It’s notoriously difficult to get a book published, and that applies to local publishers just as much as national ones. We do welcome ideas from the public, but our standards are very high.

Everything we publish must be well researched and well written. Use your local library and double-check all your facts. The staff will be happy to help you find the right reference material. Make sure you use the spell checker and grammar checker on your word processor, and ask someone else to read your manuscript to check that it all makes sense.

If you’ve written a long book, it’s easier for us (and cheaper for you) if you send us a sample chapter and a synopsis of the book. We’re always very busy, so we don’t have time to read the whole book first go. If we think it looks promising, we’ll ask you for the rest.

We work on a very limited budget and so everything we publish must be cost-effective. Certain kinds of books – poetry, for example – only sell in very small quantities, so we just couldn’t afford to publish them. Fiction can also be difficult as there is such a lot of competition from big national publishers with huge advertising and promotions budgets.

Unfortunately, we have to reject many more books than we accept. The library has a publications panel - senior librarians who have a lot of experience of the sorts of books which are popular with readers – and they help us to decide which books to publish.

Don’t expect to make a lot of money from publishing your book. Local publishers can only afford to produce very limited print runs (sometimes just 1,000 books) and you will probably only get a few pennies in royalties for each copy sold. Authors who make fortunes from writing – like Harry Potter author JK Rowling – have big publishers who can distribute many thousands of books worldwide, but they make their real money from selling film rights.