5 Get Bookish

This Woocommerce based POS hub by Hachette Children’s Group allows booksellers to order posters, bookmarks, dumpbins and more!

Academie du Vin Library

The Académie du Vin Library was founded by Steven Spurrier and friends, dedicated to publishing the finest wine writing of the past, the present and the future. We have created a new e-commerce site with a streamlined stucture that puts the beautiful books at the heart of the user experience.

Alma Books

Established in 2002, Alma Books now has five imprints, and we have created a single new e-commerce website which encompasses all of the imprints.

Atlantic Books

Atlantic Books is an independent British publishing house founded in 2000.  Based in the heart of Bloomsbury, they publish quality literary fiction and non fiction.  Atlantic are also the home of commercial imprint Corvus, and proud publishers of a selection of books from Grove Atlantic in the US as well as a home to a growing list of fine fiction and non-fiction from Allen & Unwin.

We designed and built Atlantic’s new site to be updated with a feed from their Biblio system, and put their four imprints at the heart of the structure – so each imprint has its own ‘home page’ within the site.

Awesome Reads

Awesome Reads believe reading should be a fun, entertaining, and life-long pursuit. In short, it should be awesome.

We enjoyed making this simple website for Awesome Reads. And it meant we got to say ‘awesome’ a lot. Which was… awesome.

b small publishing

b small are on a mission to empower all readers with critical literacy skills. Whether that’s examining engineering through fun activities or digging for the truth behind real-life mysteries – or even learning to speak French or Spanish – the books they publish help children make sense of themselves, others, and the world around them.

Barbican Press

The Barbican Press list holds poetry, drama, writing for children, and compelling nonfiction too, including vivid tales of maritime communities.

The publisher is the writer Martin Goodman. He knew what sort of publisher he would like to find for his own work, and so created it for others. The Press was born in Plymouth – hence the name ‘Barbican Press’ for the Barbican in that city, and a sense that a Barbican is a strong and protective space in which writers with a fighting spirit can take shelter.

Barbican Press were already using WordPress, but we worked with them to create a completely new look-and-feel and content structure, including the ‘Where in the world?’ map, which plots the key settings of all of their books.

Barrington Stoke

We redesigned the Barrington Stoke website to reflect their evolving brand identity, and signpost information for key audiences: parents / carers, teachers and librarians, and members of the book trade.

Batsford Books

A website for newly-independent Batsford, which has been part of other publishing companies for more than 20 years, derived from the website of Pavilion, from which Batsford is being ‘spun out’.

Belgravia Books Collective

A new web presences for two linked brands, under the banner of the Belgravia Books Collective:

• Gallic Books (publisher)
• Belgravia Books (bookshop)

This e-commerce website replaces two older websites, and allows the the client’s team to manage everything within one WordPress website.

BKMRK

Young Adult portal website for Hachette Children’s. We took over the construction of this project part-way through and brought it to a successful conclusion, using a brand identity and outline designs provided by another agency.

Black Horse Westerns

A new website for the Black Horse imprint, which in 2015 became part of The Crowood Press, a family owned publishing house, which is committed to continuing with the Black Horse imprint and to working with both new and established authors and editors.

Boldwood Books

Boldwood Books is a new fiction publishing company with its first books published globally in August 2019.

Based on the principles of a true partnership with authors, consumers and team members, Boldwood seek out the best stories from around the world from both new and established writers and bring them to readers everywhere.

bookbridgr

bookbridgr lets book bloggers request books, exclusive content and author interviews direct from the publisher. It gives bloggers first access to dozens of front and backlist Headline titles (both in physical and ebook formats), while also allowing them to request a huge amount of extra book content for their blogs, join an author blog tour or request interviews with new and bestselling authors.

Chambers

We updated the design of the existing Chambers website and migrated the underlying technology to WordPress for ease of management, whilst retaining the key features of the existing site: the dictionary search and Word Wizard.

