Caledonian...
No computer system can fix a broken publisher
With stability taking hold of the hybrid print-digital market after years of rapid ebook growth, many...
Discoverability? That's not nearly enough.
Discoverability isn’t nearly enough. Discoverability relies on someone actively trying to discover...
Why ‘easy’ publishing solutions hardly ever are
Almost every week, a new technological innovation comes to market, promising to save publishers money...
ONIX & data feeds
Publisher websites
Why publishers must use direct sales
If you were writing a business plan to set up a new consumer goods business, which of the following...
To go direct, publishers must mean business
The arithmetic of publishing is fairly straightforward: Sell plenty of books at as high a margin as...
Running a publishing start up
Pandemic update
Update, Janury 2021
As England goes into another full lockdown today, with schools closed until mid...
Deanna joins the team!
Some lovely news for us in all of this: we are delighted to announce that Deanna Marbeck joins our...
Nine hard-earned pieces of advice for publishing start-ups
Being an indentured employee is how most people pay the bills. But about 12 years ago I started down...
Grants and sources of funding for software development
Ring the good news bell! We have been awarded a ~£20k Innovation Support for Business government grant...
No longer an oxymoron – beautiful publishing software
In early 2011, our CEO Emma Barnes sat at the kitchen table and wrote the first lines of Ruby code...
How we unbranded our software company
The Consonance promise is:
to harmonise publishing businesses’ processes, by sharing our expertise...
A range of Consonance customisations
“We see how well you service publishers day in and day out.” –NBN International via Twitter
2018 Customer survey report
This is a long post, so here’s the summary:
* We’re going to work on the things you have told us...
Technical skills in publishing
Introduction to publishing title management software
Introduction to publishing title management software
If you don’t currently have access to a publishing...
Book machine unplugged
On the road again! Emma & Sara were on a Book Machine panel with Lola Odelola and Janneke Niessen
Publishers can learn a few things from programmers
As both a publisher and a programmer, I’m a member of a very select club. I’ve been struck by many...
Learning how to code, the long way around
I’d always meant to learn to code, but there never seemed to be a good time.
I graduated in 1996...
A taste of code
On Thursday, in conjunction with BookMachine, the Consonance team ran a workshop to teach 30-odd publishers...
Futurebook manifesto for skills
This appeared in FutureBook and was also delivered at the FutureBook conference
Whatever the other...