To ensure you’re getting best value,
let’s check we are a good fit.
Choosing Consonance means choosing the most supportive, most pragmatic, most expert and interested publishing management partner, with the highest quality ONIX and the most intuitive, modern interface. That sounds great, but it’s not right for everyone. If we both discover, too late, that it’s not right for you, that’s a lot of wasted time and effort, which you shouldn’t have to shoulder.
We want to ensure that what we are best at is what you actually need. This is a guide to who we are, what we’re great at, and what we’re not. We hope it helps you get a feel for whether Consonance is right for you, or whether another system would be a better fit.
Because publishing is small, and clients talk. And if they’re great-fit clients, they talk and it’s in our favour! And then more great-fit clients appear, and it’s all rainbows and the right pace of growth and the satisfaction of actually helping clients brilliantly. Sales people, who are lovely but obliged by their job description to be avaricious, imperil that happy state by chasing the ‘deal’ over the fit. So we don’t have sales people. Get in touch and talk to the directors, instead.
Creating the publishing future we want to see .
If you want to avoid the standardisations that exist in the book trade (e.g. ONIX), or if your plans involve disrupting publishing entirely (e.g. through replacing the creative people that underpin our industry with AI; by selecting manuscripts according to an ‘algorithm’; or through pursuing zero-hours contracts), we’re not the right partner for you. But if you need a partner to help you deliver your progressive business model, read on.
Most of our clients have a progressive agenda, and we ship features in Consonance to help them. Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing, for example, required a new work derivations feature for their remixed-content model. UCL Press pioneered Open Access, which we enable in ONIX. Canelo reimagined the entire ebook publishing process. Consonance supports Boldwood Books to run royalties on a schedule that fully centres their contributors, and to publish each work in eleven product formats including physical and downloadable audio, epub, large print and hardback. Bookdash deliver their literacy-improving mission using our API to build dashboards which help funders appreciate the reach of their investments. Taylor and Francis rely on us to keep the data of millions of products accurate and flowing, night and day, to recipients around the world. The clients we support best are progressive, and growing, with a vast amount of complex data to handle.
Our business.
If your experience tells you that large software providers, with the highest market share, deliver great value and service, go with them. But if you think “highly experienced”, “rapid development time”, “small, responsive team”, and “ONIX expertise” are benefits, read on.
We started in 2011, with a system built to meet the needs of a single publisher. (The directors still own and run that publisher, which helps keep us directly aware of the realities of publishing.) We grew initially by working mostly with trade publishers. As we have grown we have gained a strong customer base of academic and professional publishers, who tend to need management of much more complex data.
We are wholly owned by our three directors, and have no other shareholders or debt, meaning our decisions are untainted by aggressive stakeholders chasing a fast ROI. We are profitable and maintain enough cash in the bank to ride out the next pandemic-level crisis.
We are seasoned experts in the book trade supply chain, and in the programming tools we use. (Our Jobs page has details of our tech stack.)
Our pricing is by user, or by arrangement for enterprise accounts. Some competitors charge by work or product count, which isn’t appropriate for us, because the clients we serve best choose Consonance to fuel their growth: pricing by product penalises clients who grow their output. Similarly, we don’t charge by module: our license gives access to all functionality, otherwise we would be financially penalising clients for aspiring to “one version of the truth” across all their teams.
Consonance is the right choice if you want enterprise features and support at SaaS prices. This is because, with Consonance, the licence fee doesn’t have to pay for lots of non-technical staffers to explain unintuitive software to you, or consultants to “map it” to your workflows due to its inflexibility.
Our approach to service.
Our support tickets are received directly by our programming team, not by a non-technical support team. If your experience shows that non-technical support staff provide meaningful help, great. If not, and if it’s appealing to know that you correspond directly with the people who create the code when you need something doing, read on.
Usually, support tickets are to do something: change some data for a rare, edge-case reason, or accommodate another system’s changed requirements. But some tickets have been sent by clients which suggest really good ideas. We tag these, then we’ll try to action it – when we’re working on a relevant part of the system, or earlier, if it’s both a good idea and urgent.
We often write, test, and deploy code to solve support tickets, then and there.
We prefer that every user of the system is encouraged to contact support for help. Support requests can draw, as relevant, on the expertise of any of our senior staff.
We also run webinars from time to time and have a library of videos to play on catch up.
We are seasoned and expert at migrating you from your legacy systems and processes. It is a core strength of the Consonance service. If you think your case is different: yes, it probably is, and yet we’ve still seen it all – so get in touch.
Our technology.
We have one very large codebase, which can be deployed as a private cloud for enterprise clients who want to directly query their own database, and to our public cloud. Whilst other vendors’ public clouds are one-size-fits-all, which both slows down rollouts of new functionality, and means everyone has to get every new feature, the Consonance public cloud has the best of both worlds: being able to accommodate client-specific code means tailored features when you want them, and lots of continuity when you don’t. We use Heroku and AWS for our hosting and storage to access world-class security and reliability: it’s not been our experience that on-premise or vendor-managed data centres provide a good service.
Consonance is a web app, deployable to a private cloud or to our public cloud which is accessed over the internet at https://web.consonance.app.
We have a GraphQL API to allow clients to develop their own integrations. We’ve been so delighted with the imaginative, brilliant things some of our clients are building with their own data and like the idea of Consonance being “The Most Open Publishing Software”.
We write modern, version-controlled code with extensive automated tests. We feel at home, and sometimes speak, at tech events like Haggis Ruby, Brighton Ruby and Railsgirls.
