There never seems to be an ideal time to take the business temperature of British publishing—and since PW, in order for its report to be ready in time for the London Book Fair, has to wield the thermometer by mid-February at the latest, the physical temperature is seldom ideal, either. This year, at least, although it was physically almost balmy compared to frigid New York, there was no change in the almost palpable sense of unease underlying the business. No matter how good, or comparatively good, a respondent's sales year had been—and some had enjoyed a very satisfactory year indeed, especially compared to 2002—almost no one thought the underlying business was in good shape.
Two companies of great importance to the fiscal and psychological well-being of British trade publishers began the New Year in a state of some disarray. W.H. Smith, whose ubiquitous stores on Britain's "High Streets" make them a highly significant part of the book market, despite their sometimes baffling concentration on other goods at the expense of books, had a decidedly poor Christmas and has brought in a new management team headed by Kate Swann (formerly with the supermarket chain Tesco); among them is Trevor Goul-Wheeker, who headed the reputable Hammick's book chain. The new team is understood to be undertaking a major reassessment of the chain's relationship to books—one of its problems is that gift items of dubious marketability have tended to elbow books out of prime display space—but they are not prepared to say anything about their plans before May. And word as this report went to press was that very hefty post-Christmas returns would be heading back shortly.
PW's attempts to find someone who would answer a list of leading questions about a possible new direction for the chain proved fruitless; senior executives shunted us along to a PR person, who acknowledged that our questions were indeed being addressed but that no considered replies would be forthcoming until two months after our publication date. The nearest we could get to a substantive answer was that Swann has told Publishing News, "Our heritage is built on books and magazines, and I am predisposed to building the ranges for which we are famous." And Hodder Headline managing director Martin Neild, whose company is now part of the W.H. Smith empire, is convinced that the review now under way will result in a return to books as the chain's core merchandise, with staffs better trained to cope accordingly (one of the complaints about Smith's has been that even if a store has a book in stock, staff at many of the stores never seem able to find it).
If Smith's had a disappointing Christmas, two other significant players in the retail market, upmarket Waterstone's and middle-of-the-road Ottakar's (which has been expanding as Smith's has been floundering), both reported good results. In fact, more than one observer noted that Smith's was being squeezed at the lower end of the market by the supermarkets, which push books more vigorously than do most American ones, and in its cherished mid-market by both the other sizable chains. Pressure on margins is rampant in the U.K. trade, with Bookseller editor Nick Clee telling us that this was "the symptomatic issue in the past year." (Though we recall that it was a matter of considerable concern in last year's report, too; pricing in Britain seems never to have quite settled down since the Net Book Agreement, which fixed book prices, was scuttled eight years ago.)
A Messy Discount Structure
As observed in the stores, and repeatedly complained about by publishers, the discount structure in the U.K. seems an ungodly mess beside the comparatively neat and comprehensible nature of those to be seen in the U.S., Canada and Australia. The commonest kind of price promotion is a peculiar notion designed to drive volume at the expense of price, typically offering three books for the price of two, four for two, sometimes even two for one; discounts on individual titles are decidedly uncommon. Each publisher arranges its own promotions scheme with each major chain, some of which get adopted, some don't. The consumer has to be bewildered as to what any given book actually costs, and a perceived liability to these schemes is that the perceived value of books is lost in the shuffle.
Publishers desperate to increase market share are drawn into such promotions, which further erode their already thin margins, but which do increase the sales of some titles. As a result, they throw more money, in terms of higher advances and promotion costs, at ever fewer big books, for which they have to pay exorbitant advances to stay abreast of the competition. Sound familiar? Such a progression—a few big books chasing big sales, while the midlist trails—inevitably leads to cuts in lists, and most of the major houses have said they will cut down on titles this year, while some have already been doing so for years.
All in all, it is, as Clee noted, "a very unsettled time."
It has been further exacerbated by another company in trouble: Charles Cork, which supplies books to Tesco, the biggest supermarket account, announced a major cash flow problem and entered into talks with publishers and the chain itself to attempt to restructure its finances. Cork is said to owe a total of about £11 million (nearly $22 million at the present exchange rates), with several major houses in the hole for several million each. Cork is working with several of them on a cash-only basis for taking on titles. There were varying views as to the likely outcome, with most assuming that Cork would be able to buy sufficient time to get back into business eventually—though one or two people suggested that it was impossible to do business with the kind of margins involved in dealing with Tesco on the one hand and publishers on the other, and that Cork's position was ultimately untenable. If it were to go under, what would Tesco do? Some thought the chain might simply give up on books as being more trouble than they are worth; others felt books were used largely to boost the chain's image as a merchant, and suggested Tesco would be reluctant to forgo them for that reason; still others argued that books provide a much better turnover than most products supermarkets sell, and that Tesco would have to make other arrangements if Cork should fold. (Other major chains are largely supplied direct by publishers.)
All this came at a time when former bookseller Richard Barker proposed a motion at the Society of Bookmen (and later expanded on it in an article for Publishing News) that "supermarket sales do more harm than good." The motion was defeated by 20 votes to 11, with two abstentions, but Barker's arguments—that dependence on supermarket sales diminished the range of books on offer, hurt regular booksellers and dangerously lowered publisher profit margins—were cogently expressed, and clearly struck a chord with many of the publishers we spoke to. "I wish we could do without them, and we should be bold enough to try, but who is going to go out on a limb first?" is how one put it (not for attribution). It reminds one of the arguments that recur from time to time in the States about forgoing returns; everyone agrees it would be wonderful to sell nonreturnable, until the consequences of going it alone are contemplated. And publishers admit that in their desperation for increased market share, and given the ease with which a strong supermarket sale can lift a book onto the bestseller list, they have become addicted to such price promotions, however painful the immediate financial results can be.
