When Amanda Ridout launched Boldwood Books in February 2019, she did it from her kitchen table in London with a handful of colleagues and a deliberately contrarian business plan: no advances, no warehouse, no returns, and every title released simultaneously in every format on a single publication day. Six years later, the company has a catalog of 1,500 titles, more than 220 authors, 29 staff, and annual revenue of £11 million. In all, the company has sold 45 million books around the world.

Ridout, formerly CEO of Head of Zeus, built Boldwood around genre fiction—romance, crime, thrillers, and historical fiction—publishing globally from the start and acquiring world English language rights as a minimum on every title. The multi-format, single-pub-day model is central to her pitch. "Nobody else publishes audio on the day, print on the day," she said. The company operates without a warehouse, sells traditional print books on firm sale terms only, accepting no returns. Authors receive monthly royalty payments in lieu of advances. "It's genuinely like a salary," Ridout said. "It's a real partnership."

That unconventional model — initially met with skepticism — led the publisher to be named Independent Publisher of the Year at the Nibbies in 2025 and the equivalent honor from the Independent Publishers Guild.

The company's name, for the record, comes from Thomas Hardy. Ridout's grandparents owned a farm in Dorset—the property Hardy used as the setting for the character Boldwood in Far from the Madding Crowd. "I thought that's kind of an interesting literary connection," Ridout said. "But also it seemed like a good name because we want to be bold."

All the firm's growth has been organic and the company has made no acquisitions. Half of Boldwood's revenue comes from outside the U.K., with the U.S. alone accounting for approximately 35% of total sales, driven primarily by digital sales on Amazon, Audible, and the digital library platform Hoopla. Australia and Canada are the next largest markets.

Ridout is not shy about centering the U.S. in its business plan. "We always have world English language rights and we think of ourselves, maybe naively, as an American publisher," she said. "We deal directly with Amazon and Audible and all the people who have big footprints in the U.S." Boldwood does not localize titles for U.S. distribution; covers, titles, and spellings go out unchanged. "It's complete nonsense that you have to Americanize books from the U.K. for American readers," Ridout said.

The next step for Boldwood's slow conquering of the American market will be on paper. In the U.K., library purchases of print-on-demand and large print titles from across Boldwood's full catalog are the firm's top category, easily outpacing High Street retail. Ridout wants to replicate that in the U.S. "We need to get a print presence" in American libraries, she said, noting that while Hoopla has been a strong partner for audiobooks and e-books in the U.S. library market, print has so far been largely absent from that channel. Ridout identified Ingram as a likely partner for the push into U.S. libraries.

As for the trajectory of Boldwood's sales growth, Ridout is confident that the only direction is up. To support this, she recently hired two editors focused on romance, and an additional editor for contemporary thrillers, aimed at building male readership. The company also holds translation rights for approximately half its catalog and has publishing partnerships in seven European countries, including Overamstel in the Netherlands, DP (Digital Publishing) in Germany, City Editions in France, and Grupo Ático in Spain, among others.

Ridout is unapologetic about focusing on the bottom line or about the commercial fiction writers she has championed throughout her career. "There's always been a snobbery around commercial fiction," she said. "It's just so sad. It really is what most people read all around the world."