Category: Media

Celebrating NOP’s Culture of Mutual Support

This week highlighted one of NOP’s greatest strengths: our culture of encouragement. Several colleagues took time to acknowledge each other’s contributions on ongoing projects, and offered thoughtful feedback to help colleagues refine their ideas.

Strong communication and a willingness to champion one another continue to propel NOP forward as we build towards an exciting 2026.

Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player: the Tee-Shirt Collection

Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player: the Tee-Shirt Collection

Paul Warren has produced some iconic illustrations for Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player and we’d like to offer you the possibility of purchasing your very own T-shirt, adorned by one of these images.

Each image will be printed as a badge on the top left hand side of the front of your T-shirt. Your T-shirt can also have our larger ‘Greatest Of All Time’ image (below) printed on its reverse.

£20.00
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MAJAS DIARY CONFIDENTIAL DO NOT OPENDownload

Strengthening Collaboration as We Approach Year-End

As the year draws to a close, the NOP team has been energised by a renewed focus on collaboration and shared creativity. Last week, colleagues engaged in a lively after-hours catch-up to exchange ideas on upcoming manuscripts, festive campaigns, and new ways to support our authors.

We’re proud of the enthusiasm everyone brings to these informal idea-sharing sessions: another reminder of what makes NOP such a dynamic, people-first publishing house.

Please note that future postings will no longer be produced by the younger members of the NOP team but from our professionalised marketing and communications department. If you wish to hear from those members, please contact us directly via this form:

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Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player 2026 Calendar

Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player 2026 Calendar

A 12 page, A4 calendar with images drawn from the Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player by Nick Owen and illustrations by Paul Warren.

£20.00
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PRESS RELEASE: Nick Owen Publishing Addresses Ongoing Website “Leakage Issue”

Nottingham, UK; 2 December 2025

Nick Owen Publishing (NOP) today issued an update regarding the recent and unexpected appearance of internal meeting minutes, confidential memos and unvarnished staff commentary across various public pages of its website. These documents, which include highly candid discussions about biscuits, printer failures, and whether Julian should be allowed unsupervised access to the CMS, were unintentionally made available to the public following a series of technical “incidents”.

While early reports suggested another external hack, a preliminary review has now clarified that the root cause was “a complex interplay of outdated plugins, faulty permissions, and one employee who clicked something they absolutely should not have clicked.”

What Happened?

Over the past several weeks, the NOP website began sporadically attaching confidential materials to the bottom of blog posts, book pages, and on one memorable occasion, the author biography for a children’s title.

These included, but were not limited to:

  • Minutes from the “Is the Printer Sentient?” staff meeting
  • A draft disciplinary letter to the person who accidentally emailed a baguette
  • Three pages of Maja’s doodles
  • A detailed argument about whose fault the website hack really was
  • A 1,600-word monologue from Paul Warren titled “Typography Crimes I Will Not Forgive”
  • Eleanor’s annotated list of “People I’m Hiding the Passwords From”

NOP apologises for any confusion caused to readers, reviewers, international partners, and the three unsuspecting school libraries who thought these were “bonus materials”.

What Happens Next?

To restore order, NOP is implementing the following corrective measures:

  1. Full rebuild of the website, led by an external team whose key qualification is “not emotionally involved in any of this.”
  2. Immediate revocation of back-end access from all staff except Eleanor, who has been deemed “least likely to press something shiny”.
  3. A compulsory CMS training session, which Julian will attend twice.
  4. Installation of a permissions system in which no file can be made public without at least two editors confirming it is not (a) minutes, (b) gossip, or (c) a shopping list.
  5. A new rule: If a file is titled “DO NOT UPLOAD”, it may not, under any circumstances, be uploaded.

Reassurance to the Public

Alex Moore, Managing Director, said:

“We want to assure everyone—customers, partners, international publishers, and the unfortunate members of the public who now know far too much about our internal biscuit budget—that the website is being stabilised. Nick Owen Publishing remains committed to transparency.

NOP stresses that there is no ongoing security risk, no personal data was exposed, and that the accidental publication of confidential documents was annoying and embarrassing.

