We’re Hermitage Editions! Oh, you mean the people?
Kipp Brooks is the founder, experienced in sustainability reporting and buying too many collectible books (shhhh, don’t mention the ‘to be read’ pile!).
Oli Howson is the technical director, and is an academic and experienced author.
Both work as commissioning editors.
Publishing a fine press book isn’t as simple as pushing a Word file through Kindle Direct Publishing. We have many partners, many of which are small companies so need paying up front to keep in business. Pre-order payments are used to pay these amazing craftspeople for their hard work. None of it goes into the Hermitage Editions coffers until everything is paid for, and even then, it is likely to be directed at a future publication as soon as possible.
Pre-ordering also gives you the opportunity to spread the cost before the books are released and gives us a good excuse to share some of the amazing interim artwork from our partners.
We do everything we can to stick to our projected publication dates, but sometimes obstacles crop up. An illustrator may need a bit more time to create their amazing works of art, or a binder might be waiting for some specialist glue to be delivered.
We will always try to communicate with you as much as possible and will endeavour to provide regular updates.
Our approach to matching rights is a little different to other fine press houses, and we aim to make it as fair to as many people as possible.
Our rules on matching rights are as follows:
- Rights exist across a named series or collection only. New collection = new rights. The rights conferred in any purchase are always included in the description for the edition.
- You can sell, gift, or donate your rights on a collection or named series to another person, as well as give up your rights if you so wish. The current process to do this is to send us an email:info@hermitageeditions.co.uk.
- If you have rights on a book, approximately two weeks before the release date you will receive an email containing a secret link which you can use to order your rights-linked book. This link will only be available prior to launch. If you miss this window, we will try to match numbers if you use the normal link but I’m afraid we can’t promise this.
- We operate a ‘use it or lose it’ policy with rights. If you miss a book, the numbers go back into the general pool for future books in that collection.
Our usual print runs consist of the following:
- Limited Edition – unnumbered but restricted to 1,000 copies (and four undistributed copies)
- Numbered Edition – limited to 350 copies (and four undistributed copies)
- Lettered Edition – limited to 52 copies (and four undistributed copies)
- Singularis Edition – limited to 15 copies (and four undistributed copies)
These parameters might change in response to the needs of a particular book, in which case we will advise you before the book is available to order.
We also have some Quixotic editions planned. These will all be special in their own particular way!
Absolutely – we will do everything we can to ship anywhere in the world, as long as the law allows. We may need to prepare a custom postage quote for you to take into account the extra shipping and potential tax implications.
If you want to reserve your book quickly, feel free to ‘buy’ with UK shipping and then send us an email with delivery details. We will raise a secondary invoice for you once we have figured out how to get your order to you! If we discover we are unable to ship to your destination, we will refund the whole payment.
Across a book series, no. Across a collection, maybe. What we won’t do is say one thing and do something different. If we’ll say we are producing 1,000 copies, we will not then print another 1,000, even if lots of people are interested!
When we’re ready. We focus on producing amazing books – quality is everything – we don’t want to commit to quarterly announcements and then have to change what we say! But if you want to know something, just drop us an email or a message on Facebook. We don’t keep secrets if we can help it and love chatting to other book lovers.
It depends. Drop us a message and let us know what’s happening. We will do our best to support you, but it depends on the publishing stage we’re at. We may have already passed your money on to one of our partners to complete their side of things. However, we don’t want you stuck with a book (or even with the promise of a book) that you don’t want or can’t afford, so let’s have a chat and see what we can do to help.
Obviously, you have statutory rights, but outside of those we don’t generally accept returns. A returned book has to be inspected and repackaged to be able to resell it, and this involves both a cost and a risk to the book. If you have changed your mind about a book, what we can do is support you in reselling it. We are still finalising how this will work, so drop us an email and we can have a chat about it.
If n is 1, sure! If n is more than 1… yes, for now. We don’t currently have a limit on the number of books you can buy, but this policy is currently under review by the team and may change at any point.
However, if you were to buy three lettered editions of a book now, we wouldn’t stop you buying the same three letters of the next in the collection if the policy were to change. That would just be mean!
A small number of copies of each edition are kept back for our private collection here at Hermitage Editions. These are used to show to potential clients and to receive occasional stroking by the company founders.
The undistributed copies have completely different numbering systems to the numbered editions, based on the system created by the Cistercian monks (who counted from 1 to 9,999 using a single glyph). We chose this method partially because it’s super cool, and partially because one of us (who shall remain nameless) caused much hilarity by confusing Cistercians with Cisterns – and so forth came the toilet monks…