From the marketing/publishing side of the tracks, what has been the biggest surprise, both from the ‘most challenging’ aspect and the ‘most rewarding’ standpoint?

The most challenging thing has been trying to get hardcopy paperbacks sorted out. We’re a small start-up, without sufficient capital to order in advance, so we needed to find a print on demand partner who would bear the costs of printing upfront. In order to do that, we had to decide to hand over control of selling the book to the POD company, to allow them to recover their costs first, then pass on our share (from which we would then share with our writers). So far, so simple. But finding someone willing to do that, then having to negotiate the tricky ground of passing business checks (it would be so much easier if we were a public limited company, but that would then undo our entire business ethos).

So yeah, that’s been challenging. Or as I like to call it “a complete pain in the arse”.

Most rewarding comes from the publicity point of view – the phenomenal help that Twitter has provided us with. From spreading the word about the project, to landing us a radio interview in the United States, to helping us find many of our new roster of writers, Twitter has been invaluable, to an extant that I could not have foreseen.