Our story so far
Advanced functionality borne from the need of our own publishing requirements
“Consonance was born from our need to work efficiently as a single team, to communicate effortlessly with trade partners, and produce beautiful marketing materials.”
When we started, in 2011, Consonance (named Bibliocloud, back then) was an in-house project by Snowbooks, our sister publishing company, designed to bring all our knowledge about our books together in one place.
Since then, the system has evolved through working closely with our ever-growing numbers of publisher clients to be enterprise publishing software — for publishers, by publishers. Our experience now spans all types of publishing lists, working in all manner of ways with the supply chain: academic, children’s, international, professional and scholarly, and the system is designed to share that knowledge with all our clients.
Along the way, we won:
- a Futurebook Innovation award in 2012
- a Digital Leaders commendation in 2016
- IPG Services to Independent Publishers award in 2017
- Inclusion on the Futurebook 40 list of innovators 2018
- Shortlisting in The Pitch entrepreneur competition 2018 and 2019
Our largest customer, Taylor and Francis, has over half a million products, and we send out millions of ONIX updates a year.
We are a tight-knit, expert, high-performing team of hands-on programmers with extensive publishing backgrounds. For instance, co-founders Emma (CEO) and Rob (Chairman) founded and still run 20-year-old Snowbooks, and database expert David (CTO) has delivered technical solutions in various industries, moving from Oracle data warehousing, Business Objects, and Informatica and SQL-based ETL to data and system architecture and web app development in Ruby on Rails. Our team is drawn from around publishing and combine deep industry experience with technical expertise.
We volunteer at coding education events such as RailsGirls, and run our own coding courses for publishers. We partner with The Bookseller at their FutureBook conference to provide a Day of Code for 40 publishers. We run the Side Project Summer initiative to provide a community for publishers who code.
We work in a streamlined way which encourages rapid, prioritised delivery of value to our customers, relying on tools including Basecamp, Freshdesk, GitHub, Heroku, AWS, Bugsnag and Skylight.
We feature in articles in The Bookseller, Publishing Perspectives, BookBrunch, and on blogs, podcasts and reports, and our speaking credits include the BBC, London Book Fair, FutureBook, Confluence, Bookmachine, the SYP, University publishing courses, Brighton Ruby and various publishing and software development conferences.