When Jacqueline Kibby couldn’t find the format of written media her husband needed, she set up a publishing company to serve the whole dyslexic community

When I started Scorpius Books in 2020, part of the planning was to create a company that tackled the old-fashioned way in which the publishing industry works – hey, sometimes breaking the rules can be a good thing! My husband is dyslexic yet has always loved books – he’d been brought up with Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit being read to him and our shelves are filled with the military fiction he loves, yet most of them stay where they are for very long periods of time. He simply struggles with reading mainstream fiction due to the layout and size of the text which results in him being put off altogether.

So it got me thinking and I decided to look into dyslexia-friendly fiction. But no matter how much I poked around, I simply couldn’t find anything – there were
plenty of dyslexia-friendly books out there for children (Barrington Stoke are perhaps the largest mainstream publisher of these) – but there seemed to be
nothing out there for dyslexic adults. I came across the odd Harry Potter edition in dyslexic format, but anything else I found had been either produced at a very low standard or was aimed at such a young audience it was almost embarrassing – why couldn’t someone with dyslexia have access to the same fiction as everyone else? I had lengthy conversations with dyslexia associations, individuals and booksellers. But it was clear the publishing industry just didn’t seem to want to know.
So I pressed forward with a plan – even then, after tons of research, discussions and investigations, I thought I must be missing a huge part of the puzzle and
that it would dawn on me that it couldn’t be that simple… I’m still waiting! So we factored in a dyslexia format. This involved cream-coloured paper to reduce glare rather than the standard white; a sans-serif font which was easier to read; increased line and letter spacing to prevent distortion of the letters when read. These font choices also extended to our covers and blurbs.

When that first proof came back from the printer, hubby was the first to look it over and give it the thumbs up, offering a little feedback here and there in
relation to the editing and wording, which went into the final version. And so in 2020, we became the UK’s first publisher of dyslexic-friendly fiction for adults.
The feedback we’ve received so far from readers and booksellers has been amazing, and we were even shortlisted for the British Dyslexic Association’s Innovation award this year. I am truly grateful to all those businesses and individuals who took a chance to support a tiny new publisher who needed that one shot to prove themselves. It’s a shame there isn’t more fiction out there being created with a wider audience in mind and we hope that Scorpius Books can at least make a small contribution to remedy that.

Great fiction should be available to everyone and we fully support indie authors and publishers who are willing to dip their toe into the water, take a chance and break the rules for everyone’s benefit!