The WiFi's down again: my year of frustration and exhilaration

When 2018 began, Blue Magpie Books was still just an idea, a distant dream. As the year comes to a close, I am happy that it is now officially a thing, a living, breathing publisher that now has six books out there.

It's not all been plain sailing (or should that be flying?). Launching a new business involves a huge amount of toil, sweat and tears. I've done it twice now, and carry the scars from both. Believe me, there are some days when you think you just want to go back to being a regular old Nine-to-Fiver working for someone else, and not having to carry around all the burdens that go with running a start-up. When the printer doesn't work, that's your job. When the WiFi crashes again, it's you, chum. When the software that turns newspaper articles into word documents churns out unreadable gobbledygook, and the Kindle store fails to accept your book’s cover design because the letters of the title are deemed too close to the edge (it’s called design, fellas)? Yep, you and you, again. As my co-founder will testify, "Must I do everything around here?" is a frequent refrain, often accompanied by a swear word or two. Putting the blue into Blue Magpie, perhaps.

But while such setbacks are a tad depressing, the highs that come with one's successes are more than a little exhilarating. Publishing our first book in September - Explorers, a collection of eyewitness accounts of famous adventurers - was an exciting milestone, and I was honoured and delighted that Clemency Burton-Hill, the talented former Radio 3 presenter who’s now creative director for a classical music station in New York, agreed to write the foreword to Maestros, our collection of original obituaries of 101 famous composers. We’ve also received the nod from another star signing for an upcoming book introduction but more on that at another date. I’m relieved, too, that we just managed to get Tycoons, our collection of obituaries of 50 pioneers of business, out the door just before Christmas.

I am confident that 2019, the next chapter in our story, will be even more exciting. We've got a whole raft of compelling reads in the pipeline, hand-picked from the archives of various publishers around the world, which I hope you'll love. Our collection of original obituaries of great authors - Dickens, Woolf, Hardy, et al - should be first off the block. I'm also super-excited by our plans to bring interesting out-of-print books back to life, and we'll be taking our first foray into more contemporary works. Again, more to follow.

So as the year ends, may I thank you all for supporting our little venture, and I hope that 2019 brings you joy and prosperity. My New Year’s resolution? To somehow persuade our friends at BT to install superfast fibre optic broadband down the country lane in Sussex where our office is situated. My chances are probably close to zero, but we like to aim high here at Blue Magpie; as Barack Obama says, the future rewards those who press on. So that’s what we’ll do.