About Consonance
What is Consonance?
Consonance is a publishing-management SaaS used by book publishers worldwide. The product (originally launched in 2011 under the name Bibliocloud) is a Ruby on Rails / React web app designed to let editorial, production, marketing, and sales teams at book publishers work together as a single team across a complex publishing data model.
The company has been running for 14 years in 2025 and is bootstrapped to profit. Trading as General Products Ltd (UK Companies House #07800041), Consonance now supports a wide spread of publishing lists — trade, academic, children's, international, professional, and scholarly. Its largest customer is Taylor & Francis, with over half a million products in the system; Consonance sends out millions of ONIX feed updates a year. The firm has won the Futurebook Innovation award (2012), a Digital Leaders commendation (2016), the IPG Services to Independent Publishers award (2017), a place on the Futurebook 40 list of innovators (2018), and shortlist places in The Pitch entrepreneur competition (2018 and 2019).
Where will I work?
Consonance is 100% UK-distributed. The team dropped office life at the beginning of the pandemic and has not gone back — there is no office at all. Staff are spread across the UK "from England's south coast to Northern Scotland." Daily collaboration runs through a "stand-up" posted to Basecamp first thing in the morning, midday meetups on Slack, and pair programming as needed. They never have internal video calls.
What is the Consonance team like?
Consonance has been a team of six for the past few years, with "a pretty even gender and age balance and a mild tendency towards full-stack skills." Two of the three co-founders work full-time as programmers and business managers: Emma (CEO) and Rob (Chairman) also founded and still run 20-year-old Snowbooks, the sister publishing company that originally commissioned the software. David (CTO) is a database specialist whose career moved from Oracle data warehousing, Business Objects, Informatica, and SQL-based ETL to web app development in Ruby on Rails. The team is active in the Ruby community — including publishing an edition of _why's Poignant Guide for the Brighton Ruby 2020 conference — and runs technical-literacy initiatives like Day of Code for 40 publishers, Side Project Summer, and the satirical justsimply.dev and nope.business sites. The team explicitly aims for "calm and steady working practices" — no formal backlog, very rare meetings, no out-of-hours pager duty (covered by the directors), and "prioritise delivery over perfection."
Work-Life Balance
Consonance runs a four-day week from Monday to Thursday. Fridays are off, with support cover provided by the leadership team. Working hours are 7.5 per day (a 30-hour week). Hours themselves are flexible — "Accommodating hours. 8-4pm, 10-6pm, no problem. Work your hours, no more." The team gets 23 holiday days every year (28 days prorated) on top of UK bank holidays and every Friday off. After 3 years' service, every staff member is entitled to a paid one-month sabbatical.
Perks and Benefits
Consonance is unusually specific about benefits on its jobs page. Beyond the 4-day week and 30-hour week, the full disclosed list includes: 23 holiday days plus bank holidays plus every Friday off; a paid 1-month sabbatical every 3 years of service; an ethical pension option with matched contributions; enhanced maternity & paternity leave; enhanced sick pay; and a staff bonus pool paid quarterly and shared evenly between non-director staff — the bonus is a percentage of revenue from annually-renewing clients, so the team's incentives are tied to client retention rather than new logos (and their churn is below average as a result). New starters get a home-office equipment budget covering standing desk, footrest, wrist-rest, chair, monitor, microphone, MacBook Pro (the team runs OSX), keyboard, and mouse. The company is bootstrapped, has solid cash reserves, has no VC pressure, and operates with no contractors.