Please Support your Local Bookshop
While you can purchase our books online via this website, we would encourage you to use your local bookshop if you are fortunate enough to have one. If you don’t use it, you may lose it.
To encourage you to use bookshops, and because postage makes a big dent in our margins, we are now charging £2 flat rate P&P charge for UK addresses. This is a flat rate., so if you buy one book or ten the postage fee is the same.
For a list of bookshops in North Devon (and beyond) click here.
We love libraries too.
Also, we are happy to see our books borrowed from libraries. The author still gets paid something for each time their book is borrowed thanks to the PLR scheme. It is a great way for readers to discover new authors. If people regularly borrow books then the library will often buy more copies to meet demand. Please support your local library.
Libraries Unlimited who run Devon libraries have most of our titles. If they don’t have the one you want, please ask them to stock it. If you live outside Devon and want to borrow any of our books, do ask them to buy in stock. The worst they can do is say no.
About Blue Poppy Publishing
Blue Poppy Publishing is a new and very small publisher based in North Devon with, currently, four eight a dozen authors, and more being developed for future publications. Most of those authors are from the local area, although our books have a broad appeal. (One or two are set in Devon but it’s not essential)
The History of Blue Poppy Publishing
The imprint was set up in 2016 to publish the “Wise Oak” series of Books by Oliver J. Tooley. Then it seemed natural to offer the opportunity to other authors to get their books published under the Blue Poppy imprint in order to benefit from mutual experience and promotional efforts. As a result, in 2017 three new authors joined up. Presently there are at least another four authors interested in publishing their books through the imprint, at various stages of development.
Blue Poppy Publishing is not a traditional publisher with a big budget. We can’t pay authors an advance. We can’t even pay for the production costs of your book.
However, nor is it a vanity publisher. We won’t put our logo on a badly written book by someone who just wants to see their work in print.
Blue Poppy is a Self Publishing Collective.
What that means is that we will help a self publishing author with a number of vital aspects of bringing their book to market, but the author still has control and (although you may not like this bit) still pays for all the production costs.
Personal biographies and autobiographies.
We are willing to take on the job of preparing personal biographies for private use, e.g. if someone wants only a few copies of their memoir for family members to read, we can prepare the file for printing, and we can arrange to have small numbers printed without the book being in the public domain. This is a private service and not part of the Blue Poppy publishing range.
Our Authors
- Joni Dee is a professional, working in Central London. His first book And The Wolf Shall Dwell generated a substantial number of pre-orders before its launch in July 2017 and still sells well.
- Sheila Golding is a mother and grandmother who lives in Ilfracombe and writes poetry and stories including Teeny Tiny Witch her book for younger readers which is stunningly illustrated by Colin Rowe of Corvus Design.
- Janet Few has a considerable back catalogue of non-fiction already to her credit. She is a professional historian and genealogist and gives talks on the subject. Her first novel, Barefoot on the Cobbles comes out in November 2018 and is set mainly in Clovelly and North Devon.
- Anne Bainbridge is a writer living in South Molton. She is a regular attendee at the South Molton writer’s group which meets at the library. Her charming collection of short stories, Weathering the Storm is available to order from any UK bookshop, from us, or to borrow from Devon Libraries, as are most of our titles.
- Katie Mallett is a poet who has had her poems published in numerous magazines and was also a regular contributor to Wake Up WIth Wogan. Her collection of poems Surprise Surprise! is described as “Tales With a Twist, In Verse. It is sometimes funny, sometimes a little gruesome, but always entertaining.
- Anne Beer came along to the little writing group that I set up and immediately demonstrated her writing skills with stories that made us laugh and cry with equal ease. I published a collection of her short stories as Inspiration, in early 2020 and her autobiography My Life on a Cliff Edge arrives in November 2020.
- Sally J Hubbard
- Bethany Askew is a well established author with over a dozen titles in her back catalogue. She has published two with Blue Poppy, Three Extraordinary Years, and The Two Saras; both are novels about the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
- Lastly there’s Oliver J Tooley
The imprint began with Children of the Wise Oak 2016 a fantasy set in the real events of Iron Age Europe. The sequel Women of the Wise Oak was published in 2017
Oliver also writes as Olli Tooley for younger readers. “For Cats’ Eyes Only” is now out. It follows the adventures of Special Agent Felix Whiter, of Animal Intelligence Services, and features terrible puns, fart jokes, action and silliness. - ALSO – an anthology published 29th September 2018
“Mystery Magic & Mayhem – and a Sprig of Mistletoe” is a collections of short stories and poems for children aged around 8-12 (but with fuzzy margins to the age range)
Produced by the “Writing for Children” group at Barnstaple library, with contributions from 14 writers, and illustrations by Pat Fricker (and others) like this one
Authors looking to get published
Let’s be clear, Blue Poppy is not a big publishing house with money to spend on developing potential new authors. It is just one person; Olli Tooley. BUT; the process of publishing Children of the Wise Oak has taught many valuable lessons already. If you are a North Devon based author who wants to self publish but would prefer to do it under an umbrella of an existing imprint; if you are willing to finance your own printing or to crowdfund it, as I did with CotWO, then Blue Poppy may be able to help.
If you want to do it all yourself that’s fine too. There are useful notes on self-publishing basics starting here.
Organising an editor, cover design, formatting, printing, distribution, ISBN, e-books, Amazon listings, publicity, and all sorts of other little things, can take a lot of time and energy that could be spent writing the next book. I can give advice and help avoid wasted time, as well as actually doing some of the jobs outright. At all times it will be your book, your copyright, your project. Any genuine costs will be openly discussed but, having done this as an author, I am painfully aware of the need to generate sales profits to pay for stuff, so I won’t be looking for profits off your hard work up front. If the book sells well, everyone does well.
We are presently experimenting with an in house crowdfunding platform to see if we can use that to raise the production costs of new books without incurring third party fees.
Genres
Blue Poppy is not interested in publishing anything overtly “adult” e.g. erotica or horror. Nor really anything that is specifically “romance”.
What would be most welcome is fantasy, historical fiction, sci-fi, adventure, mystery, YA, and other stuff with a broad age range appeal.
Non-fiction will also be considered.