What Taryn Believes
Introduction to Taryn
Taryn Lee Johnston is one of the UK's leading independent publishers and the founder of two award-winning imprints, FCM Publishing for non-fiction, business and self-help, and Chronos Publishing for autobiographies and fiction. Through Taryn Lee Johnston Integrated Media Consultancy, she works directly with founders, executives and public figures on the books that come to define their authority.
Her clients have included Bob Champion CBE, Tony Robinson OBE and Rudolph Walker CBE, Books published through her imprints have been finalists for the Business Book of the Year Awards for seven consecutive years, recognised as Independent Bookstore Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Page Turner Awards.
She has been named Independent Publisher of the Year in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
The publishing industry is not in good shape. It is dominated by five major houses and Amazon, who between them control the shelves, the windows, the marketing budgets and the path to readers. Strong independent authors are routinely invisible, not because their work is weaker, but because the gatekeeping favours scale over substance. Readers are fed the books the big six choose to put in front of them, and the books that might genuinely change someone's thinking quietly fail to find their audience.
The economics are not better. The retail price of a paperback has barely shifted in over a decade, while the cost of paper, ink, distribution and every other element of running a publishing house has risen significantly. The result is a market that punishes quality and rewards volume, and an industry that cannot sustain the kind of careful, considered work that produces books worth reading.
Taryn has spent more than twelve years building a different kind of operation inside that market. The books she publishes are books she believes in, by authors who have something genuinely worth saying. Not potted histories of past achievements, but books where the author shares something of themselves, offers honest insight, and gives the reader something they can actually use. That distinction, in her view, is the difference between a book that earns its place on a shelf and a book that doesn't.
The relationship between an author and the person helping them write their book is built on trust, and that trust is something Taryn takes seriously. Authors come to her with stories, private information and material they may not have shared before, and they trust her to help them write it in a way that does justice to the truth without exposing them unnecessarily. Without that trust, no book of any value gets written; with it, almost any book becomes possible.
She is also clear about who the work is for. A book is a tool with a job to do, in the same way a website or a salesperson is, and writing it is only the beginning of the work it has to do once it exists. The clients who understand that are the ones she takes on.e.
On the question of AI, Taryn's position is that it has a genuine and useful place in publishing as a tool for research, for breaking through writer's block, and for strategic support. Her concern is the rise of poor quality, derivative and plagiarised work being passed off as authored, and the questions of copyright and authenticity that the industry is only just beginning to grapple with. The thinking that turns expertise into a book worth reading remains entirely human work, and is likely to stay that way for some time.
The Journey
Taryn Lee Johnston was born in Coventry and grew up in Bedworth. At sixteen, after her mother remarried, the family moved to Skegness, where Taryn enrolled in a YTS scheme and went on to earn a BTEC National in Business Management and Finance. She returned to Coventry in her late teens and spent two years temping, work which built her confidence and revealed an early aptitude for technology that would shape much of her later career.
A move to London followed, where she worked in a series of roles including a period as a crane driver, before settling into a position at a global telecoms company and rising into programme management and marketing. After the birth of her children, she relocated to Lincolnshire to be closer to family.
In 2011, following a divorce, Taryn founded Creative Thinking, the marketing business that would later become FCM Media. The work allowed her to build a serious professional career while raising her children as a single mother, and the business grew quickly through web design, copywriting and integrated marketing services for clients across the region.
The shift into publishing came in 2014, when she was asked to edit a novel and recognised the gap in the market for an independent publisher willing to work with authors at the standard the major houses reserve for their own. FCM Publishing was founded that year, focused initially on non-fiction, business and self-help titles. Chronos Publishing followed, specialising in autobiographies and fiction. Both imprints have grown into recognised names in independent publishing, with a track record of awards, finalists and critical recognition that is genuinely rare at this scale.
From 2017 to 2025, Taryn lectured at Lincoln University on digital marketing and advertising, joining the permanent staff in 2021. She stepped away from the role in 2025 to focus fully on her businesses and on the development of NovoBooks, the multi-reality publishing platform she co-founded. The academic work shaped much of her thinking about how the industry communicates with the next generation of readers, and continues to inform the publishing she does today.
Speaking and Industry Voice
Taryn is a TEDx speaker, with her talk Once Upon A Love Story available on the TEDx platform, and a regular voice on the future of publishing, the role of AI in creative industries, and the realities of building an independent publishing house in a market dominated by the major players. She hosts a YouTube channel where she interviews authors about their work, and writes a regular blog on the business of books, AI in publishing, and the issues the industry would rather not discuss.
What Comes Next
Taryn is a co-founder and partner in NovoBooks, a multi-reality publishing platform launching its MVP this year. NovoBooks is built on the conviction that publishing has to meet the next generation of readers where they actually are, which means using technology to make books more immersive, more accessible, and more genuinely useful than the format has been for the last twenty years.
The platform makes accessibility central rather than optional, with built-in support for readers with dyslexia, larger print formats for those who need them, and customisable narration so the reading experience can be shaped to suit the reader rather than the other way round.
It is also designed to remove the gatekeeping that currently keeps strong independent authors invisible, by bringing authors, publishers and service providers together in one place and establishing the kind of quality standards that allow self-published work to be taken seriously by bookshops and readers alike.
It is the most ambitious project Taryn has been involved in to date, and the one that most directly reflects what she believes the publishing industry should be doing rather than what it currently does.
What She Wants the Work to Stand For
Taryn's ambition for FCM Publishing and Chronos Publishing is straightforward. Both imprints exist to publish books she believes in, by authors who have something genuinely worth saying, to a standard the wider industry should aspire to. The longer-term goal is to leave the publishing industry in better shape than she found it, and to demonstrate that quality, integrity and commercial viability are not mutually exclusive.
She is actively working toward establishing standards for independent publishing that would allow self-published authors to demonstrate the editorial, design and production quality of their books, and would give bookshops the confidence to stock them on the same terms as titles from the major houses. The gatekeeping that currently keeps good books invisible is, in her view, one of the most fixable problems in the industry, and one she intends to keep working on.
Above all, she wants people to read again. The books she publishes, the books she writes with her clients, and the platforms she is helping to build are all directed at the same goal, which is to make reading something the next generation of readers actively chooses, rather than something they politely abandon in favour of faster, easier, less considered content.
Recognition
Awarded 2025
Independent Publisher of the Year - East Midlands Winner 2023/2024/2025/2026
