Detritus Short List And A Big Restructure

2025 - 2026 has really been a year of challenges for a small publishing company. The very exciting thing has been more team members, and that led us to be able to launch Detritus which was our first book competition.

We had more entries than we thought our very small platform might attract, and all the stories were good. People got through to the long and shortlists because we preferred their writing, wanted to read full manuscripts and thought their work might fit more with our bookshelf.

But there were no bad stories and crucially none of them we thought we would necessarily pick up in a mainstream bookshop. Without exception these were all different and deserve to be published in some shape or form. In most cases, just not by us with a very tight selection criteria.

Here's the shortlist of people whose scripts we really, really wanted to read:

Congratulations to all and we are pretty sure that even if we don't publish this work, some of these authors will soon be in a book shop near you.

In the meantime, Pudding Press is 10 years old now and ten years in book publishing and arts in general, without going under is no small feet. Things have not been as straightforward as we would have liked in the last few years as they haven't for a lot of small UK businesses.

That said, we did pay some tax to HMRC recently, which is more than can be said for many a giant and 'successful' conglomerate.

At the heart of some of the strife, though, has been identity and branding decisions as well as a terrible time with a printer. Being a tiny company we can't just chuck money at the problem but have to be a bit more measured.

You'll see that our text-based books are currently not being printed temporarily. You can still get our comic.

But great and exciting things are brewing and we'll hopefully be all new by the end of April.

Watch this space....