Trade publishing update

May 2024 

The IPG’s trade publishing correspondent Will Atkinson looks at a host of issues in the trade sector, including the Independent Publishing Awards, distribution, AI, new author models and bookselling

At the recent Independent Publishing Awards I was struck by how recently most of the Publishers of the Year had been founded. Two got going in 2020 and one in 2019, and Bristol University Press had a revamp in 2017. The fifth, Jolly Learning, founded in 1997, showed that long-term expertise brings rewards too. But if you take the winners across all 15 categories, more than half launched less than five years ago. Cambridge University Press brings up the rear, having being founded in 1534. 

It is not as if the competition wasn’t stiff. Profile, Faber and Boldwood had amazing years. Bonnier and Bloomsbury have significant resources. Edward Elgar, Boydell & Brewer and BT Batsford are astoundingly good at giving their customers what they want—and these are only the publishers I know something about. 

So, is this a golden time for new(ish) publishers? Having time on my hands, your correspondent got on to Wikiwand and trawled through the years when publishing companies were founded, and 2019 to 2021 does prove something of a golden era. Time will tell of course, but it seems like a good moment.   

For context, in terms of volume of publishers founded, the 1990s was very fruitful and saw the launch of some big names. From 1990 with Black & White, Grove Atlantic, Pen & Sword, through the mid-90s with Birlinn, Profile, Canongate (rebooted), Pushkin, Eye Books and Seven Stories, to 1999 with Constable & Robinson, NY Review, Persephone, Continuum, Sort Of and—I had to add it in, and yes, it is still going—Mad Norwegian Press.  

There is then a big drop off in volume from 2008 to 2019—notwithstanding some fine start-ups—before we seem to be up and running again. More telling is how many of these companies are still independent. I have often thought that independent is a synonym for temporary ownership, but looking through the 1980s and 1990s I was struck by the longevity of independent ownership—not just by dint of the survival of the owner, but by shrewd passing on or sales to like-minded bodies or individuals. For those of you off to the British Book Awards, when the ceremony starts get on to Wikiwand: founding years of publishers. The hours will simply fly by.  

WH Smith

WH Smith has been a major part of our industry since 1792. It was the first retail chain in the world and is a well-known British brand globally, and working there or at BCA used to be seen as a perfect grounding for a successful career in the industry. Last week WHS revealed its six-month interim trading statement, and the tragedy is that none of us care. It was the usual ‘high street struggling and travel going gang busters’ story. (Incidentally, the annual report is an exercise in obfuscation that a Post Office lawyer would be proud of.)

The buying department at WHS Travel is much loved because it is good, have been around a while, and cares about its customers, books, publishers and authors. Co-op fees and discounts are high, but you can ‘make’ a book through the chain just about profitably, if it is the right book and your print run is high enough.

However, the high street business has been an invalid customer to almost all independent publishers for years now. Gone are the days of the Twitter feed where folk shared pictures of tatty WHS carpets, but it must still be the UK’s least liked retail brand. I thought that the Travel business was the junior partner, but in fact its turnover is 50% larger than the high street. Senior WHS management appear to accept a slow erosion of sales on the high street accompanied by cost cutting, but with significant investment in travel stores in the UK and abroad, notably the US. Don’t watch this space. 

Nothing backs up that invalidity more than the Richard & Judy promotion, and the unveiling last week was no exception. Long gone from the telly—that finished in 2009, when it then partnered with WHS and went online—this is for big brands or a proven bestseller, alongside one riskier choice. The charge for inclusion is eye-watering and the returns are… eye-watering. When it started in 2004 it was kind of brilliant and undoubtedly grew the market, sometimes creating bestsellers from a standing start; Star of the Sea by Joe O’Connor springs to mind. 

I calculated at the time that the success of these selections reduced the sales of almost every book that was in Waterstones’ summer reading promotion by about half on the previous year. This was the end of any kind of democracy for books and authors. The era of increasingly massive sales for a diminishing number of titles had begun, and we are still living it now in this winner-takes-all market. 

