Phoenix Publications Ltd is live

I’ve been a criminologist for more than 3 decades. For the last few years, I’ve also been a cautionary tale — the academic who got “cancelled,” who fought a tribunal, who became, depending on who you ask, either a fighter and campaigner or a problem to be managed. Now, so many years after my first cancellation, I’ve made my peace with both versions.

What I haven’t made my peace with is watching good books die before they are even born because commissioning editors get nervous, or marketing departments get cold feet, or a sensitivity reader flags a sentence that was simply true and inconvenient. I’ve watched it happen to other people’s work as often as my own, and I got tired of it being someone else’s problem to solve.

So being someone who likes to blow up roadblocks, I’ve started a publishing house.

Phoenix Publications Ltd exists to publish the books that traditional presses are too frightened or nervous to touch. Works on sex, gender, crime, culture, and the war currently being waged against honest argument. PPL is interested in work by people who’ve done the thinking, have the evidence, and have simply run out of patience with mainstream publishing companies.

Our first title, Sex: One Woman’s War, written by me and Pat Carlen, is out now — part memoir, part sociology, about academic freedom and the personal cost of saying things people would rather you didn’t. But I want to be honest with you: the book is not really the announcement here. The book is proof that this can be done properly — typeset, edited, distributed, sold — outside the gatekeeping structures that have failed so many writers.

The real announcement is that Phoenix is open for business, and open for proposals.

If you’ve written something — or are writing something — that mainstream publishers have been too cautious to take on, I want to hear from you. Full submission details are on the website. I can’t promise to publish everything that lands in my inbox, but I can promise it will be read by someone who understands exactly why you wrote it and exactly why someone else was too nervous to publish it.

This is a small press. For the moment, it will stay deliberately small until we can set up the distribution systems and other infrastructure to handle capacity.

You can find me at phoenixpublicationsltd.co.uk. Follow along here and on X for updates on new titles, open submission windows, and the occasional dispatch from the front line of independent publishing.

Thank you for being part of this from the start.

Jo