The Tudor House imprint began life when Marina Oliver was
asked by the Old Girls Club to write a history of her school, Queen Mary's High School, Walsall, for its
centenary.
A prestigious, hard cover book was planned, lavishly illustrated with both colour and black and white
photographs, as well as cartoons and reproduction of documents such as play programmes. To sell it in
bookshops an ISBN number was necessary, and to obtain this a publishing imprint had to be set up.
The brother school, a grammar school, was a Tudor foundation, one of the few to be established during
Queen Mary Tudor's reign. A name incorporating Tudor was selected.
Later on, Marina and Debbie Oliver (her daughter) decided to self-publish second editions of two books
originally published by How To Books, titles which had gone out of print. They were Starting to Write
and Writing Historical Fiction.
Debbie was then a Group Production Editor of ComputerAct!ve, and
she used her skills to prepare the books for printing. Using Print on Demand techniques, copies of
Starting to Write could be produced as needed, either for individual
sales, or to sell at the many talks and courses Marina and Debbie ran.