Distribution, AI and Late Payment Regulation

Regular readers of this update have had a month off my comments about distribution, so welcome back! Bloomsbury’s move to Hachette UK Distribution is good news. Hachette has struggled to attract, or don’t want, smaller publishers, whilst Macmillan Distribution has a reputation and history of looking after the indies. It is not an exact freeing up of, say, the £100m of capacity that Bloomsbury physically represents, but it is a big step in the right direction. Given that Macmillan met and conquered the most extraordinary challenges around the Harry Potter launches, this seems a little disloyal—but I guess the numbers worked for both parties.

April seems to have been a month of training in Artificial Intelligence for many publishers, and I was struck by the news that AI is taking the jobs of translators. This seems a nice example of the contradictory nature of AI, and the choices that lie before us. Clearly, if we can make our authors’ books available in the 23 major languages we are doing them a service—but if this means we cut off the opportunity for authors to be published ‘properly’ in those countries, that is a disservice. Our relationships with foreign publishers would also be diminished. Everywhere I look, it appears we are heading for a two-tier industry where the books that get made by humans will cost more, while AI off-the-shelf-good-enough solutions will be cheaper. 

Maureen Freely frequently put her own distinguished career as a novelist on hold whilst she translated Orhan Pamuk’s work into English (though his own English was pretty good). The point being that the art of translation is a highly skilled part of our ecosystem that we need to look out for, along with many other human-driven endeavours, while we go through the AI choices and changes.

Now for some non-news from the European Union, which has decreed under the Late Payment Regulation that everyone should be paid for their goods and services within 30 days. Great for small businesses and freelancers. However, after some uproar, the European Parliament has excluded books from its scope because ‘of the slow moving nature of books as cultural products’. A rather deadening phrase, but very well done to the Booksellers Association, European and International Booksellers Association and Bookselling Ireland for getting the EU to see sense and quickly.

Book costs, new author models and bookselling

Your required reading for this month is Galley Beggar’s summary of what a book costs. It outlines very clearly the challenges of being a smaller publisher, and to summarise: the day-to-day doesn’t make much financial sense, and it is the breakouts and backlist that make it OK. Profit turns up if you sell more than 10,000 copies of a title. You don’t need many of those, but they don’t come around often enough. But please do read this piece. I guess all of us find our own way to fight what sometimes seem insurmountable odds with a mixture of these common threads: taste-based acquisition and publishing, expertise in digital, keen overheads, backlist building, nichy-ness, direct to consumer expertise, and our old friends speed, agility, passion and intelligence. 

I had ignored the announcement of Madeline Macintosh’s Author’s Equity in early March because it seemed very low on detail. However, it keeps cropping up in conversation. This new company, based in the US, is most certainly full of heavy hitters. Previous bosses of Macmillan and PRH getting together, along with other senior folk, is by definition a powerhouse. The press release says it is there ‘to create a fully author-centric model with core principles that put the author first and offer financial incentives and a publishing process built around each author’s unique audience, vision and needs.’ It’s a new publishing company committed to reshaping the relationship between author and publisher.

We are all author-centric, but sometimes it feels that publishers trot this out as a matter of course and as a politesse, despite it being true. What is interesting is that the conversations are really happening in how the author gets rewarded. Many digital-first businesses have been offering ‘enhanced’ royalties since the start. Where we independents may well have the edge is that corporates really haven’t embraced any kind of movement on the established advance / royalties model or rates, so this may be our chance. 

Finally, booksellers. The number of bookshops in the UK declined by 0.8% last year, which seems like a triumph considering the pressures on retail. That is a net number, so regrettably there were some closures—but also almost a balance of new openings. What I notice when looking at subscriptions of new titles is the significance of the small chains, and they are  growing. Andy Rossiter has announced the opening of his sixth store, Wayne Winstone has three, and there are five Toppings. Adam Hewson is opening his third shop and of course there is Daunts. As UK-based publishers we are well served by our retailers: Waterstones, a large books-only chain with good sites in most towns that is committed to quality retailing and publishing; and a vibrant independent sector that is often the highlight of a street or town. And then, of course, there is WHSmith.  

I salute you from one provisioner of slow-moving cultural products to another.  

Will Atkinson

IPG trade publishing correspondent