SMALL PUBLISHERS: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

I acknowledge that being a publisher is hard. (Hold your tears, unpublished and self-published writers...) It's hard for a small and dedicated publisher to make money or even to survive. It's easier if you want to be big and therefore seek to publish mega-commercial books - if you're lucky enough to find some. It's also easier if you strike lucky again and find yourself a few Booker shortlistees or winners, as Tindall Street Press did, or Canongate (which can no longer be called small); or if you pick good books and market them tirelessly, as Strident Publishing do. But what if you don't aspire to that and you just want to publish a small number of good books with a modest but passionate readership? Fair enough, eh? Isn't that like being a midlist author, a perfectly admirable situation and one we have to deal with if we don't choose or happen to write mega-sellers or if we want to write something more cerebral than popular, more artistic than commercial?

I have a great admiration for people who follow what they believe in despite its being hard. I don't exactly take an easy route myself. I also think some of them demand a lot of their potential customers. They ask us to support them because they are small and niche and suffering. I think our sympathies might be more justifiably with small and niche and sensible or ambitious. I say just the same to authors: if what you're writing isn't selling enough or gaining sufficient critical acclaim to make you happy, write something else or go about it differently.

I'd like you to look at four small UK publishers and see what they are doing.

Snowbooks - here I declare an interest because Snowbooks is my chosen publisher for Write to be Published. They are original, award-winning, unorthodox in many ways. After some temporary problems with a piece of software dealing with royalty cheques last year, which understandably caused temporary anxiety to some authors, Emma Barnes (the MD) blogged here about the financial situation for her company and also apologised for the glitch when the printing firm they used went into administration with some of their books underway. I am in awe of this openness. You would not get this with large publishers. Emma is uber-passionate about what she does, but combines this with a very strong business sense, gleaned from her previous career in the financial world. She survives and makes a profit through a combination of publishing out-of-print titles and new ones that she believes have a market - and very often they do. Though she seems to work ridiculously hard, I have never heard her complain. She is amazing to deal with, though I hope her young son wasn't completely fed up when his mother and I spent a whole weekend batting the "final" version of WTBP back and forth.

Strident - I've no idea of the figures, but Strident are looking and sounding very strong. Optimistic, using Facebook and Twitter to promote their authors actively, getting their books into promotions and garnering reviews in great places. They publish two friends of mine, Linda Strachan and Gillian Philip, both authors who are doing very well in terms of sales and acclaim (and both published by other publishers, too.) The MD, Keith Charters, is a children's author, too, and has a business background, enabling him to combine his interest in writing and authors with his financial, business and marketing awareness. Many writers with larger publishers would envy the energy with which Keith gets books into shops and onto shortlists.

Two Ravens - Sharon Blackie, the MD, sent me an email with this link, which she'd like me to pass on to you, and which outlines her current situation. She is fuming about the comments beneath a recent blog-post by the fourth small publisher I'm going to mention (see below) - which surprised me because I thought the comments were largely sympathetic and patient. Sharon criticises "comments like ‘do a business course’ or ‘try e-books/ print-on-demand instead’, 'what if small publishers could band together' or ‘target your specific readership by using social networking sites’" saying that they "show no understanding of the issues that small independent publishers of books that are different – books that the big guys won’t take the risks to publish – face." I know it's annoying when people don't understand but I think those comments were mostly well-meaning and helpful, actually, and they contain a sensible message: if something's not working, try another way. The mission statement of Two Ravens is to publish books "that are non-formulaic and that take risks" - that's enormously brave and commendable but the whole point about risk is that it's risky. And sometimes doesn't work. And, as is the case for authors when a risk hasn't working or is no longer enjoyable, a publisher has to choose what to do to deal with that. 

And here's the fourth one. Linen Press. Lynn Michell asked me some time ago to blog on her behalf. So I did, for the second time. I don't know if she noticed, because she hasn't been in touch, but I hope she's too busy doing more important things, such as selling books. I also spoke supportively about her at the York Festival of Writing and sent people over to what I thought was a great post by her. And Lynn blogged on the Guardian blog about her bizarre situation whereby she loses money each time she sells through Amazon and (as referred to above) she had lots of comments, which I thought, as I said, were largely supportive. The people were generous to take time to answer her problem, I thought. (Having said that, I believe that some of the negative comments were the most helpful ones, just as it's the negative feedback that authors have to deal with before publication that often helps them the most. Yes, it's not just writers who have to deal with negative criticism.)

This is a blog for writers, not publishers. Don't get me wrong: I love passionate publishers and passionate writers, including when they don't sell loads of books. (After all, I don't sell that many myself: I don't measure success by numbers.) But I also love readers. And I will serve readers and writers until I have no writing bone left in my body. I will serve them above publishers because I know what writers go through to produce the material for publishers. And I know how little writers earn - often below 3% of the cover price of each book their publishers sell.

Authors: write books that will sell. Publishers: publish and sell them. When either authors or publishers fail to do that as well as they wish, they need to adapt. It's the survival of the fittest. Publishers, large and small, need to watch the winds of changes blowing around them. They need to work in proper partnership with authors; they need to be realistic, pragmatic, pro-active, farsighted. So do authors. It seems to me, frankly, that authors are sometimes adapting better than publishers, which explains the rise of self-publishing. (Thereby hang another blogpost or two...) It seems to me also that publishers always need authors, but that authors do not always need publishers.

I wish these publishers enormous success. I hope that Two Ravens and The Linen Press find a way to enjoy and succeed in what they are trying so hard to do. But hard work and determination, of which I know they have volumes, are not always enough. Just as they are not enough for authors. Authors have to know how to adapt after rejection: they have to improve what they offer and do everything right, listening to readers. We cannot afford simply to complain about rejection, unless we want to continue to be rejected. Writers have been told that over and over again by publishers. I think publishers sometimes need to accept the same message.

[Edited to add: I have now stopped comments on this post and deleted some. I dedicate countless hours to blogging for aspiring writers and am not a free advertising billboard for anyone, though of course mentioning your work is completely fine if it's relevant and fair. I had received a number of comments all beginning with exactly the same words and I felt somewhat used.]