What We’re About and Why We’re Here
Butterworth Books is a community interest company (registration number 13574110). That means we’re not here to make a profit, and any surplus from our trading is pumped back into the publishing house to help more authors fulfil their potential.
We’re about facilitating creatives to carve out a successful career that maximises their potential and their income, and to support authors to make their writing dreams come true.
We believe in independence, choice, and creative control. We believe in the power of your words and your desire to tell your stories your way.
We’re establishing a quality level and a brand that readers can trust. They’ll see the Butterworth Books logo and be confident that their money will be well spent, and that they won’t spend their precious reading hours distracted by poor/non-existent editing.
What’s Our Mission?
It’s two-fold.
Firstly, we want to elevate the quality of independently published books to the same level as traditional published books—and beyond. We want to raise the expectations of readers and increase their confidence in the product they’re buying from an Independent author. We want readers to look on the top 100 LGBTQ+ books list and to see top quality covers from professional designers, such that it’s not an easy game to spot the difference between Indie and traditionally published books. We want to make a reader’s decision to “buy Indie” an easy one.
Secondly, we want to support authors with great voices to become Independent authors where they might not have the money to do so. If you can’t afford the money it takes to put a top-quality book out there, we’ve got you. We’ll negotiate individual, flexible contracts that give you all the professional help with none of the costs up front. And when you start selling, that’s when you pay for those costs. If you don’t sell, you don’t pay. Simple.
As successfully published Indie authors, you’ll also have the opportunity to pay it forward and use a percentage of your profits to fund scholarships and free book services to brand new authors. But again, that’s a personal choice and there’s no obligation to do so.
Why Be An Indie?
As an Indie, there are things you can do (or that are easier) that you can’t when you’re traditionally published: refresh your cover art to meet new genre trends; Amazon ads to increase visibility to a world of people who aren’t on LGBTQ Facebook groups; be part of Kindle Unlimited; see the sales numbers daily; control your metadata; revise books based on reviews; be flexible and responsive to your fans; control your price point and sales.
You become part of the Indie author community. And at Butterworth Books, we want our LGBTQ community to be visible, to others, of course, but most importantly, to each other: to find our tribe and become part of a community that strive to help and support each other and the readers who find solace, solidarity, and strength in our words.
Butterworth Books 