At Taller Books, we’re passionate about Young Adult fiction. We publish YA – but we also read, review, and discuss fiction for young adults. We follow our favourite authors, and we love discovering new books and new voices.
For more information, check out our Author Pages and Press Packs.
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Who is behind Taller Books?
Taller Books is an indie publisher, set up to publish the Battle Ground series by Rachel Churcher. Behind the scenes, you’ll find Rachel Churcher and Alan Platt. Rachel spent many years working as a magazine editor and journalist. She writes Young Adult books, and writes about Young Adult books on her GoodReads author site and blog. Alan provides technical support, proofreading expertise, and learned a long time ago to discuss the Battle Ground characters as if they are real people. He’s fixed the occasional plot hole, and he is happiest when he’s writing shiny CSS code for this site!
Why are you giving away a free book?
Battle Ground isn’t published by one of the big publishers, so there’s no advertising budget for the series. Indie authors can’t publish a book on Amazon and hope the audience finds it – Amazon is a vast bookstore, and no one will find a book that isn’t promoted, reviewed, and anticipated.
How do indie authors tell you, the audience, about their books? We give you a taster. More importantly, we give you a good taster. Something that will entice you to come back for more. Something you’ll want to tell you friends about. Something you’ll love.
Making Trouble is one of the best stories Rachel has written, and we’re really proud to be able to share it with you. We hope you enjoy it, we hope you review it on GoodReads and LibraryThing, and we hope you come back for more!
Why do you want my email address?
Big publishers promote their books with flashy advertising campaigns and tours. That’s a great way to tell an audience about a book, but it’s also really impersonal. At Taller Books, we want to talk directly to you, the reader. We want to tell you when we publish something new. We want to give you exclusive stories and extracts from future books.
And we want to hear from you. Bookstore Addicts is our online community for YA readers, and giving us your email address signs you up to our club. We’ll email you every couple of weeks with our news – but we’ll also hook you up with other new YA releases, and reviews of other people’s work. You have our email address, and we hope you’ll get in touch!
What will you use my email address for?
We will only use your email address to send you our news and reviews. We won’t send you advertising or spam, and we won’t pass your details on to anyone else.
Indie publishers don’t have big budgets. There’s no big company bankrolling us, and no author advances to pay our living costs while we write. We won’t get paid until the first Battle Ground book goes live on Amazon, and that’s why we need your email address. We need to be able to tell you, directly, when each new book is published. We need to let you know in advance when the next book will be available.
Our mailing list is our storefront. Think of it as the front window of a bookstore, or the special offer table in your favourite high street book shop. We want to put our books somewhere where you will see them, and make it easy for you to buy the next book in the series. Your email address is your key to all our announcements, and we guarantee that members of Bookstore Addicts will be the first to hear our news.
Why review other people’s books?
We’re all readers. We all read books we love, and books we don’t get on with. Big publishers tend to see other authors as competitors, but we see them – and you – as collaborators. If you’ve read a great book by someone else, tell us about it! And if we read something fantastic, we’ll let you know.
Writers develop their skills by reading. This is your chance to tell us what to read.
Why are you self-publishing?
There are so many reasons behind our decision to publish the Battle Ground series ourselves.
Rachel wrote all five books of the Battle Ground series before she pitched the books to an agent, and found out the hard way that publishers don’t want completed series. They want to buy Book 1, package it, throw it out there and see how it goes. Then they’ll tell the author what they want from Book 2, and Book 3, and so on. Battle Ground is a complete story, beginning in Battle Ground (Battle Ground #1) and ending in Victory Day (Battle Ground #5). Plot points in Book 5 required changes to Book 1, so writing it book by book would have been impossible. The completed series is the story Rachel set out to tell – not a series written to orders from a publisher.
Indie publishing allows us the freedom to publish our books on our own timescale. Rather than making readers wait as long as a year for each new book in the series, we have been able to publish a new Battle Ground book every six weeks, starting in July 2019.
Publishing as Taller Books gives us creative control. Rachel commissioned and helped to design our book covers, and worked with proofreaders and beta readers to edit and perfect the series. We’ve designed our own website, and if we want to give our readers a free book, we can!
Most importantly, indie publishing means that we can talk directly to you, our readers – and we hope that you will talk to us as well. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and what you want to read next. Your views won’t get lost in a corporate inbox – we’ll read them all, and we’ll do our best to respond.
Why is this so complicated?
The publishing industry is transforming. Amazon and other eBook publishers are changing the way readers access books, and making it possible for smaller publishers to reach much larger audiences. This gives indie publishers like us the chance to rewrite the rules, and bring a greater diversity of stories, authors, and characters to our already diverse readership.
It’s a rollercoaster. The industry is changing fast, and we need to be ready to change with it. We aim to write original stories, and bring them to our audience by whatever means we can – and we’d be thrilled if you would join us for the ride!
Where does the name ‘Taller Books’ come from?
‘Taller Books’ is a nod to Ray Bradbury, one of Rachel’s favourite authors. His poem, ‘If Only We Had Taller Been’, is a beautiful, optimistic hymn to science, space travel, and human endeavour.
You can watch Ray Bradbury read a version of his poem here.