Chelsea Green UK

Founded in 1984, Chelsea Green Publishing is a 100% employee-owned leading publisher of books on the politics and practice of sustainable living. The UK arm, Chelsea Green Publishing UK Ltd, was created in 2018, with an aim of developing a new publishing programme in the UK, as well as partnering with like-minded, progressive organisations in the area of sustainable living. Chelsea Green now has the ability to sell directly to UK consumers via this WordPress and WooCommerce website, with bibliographic data feeding in from the US website, and orders sent automatically to Grantham Book Services.

Christopherus Homeschool Resources

WooCommerce-based site for Christopher, specialist educational publisher of Waldorf-inspired parenting and education materials and resources.

Crimefiles

Crime fiction community website for Hachette publishers Headline, Hodder & Stoughton and Quercus, showcasing their combined crime list as well as staff and guest blogs and a regular podcast.

Duckworth

Duckworth nurtures a rounded world view through accessible and stimulating works of popular science, psychology, memoir and history. Founded by the family of Virginia Woolf in 1898, Duckworth have published incredible authors including D.H. Lawrence, Oliver Sacks, Evelyn Waugh and Beryl Bainbridge.

We really enjoyed creating this site for Duckworth after they joined the Prelude Books family – and reading about their interesting and at times hair-raising history!

Faber Finds Blog

Blog design for Faber’s print-on-demand imprint Faber Finds

Faber Social

A new iteration of Faber Social – books and music at the heart of independent publishing.

Farrago Books

Website for Farrago Books, the series-driven humour imprint of Duckworth Books Group.

Flint

Flint is a new imprint from The History Press dedicated to publishing non-fiction books that spark. We have created a simple Divi-based site to showcase the books and provide a blogging platform and data capture mechanism independent of the main publisher website.

Folio Society Blogs

We created a new WordPress-based news and blogging site for The Folio Society, which integrates with their main e-commerce site. We replaced two separate WordPress sites which were not mobile-friendly.

Green Bottle Press

Brand design and web development for startup poetry publisher Green Bottle Press, which aims to publish work that is unusual and deserves representation but might not appeal to the more established presses.

Grub Street

Grub Street is an award-winning small, niche independent publisher, publishing only books on cookery and military aviation history. We created a responsive e-commerce site using for Grub Street using WordPress and WooCommerce.

H for History

H for History is the historical fiction and non-fiction community from Hodder & Stoughton, Headline and Quercus. Bookswarm designed and built this responsive website to allow both books and blog posts to be explored using a range of classifications, including Period and Genre.

Handspring Publishing

Handspring publish professional-level books for bodyworkers, movement teachers and all professionals who use movement or touch to help patients achieve wellness.

We designed and built a new theme for Handspring using Divi, using the underlying structure created by the original developers.

Hayes Press

Hayes Press is as a non-profit publishing house known for its faithful, biblical publishing. Some of the topics includes bible characters, general themes, general surveys of Bible, Canon, guides to various translations, and inclusive language debates.

We implemented the website using the WooCommerce shop plugin for WordPress.

Henley Hall Press

Brand creation, website design and build for publishing startup Henley Hall Press, an independent publisher of thought-provoking non-fiction books, including current affairs, gardening and ecology.

Hodderscape

Updating the Hodderscape blog to use a new version of the brand, with a new-look mascot (Pickwick the dodo).

This was an update to a previous iteration of the site, which we created several years before, with the same underlying architecture.

Hoopoefiction.com

Website for Hoopoe, the new fiction imprint of The American University in Cairo Press.

Icon Books

ONIX-feed powered website for Icon Books, an independent UK publisher which produces popular, engaging and sometimes provocative non-fiction for adults.

In 2017, we launched a new version of the site to celebrate Icon’s 25th birthday!

InterVarsity Press

E-commerce website for imprint of SPCK.

Introducing

Migration of the site for Icon Books’ well known series of graphic guides to a WordPress back-end, while retaining the existing look and feel.

Updated in 2017 to celebrate Icon’s 25th birthday and tie-in with the look and feel of their main website.

