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BlogInterviews
Home›Blog›PUBLISHER INTERVIEW – ISABELLE KENYON (MANAGING DIRECTOR – FLY ON THE WALL PRESS)

PUBLISHER INTERVIEW – ISABELLE KENYON (MANAGING DIRECTOR – FLY ON THE WALL PRESS)

By T.O. Munro
June 6, 2025
195
0

Fly on the wall press logoWe are joined today at the Hive by Isabelle Kenyon, Managing Director of Manchester based publishing house Fly on the Wall Press.

Isabelle has led the publishing house she founded to success and recognition as

  • Small Press of the Year – British Book Awards 2024 (North),
  • Promotion of Environmental Sustainability winner (Manchester Culture Awards) 2024

And

  • Finalist in Manchester People’s Cultural Awards 2023

The press prides itself on offering Ethical, political and accessible books as befits its tagline of

A publisher with a conscience

Isabelle is herself an accomplished and versatile writer with published collections of poetry, short form fiction and a debut novel the thriller The Dark Within Them which came out in 2024. Alongside the writing and publishing, Isabelle offers support packages to aspiring authors and has designed modules in publishing for Masters level courses at the University of Bournemouth.  No wonder then, that Isabelle was named as a Future Leader by Bookseller in 2024.

You describe yourself on Goodreads as ‘Always writing, always reading!’ which sounds like a fun but busy life, so thank you so much for agreeing to answer a few questions, Isabelle.

 

TO: Small press publishing is a challenging field to work in, though Fly on the Wall Press is doing well as we can see.

What was impetus that led you to found Fly on the Wall Press, and why that name?

IK: So strangely, it wasn’t a conscious choice. In 2017, I’d started performing my work at Open Mic nights in Guildford but wanted to work with other writers, so I joined Twitter and Goodreads and formed communities in the US, as well as in the UK and Ireland. At the time, to unite people, I put a call out on my blog for contributions to a mental health anthology, Please Hear What I’m Not Saying, for the charity Mind. We’ve changed a lot since then, but it was a case of learning how to put together an anthology and distribute internationally from the start. We fundraised a lot for Mind, which was fantastic, whilst forming a community, so people asked when the next one would be.

It was a really enjoyable experience so in 2018, we put together a second anthology, Persona Non Grata, about social exclusion and homelessness; this time we collaborated with Crisis Aid UK and Shelter. We expanded our audience, went into warehousing and did a launch event for this anthology, so I officially recognised to myself that I had become a publisher.

In 2019, I put a call out for individual writers, and that’s when we started with just poetry collections in the first year, before branching out into the current models which we have now. So, Fly on The Wall publish novels, short story collections, poetry, and we have our anthologies, which is what we’re known for from that first year.

In terms of the name, it came from the idea of sitting in a coffee shop, ear-wigging on what people are saying and observing what people are like from a dialogue or mannerisms perspective. The idea is to create authentic narratives; as writers, we’re always stealing things from people around us.

 

TO: Fly on the Wall Press’s mission statement is as A Publisher With a Conscience.

What does that mean in practice for the stories, authors and publishing approaches that you take on?

IK: Great question! The stories should have a social message and be ready to say something about the world we live in – perhaps something controversial or thought-provoking. For authors, it means that our approach is accessible, and we want to give them as much information about the industry and the process – nothing is gatekept. We like our authors to feel empowered! We also know that mental health is number one – publishing can be hard and we want to make sure our authors feel supported and valued. People over profit!

TO: Publishing is a very competitive and intense industry with overheads that must make it difficult for small presses to survive let alone thrive.

 

How do you insulate Fly on the Wall Press against some of the commercial storms that rage, from things as simple as the cost of paper, to booking time slots for print runs on big commercial printers?

IK: Definitely – the conditions get harder every year for someone looking to start out as a new publisher! If book prices had risen in line with inflation, Enders Analytics says that the average price of a paperback would be just over £12 – so £11.99-£12.99 is where we place our books now, to ensure ethical royalties for all. We don’t have an issue with printers because we prefer to work with smaller companies who value our books and know what we do intimately. We also don’t have an office, avoiding overheads, and I’m chronically underpaid, which is my own fault 😉, but helps us publish more books…

 

TO: You are a writer and publisher of both prose and poetry. Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From is another writer comfortable in both forms, although the poetic precision of language and concrete imagery is very evident in her prose novel.

How far do you find that poetry and prose complement each other in your work as a writer and as a publisher and how far do they demand their own distinctive approaches?

IK: I always know if a novelist is also a poet, I feel! And that crossover works really well for creativity of language. It can also be a challenge – is the work commercial, or literary? Sometimes bigger publishers don’t know quite where to place it.

 

TO: We live – according to the apocryphal curse – “in interesting times” and certainly the slew of negative news on mainstream and social media can be exhausting. In the introduction to your workshop on climate anxiety you make the point that over 70% of young people feel hopeless about climate change.

What steps do you think those working in writing and publishing can most effectively take to reduce that ‘climate anxiety’ and inspire hope and action?

IK: We need more utopian narratives of communities working together and community action/new technologies. There are so many dystopian narratives, I think we’re all worn out. We can micro-influence by writing about the change we want to see.

 

TO: Often in writing fiction to effect action, authors aspire to deliver warnings, or to raise awareness, or build empathy. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang is a rare work of fiction which directly inspired an environmental movement, albeit a controversial one in the ‘Earth First’ eco-terrorist group.

