Andy Severn

Visit Andy Severn on
table number 8
at the summer
Oxford Indie Book Fair
on 13-July 2025

See home page for details, map and more.

Andy Severn – Oxford eBooks

There’s a well known phrase: “Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life again” there seems to be some disagreement as to whether it was attributed to Mark Twain. But who cares about that when you’re living your best life.

I’ll freely admit that I have been incredibly lucky in that I have been working dream job from the day I left school at 18 right up to the present day at the tender age of 57. To begin with, I worked in the basement of a large company operating a behemoth pair of mainframe computers after a short stint putting together parts for what was at the time a revolutionary new hard drive product.

During that time, I doodled and tinkered with video came coding until in 1986 I was thrust into a gigantic red leather chair and asked the immortal words by a fat man with a cigar “Do you want to make a lot of money?”

Money… Okay, yeah, but I was making GAMES, that was what had my attention. These were the frontier days of the games industry and we were the young, wild, smart things who made our own rules. Rock and roll days for sure… Indeed, I was something of a maestro of digital ‘chip tune’ games music.

I’m not one for giving up on something I love, but in 2010 I hung up my Gantt charts – the life of a video games producer is better paid, but less glamorous and significantly more stressful than coding was in the golden days – I went my own way to form Oxford eBooks.

You see, I’d circled my love of storytelling through games back to their roots in writing and publishing books.

And so for the last 15 years, I’ve been working with a dazzling parade of authors to bring their books to life. My obsession for technical efficiency gave rise to what I simply call ‘the process’ – a method and set of my own software tools and procedures for turning just about anything that a writer can throw at me into a crisp, clean eBook or printed edition.

Having a deep knowledge of how to create a book in printed or digital form is, I think the key to being able to do that for a decent price. Oh, and practice – LOTS of practice! I’ve literally made THOUSANDS of eBooks and now I teach students at Brookes University a more accessible and less technically intense version of what I do.

But the great thing about teaching is that you can (or at least, SHOULD) be able to learn from what you teach. You look at what your students find difficult and ask yourself “how can I make that simpler, more efficient?” I love that.

And so whenever a client comes to me with their book that’s a bit complicated or in a bit of a mess, I smile. Because it probably means I’m going to have to figure out a new way to make it work without costing the Earth and so learn something new.

One of the best parts of my job is watching the faces of my author clients when they see the book that we’ve worked on together for the first time.

It’s that same sense of joy that I find at the Oxford Indie Book Fair. From those crazy few minutes where the exhibitor passes sell out like we’re giving away gold bars, to the outpouring of gratitude in the inbox from those who have taken part in what really is something very special.

It makes me smile on the day when I talk to visitors, clearly hopelessly lost in the wealth of choice over which book to buy… then I see them pass by later clutching an armful off to lose themselves in adventure.

It’s tough work organising something like this, but those moments make it worth it every single time.

Andy Severn

Organiser | Owner of Oxford eBooks and sci-fi-cafe.com