Kelpies

Kelpies are Scottish books for children everywhere. The Kelpies imprint is published by independent publishing company Floris Books, which is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. We created this responsive, e-commerce site for them using WordPress and WooCommerce, integrating with their distributor, Booksource, to seamlessly send out orders.

Lawrence Wishart

Lawrence Wishart have been publishing critical left ideas on politics and culture since 1936. Through books, journals and events, they foster a space where people can think together, challenge political ‘common sense’ and explore new possibilities. Their current work is particularly focused on the areas of race, gender, LGBTQ issues, intersectionality, climate justice, and colonialism.

Leuven University Press

Shopify-based e-commerce catalogue for Belgian-based Leuven University Press.

Product data is imported automatically via the Consonance API.

Lion Hudson

Lion Hudson publish books and other media for children and adults to help them grow in their Christian faith. We created a new e-commerce website for Lion Husdson to replace the previous incarnation, focusing on ease of use and integration with multiple distributors and internal systems.

Little People, Big Dreams

Bookswarm has created a new digital home for Little People, BIG DREAMS, the best-selling biography series by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara.

Users can discover the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream. Told as a story, with a facts and photos section at the back, this sweet series for kids celebrates triumph over adversity through some of history’s favorite characters.

Little Tiger

The Little Tiger Group was founded in 1987, and today they publish a huge range of formats and genres, striving to create a diverse range of high-quality books, with something that will appeal to every reading taste, helping children develop a passion for books and a life-long love of reading.

We designed and built a new e-commerce website for Little Tiger, using WordPress and WooCommerce. Product data is kept up to date automatically by Booksonix via the WooCommerce API.

Mac Keith Press

Mac Keith Press was founded by Ronnie Mac Keith in 1959 to improve the lives of disabled children, their families and carers by extending the knowledge and understanding of the fields of developmental medicine and paediatric neurology. They are an independent, registered charity and funded by the sale of their publications.

Mac Keith Press were already using WordPress and WooCommerce but we created a new website design and a new architecture to streamline the organisation of their core book information. We also integrated WooCommerce with Moodle, allowing users to purchase online learning enrolments from the shop, alongside books and ebooks.

Michael O’Mara Books

Creation of a new website for specialists in creative and inspired adult non-fiction, Michael O’Mara Books, encompassing their LOM ART and Buster Books imprints too. The website take a feed from the client’s Biblio system to keep the catalogue up to date.

Modern Books

Modern Books is a new imprint which publishes beautiful and original non-fiction for mindful and creative living.

Moonlight Publishing

Moonlight Publishing is a small company specialising in information books for children aged 4 to 12. Their books nurture children’s curiosity about the world around them. Each book explores one particular aspect of human experience with children: the human body, animals, plants, science, geography, transport, music, art and history.

This new WooCommerce-based website allows visitors to explore titles by series, theme and target age-range, and explains how Moonlight’s Talking Books work.

Neem Tree Press

New website for Neem Tree Press, a vibrant, young publishing house producing books that change and broaden perspectives. Neem Tree Press are global in scope with books under contract from Germany, the Middle East, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom to date. The common theme for their books is to provoke both thoughtful discussion on sensitive issues and a thirst in the reader to explore further the ideas or cultures they encounter.

New Welsh Review

Founded in 1988 as the successor to The Welsh Review (1939-1948), Dock Leaves and The Anglo-Welsh Review (1949-1987), New Welsh Review is Wales’s foremost literary magazine in English.

After undertaking an initial consultancy exercise funded by the Welsh Books Council into the options for digital publishing that would work best for NWR, we designed and built a new website for New Welsh Review, which uses WordPress and WooCommerce to allow them to sell books, magazines and subscriptions – with subscribers also receiving access to an extensive archive of online articles, and a library of digital back issues delivered via our partner Circular Software’s Masterplan system.

The site also acts as the home for the New Welsh Writing Awards, and as a submissions portal for non-fiction, short fiction and poetry.

