About SPV Creative Press

How it started

SPV Creative Press is an independent publisher based in the UK, working with experts, families, and emerging authors to turn their thinking, experiences and stories into properly published books, in their own voice.

It started quietly a few years ago, when my daughter Sophie wrote a short story on a piece of paper. She was seven, and the story was about a unicorn who'd lost her horn. We liked it enough to publish it together as a real book on Amazon, mostly to see if we could. We did. The look on her face the first time she held the printed copy is most of the reason this business exists.

What began with one children's book grew steadily from there. I went on to self-publish a small history series, then started fielding questions from other parents who wanted to do the same thing for their own children, then from coaches and consultants who'd been meaning to write a book for years and never got round to it, then from grown-up children who wanted to capture their parents' stories before time ran out.

SPV Creative Press is what all of that turned into.

Your Story Matters

Real Stories. Real People. Real Impact.

Real Stories means stories that come from real people. Lived experiences, hard-won expertise, the imagination of a seven-year-old, the memory of a grandparent. Fiction or non-fiction, the test is the same: a real human being thought this, before it ended up on the page.

That distinction matters more than it used to. The world now generates a lot of content that didn't start with a person at all, and most of it is technically fine and almost completely forgettable. SPV uses modern tools to handle the editing, formatting and publishing, but every book begins with a real conversation, and what ends up on the page still sounds like the person it came from. That premise sits underneath everything we publish.

Whether the author is a consultant with twenty years of pattern recognition to share, a grandparent with a life worth capturing, or a seven-year-old with a story about a unicorn, the work is the same: take what's actually in their head and shape it into a book that still sounds like them.

What we publish

SPV is the home for four ongoing strands of work.

Expert Conversations is the publishing series for coaches, consultants and senior independents who have years of professional thinking to put into book form. Each book is interview-based, finished in about two months, and published under the author's name.

Legacy Stories is for families who want to capture the life of a parent or grandparent properly, while there is still time. The work is gentler and slower than the rest, and the finished book is usually kept inside the family rather than published widely.

Young Authors is the local service that helps children publish their own stories. It's the strand that started everything, and the one that keeps reminding me why this work is worth doing.

Foresty Friends is the children's series that grew out of Sophie's original unicorn book, and continues with new titles as her ideas keep arriving.

The I Want To Know Now series, a sub-collection of short focused books on big subjects (the two World Wars, Hitler, and more titles to come), is being re-issued under SPV Creative Press across the rest of 2026.

How we work

Every project begins with a structured set of conversations with the author. We listen carefully, capture the material, and shape it into a book that reads cleanly and still sounds like the person it came from. The author doesn't usually have to write anything themselves; they just have to be heard.

Then we handle the editing, the structuring, the cover design, the typesetting, the photo treatment where it applies, and the publishing on Amazon (or printed copies for families who prefer to keep their book private). Most projects finish in around two months from the first conversation to the printed book.

It's a small, considered way of working. We take on a limited number of projects at a time, because the work doesn't compress well when you push the volume. That's by design rather than by default.

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