Pocket Mountains was set up by myself and my partner April Simmons in 2002. I am a designer and April a journalist and we had both worked on newspapers and magazines and for publishing companies - before returning to Scotland we were working in Hong Kong - April as a journalist with the Hong Kong Standard and me as art director with a magazine publisher.

Having been abroad for a few years, when we came back we did a lot of walking in Scotland but found the guidebooks available did not inspire us or capture the country we were re-discovering. We wanted to buy guidebooks which inspired us in the same way as guidebooks did when we had visited China, India and Nepal. We also wanted books which were affordable, portable and fun with inspiring, circular, adventurous routes - not linear Munro-bagger routes which went from the car-park to the top and back again.

With the idea for the design clear in our heads we began looking for a writer - luckily Nick Williams, who had studied with April in Beijing, moved to Edinburgh to be closer to the hills around this time and was interested in our idea. To do the job properly proved to be a lot harder than we thought - Nick ended up giving up his job to walk, write and photograph full time. Spending up to 2 weeks in the hills at a time, he bivvyed out most nights and lived on a diet of sardines and oatcakes. The name Pocket Mountains was inspired by Nick's (and our) determination to see the project through - it comes from a Jules Verne book 'The Castaways' - the hero of the book has to cross an imposing mountain range to reach safety but is undaunted because, from a distance he convinces himself, 'they are mere pocket mountains'.

The first 3 books came out in 2003 with the second 3 in the Highlands and Islands series a year later - now in the third reprint, the series has been nominated for a Scottish Thistle Award for Travel Journalism and for a British Book Design Award. Nick followed up with 2 more books this year - guides to the Southern Uplands of Scotland and to the English Lakes which have also done very well for us.

The outdoors is a huge growth sector in the UK and is worth £2.2bn to Scotland every year. Pocket Mountains was the first niche outdoors publisher to identify the obvious need for books that reflected some of that excitement in the outdoors, creating a brand which was meticulously planned and executed, and designed not just to fill a gap in the market but to broaden an existing market. Pocket Mountains books are designed to inspire people into the outdoors, to be enduring and to have a strong collectible appeal.

As a small publisher we have found it very difficult to make inroads with the book trade in Scotland and although we have done our best, sales through them account for less than 5% of our turnover - the majority of our sales come from outdoors shops across the UK and from retailers that we deal with directly rather than through the traditional wholesalers. It has been difficult to break into the market with something new and we have had to work very hard to change perceptions of 'small publishers' but to date we have sold almost 75,000 books and our turnover this year will be over £100,000 - which, with only 9 titles to our name, we think is pretty good.

Having begun with walking books we have now moved on to cycling with Bike Scotland Book One by Fergal MacErlean - again the idea was to take a fresh approach to an area of the market where the books on offer already were uninspiring and make them fun and affordable. Launched in April 2005, we have almost sold out the first run of 4,000.

We are keen to listen to anyone who has an idea which may suit Pocket Mountains - we prefer series to one-off titles.