Oneworld

Oneworld was founded in 1986 by husband and wife team Juliet Mabey and Novin Doostdar as an independent publishing house focusing on stimulating non-fiction. Now publishing over 100 books a year, Oneworld has retained its founding commitment to the old-fashioned principles of great writing, editorial excellence, high production values, and marketing flair, to produce books that are read by the intellectually curious all over the world.

We have created a new, modern web presence which is automatically updated via an ONIX feed from Stison.

Orchard Series Books

Hachette Children’s asked us to create a framework within which it was possible to set up microsites for a number of different middle-grade children’s series, including Beast Quest, Rainbow Magic and Unicorn Magic – with many of these series running to hundreds of titles.

The brief was to allow the client to create each new site and control the look and feel without requiring any design or technical input from us, which we achieved by setting the site to use a range of design parameters, including masthead images, pre-defined typography styles and numerous colour options. The result is a scaleable solution where a new website can be set up very quickly, using only a handful of design assets that are produced by the in-house team, and including a full book listing, organised by series and sub-series.

Orchard Series Books has launched with four series, with a number of additional series sites due to launch soon.

Patrician Press

Branding and website design for startup independent publisher

Pavilion Books Group

Pavilion Books is a thriving independent London-based publisher specialising in illustrated books for the UK and all international markets. Their new website is populated with bibliographic data feeds from their Stison title management system, and also features a blog, news & events section and many different ways of exploring their books – by category, by imprint and by author.

Penguin blog on WordPress.com

Creation of a customised theme for the Penguin Blog in its new home on the WordPress.com platform.

Pequeño&Grande

Spanish language version of Little People, Big Dreams, created for the Spanish publishers Alba Editorial. The site includes design and technical variations from the original US / UK site.

Practical Inspiration Publishing

Practical Inspiration Publishing is the home of books that mean business. From management to marketing, parenting to leadership, HR to health, internationally recognized authorities share their expertise in brilliantly readable books with accompanying online resources.

We created a new WooCommerce-based site so PIP could easily sell their titles online – with title and author data automatically imported from an ONIX feed.

Profile Books

Twenty-five years sinces its founding and the mission of Profile Books is unchanged: to be a fearless publisher of a diverse range of distinctive books, of the highest quality, written by the best authors in their field, and to remain a beacon of independent publishing. We created a new website for Profile Books, powered by a feed from Biblio, to mark this milestone and to provide a solid foundation for all their future digital marketing.

A new website for imprint Serpent’s Tail was created as part of the same project.

Quarto

The Quarto Group creates a wide variety of books and intellectual property products, with a mission to inspire life’s experiences. Produced in many formats for adults, children, and the whole family, their products are visually appealing, information rich, and stimulating. The Group encompasses a diverse portfolio of imprints and businesses that are creatively independent and expert in developing long-lasting content across specific niches of interest.

Bookswarm undertook the creation of a new information architecture and design for the Quarto website, before handing our designs over to their in-house development team for implementation. The new structure consolidates two previously separate websites, one of which was more trade-focused and one of which was more consumer-focused, bringing the content together into a new entity that’s much easier to explore and allows users to gain a full understanding of the range of imprints and titles that the Quarto Group has.

Quiller Publishing

Quiller Publishing Ltd is an independent publisher which was founded in 2001 by Andrew Johnston. Quiller Publishing has two imprints: Quiller is their general list and Kenilworth Press for equestrian titles. Over the years, Quiller Publishing has been built into an extremely well-respected publishing company, focusing originally on country sporting subjects and in recent years, diversifying into lifestyle titles along with a number of noted and highly regarded biographies and autobiographies.

This new website for Quiller features ‘live’ updates from their title management system, BooksoniX.

Revise SQE

Revise SQE books have one purpose in mind – helping students pass the new SQE1 law exam. They focus only on the topics you’ll be assessed on, making sure that you don’t spend time on unnecessary subject matter, and they will prepare students for the multiple-choice questions they’ll face in SQE1 and show how to answer them successfully.

