Galley Beggar was founded in 2012, and the others are 20. Indeed, all the publishers on your list are recently minted: only CB editions is more than five years old. So the cracks are wider, more great books slipping through.
The result being, after the crash, a number of literary authors, or edgier authors, who might just have made it in pre-2007, have been cut adrift. We’ve got to the point where, at any major publisher, the financial directors say, at best, ‘yes, you can break even on a book, but we can’t lose money anymore – no literary loss-leaders, please’. There are more opportunities now for small presses. Yes, and that’s generally still the case, but the financial crisis has made a difference, I think, to what is possible. So where do you see independent publishing factoring into this? The traditional brief is that small, independent publishers exist to catch the books that would otherwise slip through the cracks. Of course, an author will never be told the publisher is ‘not getting behind their book’. That can make the difference between a book you’ll hear about and one you never will. I was talking to someone at a major publisher the other day and she asked a colleague about a book: “is this one of the ones we’re getting behind?” The point being, of all the thousands of books published every year, publishers only “get behind” a few. Since the 2007-8 crash, they have retrenched in terms of what they publish, and how they go about it. The big publishers have not helped the situation. I doubt anyone expects to make money as a writer these days I think about one per cent of books break out. Galley Beggar, one of the small presses we’re going to discuss, cite a statistic on their website: “Most writers make less than £600 a year, and the average literary title sells just 264 copies.”įunnily enough, I tweeted that and it was the first time anything I had done on Twitter that trended – it got about 10,000 retweets. So even the impact of making the Booker shortlist is not that great. And one of them had only sold 3,000… and that’s pre- and post- shortlist combined. She sold 50,000 copies, which is huge in literary fiction terms. I think it was Ali Smith’s book that had sold the most. I was stunned the other day when I was reading the sales figure of the Booker short list. Let’s start by stating the obvious: publishing is a difficult industry to get into, let alone stay afloat in. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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