About the Press

There is a koi plaque outside Jodie’s house. That is where the name came from — and the detail is worth keeping, because it captures the press honestly. This is a small, cottage-industry operation: authors doing what they love, without the backing of a London office.

The koi carries a wider meaning too, one that suits a press built for authors making their own way: perseverance, and quiet transformation. Nothing about independent publishing happens quickly. Most of it happens by people who keep going.

Being a small press is not a licence to publish loosely. Every title that carries a Koi House imprint goes through a defined editorial process before it reaches a reader.

• A documented process per imprint. Each line has its own editorial method, because a modernised seventeenth-century devotional and a contemporary crime novel do not need the same treatment.
• Faithfulness to the source. On Enduring Classics and Seven Day Anthology, where we are working with existing texts, the original argument and shape are preserved. Modernisation is not abridgement by stealth, and abridgement, where it happens, is declared.
• Reader apparatus as standard. Introductions, notes, glossaries, and discussion prompts where the text warrants them — so a reader is not left to work it out alone.
• Line editing before publication. Fiction goes through a first-pass line edit against a defined voice standard for the series, with every change justified rather than imposed.
• Distinct identity per imprint. Separate branding, separate audiences, separate lists. We do not push a devotional reader towards a crime novel because it happens to share a publisher.

Koi House Press is Jodie’s. She runs the press across all three imprints — the editorial work, the production, the covers, the lists, the whole of it — and writes the crime fiction that appears under the Joe Gaston name.

The approach came out of doing it the hard way first. Everything the press offers an author is something she has had to work out herself, on her own titles, without a London office behind her.

We hand authors the knowledge and tools to run their own business, then trust them with the strategy.