Robert Hale

Responsive site for Robert Hale, independent publishers since 1936. The site has four themed sections for Robert Hale’s four imprints – Robert Hale, J.A. Allen, NAG Press and Buried River Press.

Robert Hale is now part of The Crowood Press.

Rock the Boat

Rock the Boat was launched in 2015 with the goal of publishing bold, diverse and thought-provoking books for children and Young Adults.  We created an imprint site for Rock the Boat at the same time as we were redesigning the website of parent publisher Oneworld.

Salted

Blog design for innovative independent publisher Salt Publishing.

Saltyard Books

Two generations of this website for Hodder & Stoughton non-fiction imprint Saltyard Books

Saraband

New website for independent publishers Saraband, winners of the inaugural Saltire Scottish Publisher of the Year.

Saraband 2020

Saraband is an award-winning independent publisher of outstanding fiction, absorbing nature writing, pressing environmental issues and compelling memoir. Over the last quarter century, they have provided a platform for underrepresented and marginalised voices that are often overlooked, championing diversity and inclusion as part of our commitment to excellence – and to their readers of all ages, backgrounds and personal identities, wherever they may live.

This is the second version of the Saraband website we have created.

Serpent’s Tail

Serpent’s Tail is an imprint of Profile Books. They are passionate about finding and championing books that excite them creatively, by talented writers who don’t just break but smash the mould with work that opens up space for readers to think, and live, differently.

We designed their new website in tandem with the new website for Profile Books.

SmartLab Toys

Since 2004, SmartLab Toys’ STEAM products have earned more than 50 of the toy industry’s most prestigious awards, including multiple Oppenheim Platinum awards and the Good Housekeeping Best Toy awards. Now part of the Quarto Group, their passion is creating toys and games that inspire creative thinking while providing opportunities for children and adults to learn and play together.

SPCK Publishing

SPCK is the mission agency which works through publishing. Their mission is to promote Christian ideas and values; we do this by publishing, and supporting the publishing of, books and resources for people for people of all denominational and faith backgrounds.

We created a new e-commerce website with WordPress and WooCommerce, encompassing both SPCK’s charitable and publishing activites. Orders are submitted to Macmillan Distribution (MDL) for fulfillment.

Summersdale

Founded in 1990, Summersdale is a vibrant publisher that puts its heart and soul into creating exceptional books. They swiftly respond to emerging technology and trends, provide entertaining, informative and innovative content in the genres of travel writing, general non-fiction, health and well-being, and gift and humour. Summersdale produce a diverse range of over 150 titles per year, with a backlist of over 600 titles.

Swift Press

The Curious Files

The Curious Files was a rummage through the most interesting articles written and produced by Faber and Faber‘s non-fiction authors.

The Future Bookshelf

A home on the web for Hodder & Stoughton’s range of books for writers – including a fully content-managed home page feature the client can update each month.

The Thought Fox

Responsive re-design of Faber’s blog, which is named after a famous poem by Ted Hughes. Back in 2009 Simon worked on the first iteration of this project – technology has moved on since then, but the appetite for quality content on the web has not diminished!

Three Hares Publishing

Brand creation and website design for startup publishing house Three Hares.

Tinder Press

Blog and catalogue website for Headline’s fiction imprint Tinder Press, a place where classy, intelligent writing thrives.

Walter Foster

Brimming with tips, techniques, and step-by-step lessons, as well as practical exercises, unique projects, and creative prompts, Walter Foster’s engaging and inspiring books have helped people around the world discover their creative talents, learn new mediums, and achieve their artistic goals. This new website showcases their books as well as providing a wealth of additional inspiration and resources through the Art Studio.

Wildfire

Wildfire is part of the Headline Division of Hachette UK, a vibrant and dynamic publishing company which is also one of the biggest in the world. Wildfire publish a broad range of quality commercial fiction and non-fiction.