Authors OnLine -

Authors OnLine celebrated its 10th anniversary on Saturday 13th Oct at the Buckden Millennium Community Centre, Buckden, Nr. St. Neots,Cambridgeshire. As both the first ever e-book and POD company in the UK, this makes it the first in the self-publishing industry to reach this landmark. Interestingly it is the same age as its primary printers, Lightning Source who recently celebrated their 10th birthday at the Frankfurt Book fair earlier this month. What a ten years!!

It was attended by 50 people including authors from all over the UK, The USA and Europe, members of staff and subcontract proofreaders and designers. It was generally considered a successful day by all those in attendance. The day was celebrated by an informal get together in the morning, where all our 384 paperback and hardback titles were on display including the very first copy of the first ever commercially produced Print On Demand book to roll off the presses in the UK, The Jet Stone by Peter Townsend. After a buffet lunch Richard Fitt and Derek Reece, the co-founders of the company, proposed a toast and outlined their future plans.

In ten years the company has published over 600 titles including nearly 400 in hardcopy, it now sells over £100,000 worth of books annually and has set a lot of the industry standards along the way. We have authors on every continent who have published and many have published two or more books with us, one or two more than 6. In addition it has a growing market in private publication mainly for family memoirs.

Authors Online is proud to have reached this milestone and looks forward to helping many more aspiring authors to realise their dream over the coming years.

Those authors in attendance (many with spouses or partners) included:-

Trevor Rowe, James Brodie, Miller Caldwell, Susan Shaw, Chris Bicheno, Annette Willoughby, Digby Westwood, Margaret Gail, Robert James, Richard Armour, Morris Zebaida, Nick Wastnage, Gwen Robinson from the USA, Denn Killian Mathews from France, Carol Shepherd, June Austin; Paul Wokes, Timothy Pilgrim, David Lawrence, Linda Upham.

We also welcomed designer Katy Dynes, indexer Alan Thatcher, proofreader and editor Linda Elder.

Members of the company present were Richard Fitt, Derek Reece, Gary Lee, Marjorie Fitt, Gaynor Johnson, James Fitt, Kat Reeve, Paul Rix

We would like to thank everybody for coming and to Miller Caldwell for generously donated a free copy of his book about his experiences as a camp manager after the Pakistan Earthquake in 2005 - 7 point 7 to everybody present. Thank you Miller. Also to Enrique Rewald from Argentina for the generous gift of a case of wine and Richard Armour for the bottle of bubbly.

We look forward to producing many more books over the next 10 years - cheers everybody.

See what the press say about our 10 years

To view all our photographs taken on the day, go to picasaweb.google.com/authorsonline or click on the group photo below