The article that gives you, at 10:45 a real kick to really start the day!
In my wildest dreams, I didn't think I would read this so soon...
According to this survey: "smaller presses based outside London have found success by reaching markets beyond the white middle classes and recruiting authors from more diverse backgrounds”...
The Guardian:
Small indie publishers report booming sales
In a sector that has struggled elsewhere, figures for 60 of the smallest players in the UK industry show sales up 79% in the last year
Audre Lorde, whose Your Silence Will Not Protect You is one of the success stories highlighted in Inpress’s research. Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty
Independent
publishers have unleashed a boom in sales, according to new research. Latest
figures from Inpress, which works with 60 of the smallest players in the books
industry, revealed sales up 79% in the last year – a performance hailed by
Inpress managing director Sophie O’Neill as phenomenal.
“It’s down
to a mix of really good books such as Audre Lorde’s
Your Silence Will Not Protect You from the feminist Silver
Press,” O’Neill said, “and Dead Ink’s crowdfunded book Know Your Place –
which is like The Good Immigrant except about class – and great attention to
detail.”
In a
market where literary
fiction has struggled to find readers, turnover across the Arts
Council England-funded portfolio, which includes Seren Books and The Poetry
Book Society, surged above its budget by almost £100,000 this year, reaching
£277,930.
According
to O’Neill, smaller presses based outside London have found success by reaching
markets beyond the white middle classes and recruiting authors from more
diverse backgrounds. “It proves that in publishing now, geography is
irrelevant,” she said.
At Peepal
Tree Press, a member of the Northern Fiction Alliance that specialises in Caribbean
writing, operations manager Hannah Bannister said independents were responding
to reader demand. “We are offering something that readers want rather than just
another novel with a dead girl on a train,” she said. The Leeds-based
independent enjoyed critical and sales success this year with Jacob Ross’s The
Bone Readers, which won the inaugural Jhalak prize.
Larger
houses often base commissioning decisions on past sales figures, Bannister
continued, but a sellout event in Manchester for the Northern Fiction Alliance
showed there was a thirst for more cutting-edge work. “There were over 100
young people there who wanted to find out about what’s new and interesting.
People are tired of being sold books [by large publishers] based on what they
bought earlier.”
One reason
cited for independents’ success was that they were picking up established
authors dropped by large houses after disappointing sales or because they
wanted to write in a different genre.
Monique
Roffey, who was shortlisted for the Orange prize in 2010, moved to tiny Dodo Ink in Manchester
for her latest novel after a larger publisher pulled out.
“Simon
& Schuster bought The Tryst in 2013, but got cold feet,” Roffey said. “It’s
very sexually explicit.”
Although at
first she had misgivings about signing with a small press, Roffey said the
experience has been “wonderful … I worried that they would be able to get it
into shops, but within two or three months I have sold more copies than my last
book did with Simon & Schuster.”
Advances
from independents may not be huge, but they compare well with those offered by
larger houses for literary fiction without obvious sales potential. And in some
cases, they can be higher – And Other Stories is now offering at least £2,500
for each new book.
Independent
presses can also take a longer-term view of a writer’s career, Roffey
continued, rather than dropping them at the first sniff of failure.
“The worst
position you can be in as a writer is if you have been given a lot of money for
a book that doesn’t sell,” she said. “That is the common slow death of a
writer’s career.”
-
Link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/20/small-indie-publishers-report-booming-sales
No comments:
Post a Comment