Where Pubblish came from
Martyn Folkes
Martyn started as a programmer in the 1980s, then spent nine years as a senior bookseller at Waterstones in Lancaster and Bath, watching how publishers worked from the retail side. In 1989 he and his wife Helen saw what their local market was missing, and launched Mushroom Publishing with maps and guides. Fiction followed in 1997. They published their first ebook in 1999.
By 2000, Mushroom Publishing's catalog had outgrown spreadsheets. No commercial software handled the work the way a small publisher actually does it, so he built his own — an internal tool called Makebook.
Mushroom is still going, more than thirty years on.
Pubblish grew out of the same problem Makebook did. There was software for big publishers, and software for hobbyists. Nothing was built for the professionals in between.
If you have ever kept a catalog in a spreadsheet because nothing else quite fitted, you already know why this exists.
Our Philosophy
Publishing is a workflow
Publishing software should reflect how publishers actually work. It should follow a book from manuscript to market, not just store facts about it.
Simple on the surface
You shouldn't need a training course to use your publishing tools. Pubblish stays easy to pick up, and keeps the depth a professional needs underneath.
Your data, your way
Export your data anytime, as a spreadsheet. Your catalog is never locked into our system.