We don’t charge for developments that make our system better for all clients, and we don’t take years to do it. We only charge for code that you need us to develop that is entirely bespoke to you and we release new code every day, although it’s rarely apparent: we balance stability with under-the-hood maintenance and improvements.
Our codebase includes many features which suit enterprise clients with a large amount of data, such as custom abilities; bulk price, metadata, ONIX and contract data importers; file uploaders; and ebook analysis tools. It is strongly centred around the ONIX standard, with a hefty layer of pragmatism to map ONIX to the real world, in areas such as in-house subject codes, and format and edition descriptions.
Our team.
We’ve been a team of six or seven for the past few years, with alumnae from Pharma Press, OUP, Bath University, and local government. The director-founders have publishing, retail, Oracle, and management consultancy backgrounds. All staff write code.
Two of the three founders work full-time as programmers and business managers and we aim for a collaborative approach.
We do not have separate marketing or sales teams, preferring to invest our time in the product, not in persuading people to buy it: build it and they will come has worked well for us, as our good reputation spreads through client recommendations.
All staff are full time employees, and we work as a distributed team across the UK. We dropped office life at the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s worked well for us, so we no longer have an office at all.
We don’t think many shiny new tech bandwagons solve the real problems of data quality and process management in publishing: we are AI-, blockchain-, NFT-skeptics. We encourage technical literacy in publishing so that any new technologies can be assessed by teams from a position of knowledge and insight: for example, our Day of Code is the only publishing-specific coding course and Emma, our CEO, writes, speaks at conferences and guests on podcasts about how technical literacy futureproofs the industry.
We have a can-do, inclusive, learning-oriented culture. Some of our other websites are Just Simply (say “no” to saying things are simple, when they’re not!), Nope (a tongue-in-cheek way to help people to say “no”, via a web page that took 30 mins to write), and our GraphQL Docs (showing our clients ways to do more with their own data, with code.) Our blog contains our thoughts on matters of publishing, process and technology.
Consonance vs. others: how do you decide?
Are you thinking “Don’t all these systems provide basically the same thing – ONIX feeds, project management, CRM, production, rights and royalties?” No: Consonance gives you more, for less. Here’s a trio of Consonance benefits: our ground-breaking features and UX are proven, in clients such as T&F and LUP, to make complexity manageable and growth possible; it’s a genuinely integrated app, with no modules requiring multiple sign-ins or duplicated or missing data; and our support transcends support – it’s more like having your own personal technical consultant who can actually make changes to your data and app according to changing business requirements – all as part of the low £75/user/month licence fee. Consonance means you are more profitable, with less effort.
Complexity made manageable
Your Consonance account contains all features by default. There are no extra-cost, have-to-keep-signing-in-to modules – because we want no impediment to you having your metadata, project management, production, address book, rights & royalties in one place.
We’ve built the interface to be delightful both visually and via screenreader, keeping the vast complexity of thousands of data elements, ONIX configurations, data records and project management movements out of the way, until you want to see them.
Consonance has all the features you need to calmly project-manage complex publication programmes, handle new and emerging requirements, and extract maximum value from your IP in sales, rights and OA downloads. And it does it by giving you the breathing space to see patterns, not noise.
When you’re facing new business challenges and opportunities – complying with emerging EU legislation, for example, or entering new markets and doing new formats such as audio – we are your partner of choice. Read our case studies to see how we support Taylor and Francis in sending millions of data records to and from their global “hub”; Burleigh Dodds in their “remix” model; and Liverpool University Press in their “distributed press” initiative.
Integrated from top to bottom
Manuscript delivery dates that drive to-dos. Market-specific publication dates that appear on ABIs, catalogues, spreadsheet exports and in myriad flavours of ONIX. Multi-level sales channels that bring forecasts, actuals and royalty statements together. Head contracts whose “gratis copy” sections link to your copy tracker. Ebook files whose tables of contents are used to build the table of contents in your metadata feed. Metadata pages that use our own GraphQL API – used in turn by our clients to fuel their own apps, using their own Consonance data. Configured data feeds that get your data where it needs to be: your websites, retailers, trading partners, aggregators and data repositories.
When we say Consonance is your “one version of the truth”, it’s literal: there’s no spaghetti-code damaging your data’s integrity, under the hood, which you see in legacy systems that struggle to accommodate change. For instance, our market-leading data modelling means all formats have parity – there’s no sense that audio books are a bolt-on. You enter an ISBN-13, or a price, or a short description, or a print spec and in Consonance it’s stored once, referenced everywhere. (Ask us how we dynamically convert your list price on the fly in data feeds to accommodate Apple price point revisions and local VAT rule updates, for instance!)
Relied on for support excellence
Effective, adaptable, AI-free. Evolving requirements are no problem with a single codebase that handles the often client-specific code that we write in response to the changing needs of a dynamic book trade. And the ONIX excellence you’ll develop from our expert advice and actions translates directly into less effort and more sales.
How can we make changes to the app so readily, to support your emerging requirements? We invest daily in writing, maintaining and running hundreds of thousands of lines of test code, which we use as a quality gate for every change to our codebase as well as extensive checks by our team – so we can move fast without breaking things, backed by robust processes that conform to our quality and security certifications. We don’t use any generative AI in our processes or app, because we rather like to know what our code is doing and where it came from.
Innovative, intelligent automations, informed by a deep understanding of the emerging challenges of the industry, add up to an enterprise-grade service that sets a new standard.
Schedule a call to see Consonance in action and discuss your own situation. If you have your data in the ONIX format, send it over and we'll import it, to make the call particularly interesting.
Contact us