Ameline
am·e·line  ·  noun
  1. care-ful work; an effort made with one's whole self, poured into something worth building.
  2. a publishing studio that walks the last mile of a book beside its author, and hands it back whole.
from the old sense of diligent, devoted work, the kind that takes years and is often done alone.
A woman with long brown hair, wearing a mustard yellow top, smiling at the camera against a plain white background.
Cass Scutt
Founder, Ameline Books

Hello, and welcome. I'm really glad you're here.

I'm Cass, the founder of Ameline Books. If you've found your way to this page, there's a fair chance you're holding a manuscript, and quietly wondering what on earth happens next. Don't worry, you are in the right place.

A little about me.

I am a writer and a reader. To say I love books feels like an understatement. I'm a firm believer that a book can change your life. I come from a background in communications and marketing, and some years ago I taught myself the craft of self-publishing and went on to build a catalogue of ten books. I learned what it genuinely takes to turn a manuscript into a finished thing someone can hold: the editing, the design, the formatting, the technical pieces most people find bewildering. Nothing about the process is a mystery to me any more, which means it doesn't have to be one for you.

I've written and published a children's book, and I'm in the middle of my own memoir. So the vulnerability I'll be asking you to trust me with isn't something I understand from a distance, it's something I'm living too.

Why I created Ameline.

This work found me. My first author asked if I could help publish their family history, the second asked if I could help publish their life story... and Ameline was born. When I looked at what was on offer, nothing fit the kind of stories I wanted to work with and that I knew needed to be shared. Because these aren't ordinary books, and this isn't really about the book at all. It's about holding space for someone who has written down the most tender parts of their life, and is about to hand them to the world, and almost no one out there was treating it as the tender thing it is.

There's a lot of money changing hands in this space, too, and often for work that isn't good enough. People pay dearly and are handed a poor-quality book in return.

A memoir is someone's life. When the book that carries it is careless, it does a disservice to the story and to the person who lived it. These books deserve to be made to a standard worthy of the life inside them.

So that's what I built. A studio that treats these stories with the care they're owed and to a standard that they deserve.

Welcome to Ameline...