At Your Paper Quest, we had a vision to unite our love of writing with our love of reading and to share great stories with a community of fellow indie enthusiasts. Our team houses both avid readers and talented writers and we wanted to create a community we have been a part of for a long time.
That’s how we came to Your Paper Quest. A unique subscription book box that champions and showcases the best of the self-publishing scene and independent authors.
The Limitations of Traditional Publishers
In a world of bestseller lists the traditional publishing field is an easy place to find a good read. A decent read. A, ‘yeah, that was alright’ kind of read, but only rarely do you stumble across a true gem. A story that opens your mind and leads you through a world you didn’t know you could discover. Who takes a genre and plays with it in new and unexpected ways.
These treasures find it hard to be seen among the sea of copycats in the field of traditional publishing. They are cast aside for the next best seller, ‘Dystopian Future; With a Twist!’ or ‘Murder! Mystery! Who Dunnit!?’ – generic titles we’ve seen the shape of before.
We fall in love with stories because of the doors they open within us. Because of the cast of characters that become our friends, our enemies, our mentors and companions, our teachers, and our guides.
But like we have seen in many fields of entertainment and creativity, those with the greatest capacity to bring these stories to life and spread them far and wide simply want more of the same. It makes sense really, most traditional publishers, production companies and record labels are investors, and investors want a guaranteed return on their investment. And so, buying into what sells is the safest bet to increase their investment.
And whilst the resurrection of stories such as classic Disney movies into live-action 3D hybrids, the remaking of Marvel movies, and the extension of the Star Wars franchise, among other examples, have brought old stories to a new generation and breathed a fresh bit of life into them, there’s not really anything new in them.
They champion the advent of newer and fancier technology, but the storytelling hasn’t been pushed. The depths of the human condition haven’t been reached. It is, in simplest terms, a story we’ve heard before.
The New Horizons of Indie Authors
The wonderful world of self-publishing is rife with authors pushing the capacity of human creativity in every direction it can. From books that buck old tropes and re-write the genre itself, to books that play with grammar usage and pacing to find novel ways to convey their tales, to the books that just surprise you. Stories that make you think, ‘I didn’t know someone could write a book like that.’
Those are the books that we crave. Those are the ones that make us get out of bed to write another day or read another page. It speaks to both our love of creativity and the endless potential of the human being.
After all, stories have shaped us. From Austen to Shakespeare, Ovid to Plato and back to the anonymous authors of countless world mythologies. Stories have taught us, grown us, moved us, guided us and connected us. We’ve experienced first-hand the power of a good story to challenge our thinking, open our minds and just damn well appreciate life and the beauty of living and creating.
This we want to pass on to every one of our subscribers for we know you feel the same passion too. We know you have loved the classics and the remakes but your heart craves for something new, something novel, something you haven’t seen before.
And each month our subscription book box aims to deliver just that.
Exploring New Horizons: Curating our Book Box
To give the indie authors of the world a real chance to be heard requires dedication to the cause, so it’s excellent news that our Chief Curator knows both the hardship of writing and self-publishing and the irreplaceable feeling that a good story brings.
Such passion and dedication is carefully and diligently channelled into reading every submission we receive to find our favourite indie authors to showcase to our community of bookworms.
We also know that some of us simply like what we like and gravitate towards a particular genre. We’d be lying to say we didn’t have our favourites too. But our horizons have grown so much by branching out into genres we may have once avoided, and to take in the depth and breadth of what is to offer.
To this end, we wanted to reassure our subscribers that we package each box under a theme showcasing different sides of the genre to both introduce you to new tales and to show you that a good story is a good story. And we are confident you will love each one of our selections.
The themes we choose speak to something in the human condition that opened our eyes, that did something we didn’t expect, hadn’t seen before, or left us aching when the end came for we didn’t want to step out of the universe and back into the real world.
Curated Collections: Unique Themes
Our past selections include ‘Astray Among the Stars,’ Sci-Fi adventures which showcase a dark and realistic tale, contrasted with a snappy, funny, action-packed romp through space.
‘Unmasking the Truth’ is a pair of tales of mystery and suspense that take you through the mind of a psychological malady and a mystery that includes romance in a fitting and poignant way.
We like to showcase what can be done by an independent author and the depth and breadth of each genre.
Writing is a journey, and discovering those perfect tomes is definitely a quest.
Our subscription boxes are curated by lovers of words and people passionate about bringing to the fore the amazing, lesser-known talent of the self-publishing world.
We do this with care and consideration and aim to wow you each month with the tales that have impressed us most.
We invite you to begin Your Paper Quest today and subscribe to the UK’s best book subscription box that champions indie authors and offers unique reads, month on month.