Which books have most inspired you to take action or change your behaviour and how did they have that impact?

IK: Headscarves and Hymens. Why the Middle East needs a Sexual Revolution by Mona Eltahawy. It made me think about how religion oppresses women in insidious ways, even if they don’t feel oppressed.

They by Sarfraz Manzoor – it made me think differently, about how problems lie on both sides (Muslim and Non Muslim) in modern Britain and a re-education on culture is needed equally.

Demos Rising – shout out to our multi-media anthology, fundraising for Amnesty International, on the theme of protest (poetry, flash fiction and artwork). So many inspiring international voices.

 

TO: Toby Litt, in How to Write a Story to Save the World echoed Ada Palmer and Jo Walton in describing The Protagonist Problem where stories (particular films) rely on a central heroic character who single handedly ‘saves the world’.

Do you find that the books published by Fly on the Wall Press generally stick to the central heroic protagonist narrative, or show a more distributed agency amongst a wider cast of ordinary people? 

IK: Interesting question!

Our 1920s feminist cosy crime ‘The Devil’s Draper’ by Donna Moore is a 3-women heroic narrative really – whilst Ms Mabel Adair, the 1st policewoman in Glasgow, is our guide, thief Johnnie, and businesswoman Beatrice are all equally empowered to find the women who are going missing in the city, at the hands of corrupt males…

In ‘The Wager and the Bear’, a cli-fi novel by John Ironmonger, activist Tom is our hero – and in some ways, he manages to change the mind of climate-denying PM Monty, after they find themselves moored on a moving glacier in Greenland… with a very hungry polar bear!

And in our short story collections, for example ‘Maps of Imaginary Towns’ by SJ Bradley, ordinary people, such as social workers, artists and teachers, are given heroic narratives, just for trying to get by with a sense of humour and spirit.

 

 

TO: There is an Ursula K Le Guin quote that I find myself often using in our troubled times. “Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” Fly on the Wall has embraced this with its Demos Rising Anthology which “powerfully uses different forms – poetry, prose, images – from a diverse set of writers, to speak truth to power.”

Can you tell us a bit about how this anthology came about and what drew you and the writers together in addressing a wide variety of contemporary societal issues?

IK: I think if this protest anthology had been written now, the protests featured would have been very different – so it’s really interesting to see if we’ve achieved anything since 2022. One artwork features the women’s marches in Iran, for example. The idea was that words are powerful, indeed books can be seen as so powerful, that they get banned around the world, and give people agency by fundraising for Amnesty International, and therefore being a part of change.

 

 

TO: The advent of Amazon kdp has seen an explosion in self-published books, while social media seems to be full of adverts promising to turn your AI prompt into a commercially successful novel with minimal effort from the ‘author’.

As a successful author, publisher and provider of author services and training, what are your top tips to aspiring authors looking for success in these changing and challenging technological times?

IK: Urgh amazon! Never use KDP! A book should be a journey – getting it a publisher and then a home in the hand of a reader is not meant to be easy. There’s no one size fits all, as everyone has different publication goals. Some just want their mum to read a bound copy, others want to be available at airports and in national chain bookshops. Whatever your journey, be an empowered author. Seek out information about how the industry works and how you could be useful to a publisher along the promotional path.

 

TO: Of course life, like society, is in a state of flux but (hopefully) moving forward.

What exciting developments are in the pipeline for Isabelle Keynon the author and for Fly on the Wall Press the publisher?

IK: Ooo lots! We are celebrating 7 years and over 70 books this July (Fri 25th July 2025, 6.15pm-9.15pm at Seesaw, Manchester – come along !) and we’re about to publish our first hardback novel next year (Girl Ape by John Ironmonger). We’re also about to sign our first two translated novels (Slovenian and Latvian).

(Fri 25th July 2025, 6.15pm-9.15pm at Seesaw, Manchester – come along !)

TO: Small press publishers, especially those with a conscience are a precious resource with in our community.

How and where can people find out more about the work that you do and the services that you offer as well as how best to support you?

Isabelle Kenyon at the Northern Publishers Fair (image credit Jak Stoker)

IK: First up is of course our website here – we retain 100% of the profits this way, and whilst we love bookshops, often losing over 50% of the RRP can be tough to an unfunded publisher.

We have a successful online course about How To Get Published and how to be an EMPOWERED author here 

Social Media: @fly_press (Twitter) @flyonthewallpress (Instagram) @flyonthewallpress (Facebook)

And if you’re northern, do come along to our annual Northern Publishers’ Fair – usually each April

 

TO: And finally, to make it a round dozen of questions

Are there any questions you would have liked me to ask which I didn’t, and if so, how would you have answered them?

IK: Perhaps about submissions? We open in Summer annually and we’re open for novels atm.

 

 

You can find out about submitting your novel to fly on the wall press here.

The 2025 Summer submission window is open from 1st May to the 31st July.

 

 

TagsFly on the wall pressindie publisherisabelle KenyonNorthern Publishers' FairPublishing

T.O. Munro

T.O. Munro works in education and enjoys nothing more than escaping into a good book. He wrote his first book (more novella than novel) aged 13, and has dabbled in writing stories for nearly four decades since then. A plot idea hatched in long hours of exam invigilation finally came to fruition in 2013 with the Bloodline trilogy, beginning with Lady of the Helm. Find him on twitter @tomunro.

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