About Us
Chiselbury Publishing was founded by Stuart Leasor as James Leasor Publishing in 2011 to make the works of his father, James Leasor, available to new and old readers. James Leasor had been one of the bestselling and most prolific British authors of the second half of the 20th Century, writing over 50 books ranging from thrillers and historical novels to histories and biographies. However none were available as ebooks and the few in print had legacy contracts with publishers who had little interest in them.
We were then approached by leading journalist Dominic Midgley to see if we could make the bestselling biographies that he had written with Chris Hutchins on Roman Abramovich and Sir James Goldsmith available as well.
We have since been approached by other authors wanting us to publish new and previously published works and so we have rebranded as Chiselbury to reflect our new profile. Since our rebrand in 2021 we have added a growing number of both new and previously published authors to the line up. We currently have books by more than 30 different authors in print or nearing publication.
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If you have written something that you think deserves to be published, or you own the copyright to titles that are no longer available but that you feel still have some legs please contact us. We are always looking for new works.
We are not looking for any particular genre or category of book. If you look through our catalogue you will see that we have published a wide range of types, both non-fiction and fiction, from biographies and memoirs, history books – traditional and humorous – thrillers, sagas and even westerns. Our criteria is simple – we are looking for books that we are interested in ourselves and which we believe others will like too. We are NOT in the business of vanity publishing… If we don’t agree to publish your book it does not mean it is bad, it just doesn’t grab us personally – so don’t take it personally and we wish you good luck trying elsewhere.
We have tried to make our author contracts as fair and straightforward as possible – they certainly are simpler than those widely used in the traditional general book publishing world. We don’t pay any advance against royalties (and we don’t seek any payment from. authors to publish their work). The royalty percentages are generous, based on net income not on cover price.
Some guidelines for submissions:
Please send:
A synopsis of the work and include in that any information you think might be relevant about potential level of reader interest.
At least the first three chapters/20 pages/5,000 words. You can also send the complete manuscript if that has been written.
A brief biography.
As a guide the finished manuscript should typically be between 70,000 and 110,000 words in length. If your work falls, or is likely to fall, wildly outside of this, please contact us before submission.
Please ensure your submission is your best draft and that you have used available grammar and spellchecking tools before submission (for example, those in MS Word). Complete or partial manuscripts that contain too many basic errors will not be reviewed.
Manuscripts should be written in British or US English.
Do not typeset your work or apply any complex formatting (page numbers, bold, italics etc. are fine). Please ensure that you have not added any extra lines between paragraphs – except for new sections, when we would recommend *** or a motif to signify that this space is intentional. Page breaks should be inserted page breaks, not masses of returns…
All manuscripts must be in MS Word or Rich Text Format (RTF). No other format will be accepted, including PDFs & hard copies.