The company expects normal service to resume shortly, with a new and improved website experience, fewer unexpected attachments, and significantly less shouting from Eleanor.

For more information (but preferably not for screenshots), please contact:

press@nickowenpublishing.com

PRESS RELEASE: Nick Owen Publishing Welcomes International Collaboration with Delhi-Based Lotus Leaf Books

Nottingham, UK

2 December 2025

Nick Owen Publishing (NOP) today announces the beginning of a strategic dialogue with Lotus Leaf Books, a leading Delhi-based publishing company exploring expansion into the English-language comedy and humour market.

As part of this initial engagement, Lotus Leaf Books has appointed senior strategy lead Shaila Rao to undertake a study visit to the United Kingdom. The visit will include a structured programme hosted by Nick Owen Publishing, offering insights into the cultural, literary and commercial landscape of contemporary English humour.

The programme will focus on:
– Key characteristics and market drivers of English comedic writing
– Cross-cultural adaptation and global audience development
– Opportunities for international co-publishing and content exchange
– Emerging talent pipelines within the UK humour and satire sector

Julian Pilkington-Sterne, Marketing & Partnerships at Nick Owen Publishing, commented:
“We are delighted to welcome our colleagues from Lotus Leaf Books. Cross-cultural humour is one of the most dynamic areas of global publishing, and this collaboration represents an exciting opportunity to share expertise, explore creative possibilities and build meaningful international partnerships.”

The dialogue between Nick Owen Publishing and Lotus Leaf Books underscores the increasing global interest in English comedic writing and reflects NOP’s commitment to fostering international collaboration across the literary sector.

For further information, please contact:
press@nickowenpublishing.com

Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player 2026 Calendar

Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player 2026 Calendar

A 12 page, A4 calendar with images drawn from the Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player by Nick Owen and illustrations by Paul Warren.

£20.00
Shop now

CONFIDENTIAL ZOOM CALL TRANSCRIPT DO NOT OPENDownload

It’s all in our jeans: does our DNA shape our character?

We’ve known for many a year that genetics can explain a lot when it comes to predicting the frequency of brown hair and blue eyes in a population and whether or not you’re born with an appendix. Most recently, popular forensic TV scientists have taken it upon themselves to investigate the DNA of one Mr. A. Hitler. In the TV programme “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator” they aim to “assess [Hitler’s] genetic propensity for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions”, by carrying out polygenic risk score (PRS) tests. From the results, they assert that Hitler had “higher-than-likely average likelihood of ADHD”, a “high probability” of some autistic behaviours, a “propensity for antisocial behaviour” and “a high probability of developing schizophrenia” and various other claims about his sexual prowess and proclivities.

This genetic determinism is extremely disturbing giving it’s likely to generate a lot of wild assertions. As The Guardian puts it:

“When it comes to autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the risks of stigmatising these conditions by attaching them to a universally reviled figure are especially glaring. If the takeaway from watching Hitler’s DNA for some is that “Hitler had autism”, will those with these neurodiversities be branded Little Hitlers? Or, conversely, does it garner sympathy for the prime architect of the Holocaust and the second world war?”

Perhaps it’s about time that if anyone in the media wants to assert anything about the role anyone else’s DNA has on their personality and subsequent behaviours, they should have their DNA analysed and shared with the wider public first of all.

They’ll be able to locate the gene which determines whether or not they are lying bastards, common to many in the popular press and wider body politic. Apparently this gene (the ‘lying bastard‘ gene) is located next to smaller gene complexes entitled ‘scurrilous’, ‘shifty’ and ‘tosser’. Clearly, depending on whether your genes demonstrate dominant or recessive behaviour, your chromosomes will determine whether or not you are a scurrilous, shifty, lying bastard of a tosser – or just a tosser.

The future potential that character mapping of human DNA provides us with is immense with many economic and cultural implications. The media and many politicians will no doubt help us in this desire to help us purge ourselves of undesirable genetic features, exhibiting as they do all the positive qualities of a future genetically engineered population: ‘honesty’, ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’.