The Bookseller's Clee said it was a good time to be a book buyer in Britain: books are comparatively cheap (and in a wider range of formats than we are accustomed to in the States) and widely available; but it is a business "where it's increasingly tough to make any money." Books also occupy a higher state of public consciousness than at home. Last year's BBC promotion "The Big Read," which compiled a list of people's all-time favorites, gave a big lift to publisher backlists, especially to a house like Penguin. That is much missed, since nothing comparable is happening this year, though fiction is being given a boost by a TV show called Richard and Judy's Book Club." This is somewhat akin to "Oprah!" in that Richard and Judy is on at a time—late afternoon—when it is watched mostly by stay-at-homes, and also in its rather eclectic range of choices. The pair have picked 10 candidates that form the shortlist for a popular Book of the Year award that will be given at the Nibbies (British Book Awards) in April. Meanwhile, the list is heavily promoted in stores and has pushed one title, Joseph O'Connor's hitherto virtually unknown The Star of the Sea, to the number one spot on national bestseller lists.
The problem with Richard and Judy is that at present there are no plans to take it beyond the Nibbies grand climax, though the show has so boosted sales of some otherwise unlikely books that publishers are desperately hoping it will continue in some form.
Big Book, Small Publisher
In the past few years, there always seems to be a big Christmas book that comes out of nowhere, racks up huge seasonal sales and then keeps right on going well into the new year. Last year it was Schott's Miscellany from Bloomsbury and for Christmas 2003 it was Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a witty take on the unlikely subject of the perils of wrong punctuation, which took Britain by storm and has ended up selling half a million copies to date.
One of the nice aspects of this story is that the book was a product of Profile Books, a small house headed by Andrew Franklin, a refugee from big publishing who used to head the Hamish Hamilton imprint at Penguin, and who had been struggling before Eats transformed his little company and led it to a projected turnover this year that will double last year's take of £2.5 million.
Franklin told PW that he had originally published the book's author, Lynne Truss, at Penguin and found her very funny, though she had made no impact on the trade. Then he heard three brief programs on Radio Four in which Truss discussed punctuation and he thought they would make the basis for "a wonderful book." He ran into the author at a Christmas party at the end of 2002, pitched the idea, and they got the book out in 11 months. Franklin was "absolutely gobsmacked" by the results. The initial print run was 15,000 copies. He then went on a cycling trip in Vietnam and, in his absence, the staff took it on themselves to print another 10,000; on his return, he felt they had been rash—but, in fact, demand has been such that the printings now amount to 700,000 copies, with no sign of a letup at the No. 1 nonfiction spot.
The book was snapped up for the States by Bill Shinker for his Gotham imprint at Penguin, where a special introduction by the author and a foreword by Frank McCourt will help sell it to American readers, whose problems with punctuation can be rather different, if no less overwhelming.
Meanwhile, what has its success done to little Profile? Nigel Newton at Bloomsbury, no stranger to overwhelming success, wrote him a note, said Franklin: "You must celebrate your success but also fear it." And indeed he plans to spend the new income carefully. "You can too easily believe you can repeat a big hit, and push things too far and fast. We have to be very careful not to do that." Profile will holds its list to 30—40 titles a year, mostly quality nonfiction—"no self-help, cooking or diet books, mostly current affairs, memoir, good biography." Profile also has a very small but very select fiction list, consisting entirely of Alan Bennett, Alice Munro and J.M. Coetzee. Meanwhile, Truss is adapting Cold Comfort Farm as a radio play and contemplating a follow-up book—which under the press of touring, she has no time for at present. And Franklin is repackaging her earlier Penguin titles, including three novels.
'Not a Bad Year' in Bookselling
At the Booksellers Association, Tim Godfray was one of those optimistic about the future of W.H. Smith; Kate Swann, he said, has a reputation as a "bright operator, and she's sure to make some changes; and Goul-Wheeker has a good understanding of the trade. "A strong Smiths is good for the business as a whole," Godfray declared.
Also, he said, 2003 was "generally not a bad year at all, helped hugely by Harry Potter and the Big Read." Christmas was less than ideal, but January and early February were surprisingly better than usual, with publishers enjoying the lower returns resulting from better-than-usual bookseller buying. The real concern, said Godfray, is that "there hasn't been the level of margin we'd like to see due to the continued very substantial discounting."
As in the States, pricing is not a subject that can be discussed openly between publishers and retailers, but there are a number of issues that can be, and the launch of a new forum for discussions between these two parties, which has led to two meetings so far and plans for more this year, was seen by many observers as an encouraging development. Headed by Brian McCoughlin of Waterstone's for the booksellers and Patrick Forbes Watson of Penguin for the publishers, the liaison committee includes several representatives from each side. They are working initially on the question of coordinating launch dates for as many as 250 big books a year so as to make the best possible use of wholesalers' and suppliers' stocking and transportation abilities; further down the line, they will consider moving ahead the returns initiative (discussed in this report last year), which could streamline the paperwork and invoicing involved and ultimately lower returns. Godfray also sees the question of how better to set publisher printings with input from retailers as a likely subject for discussion.
"I'm encouraged, because this liaison committee hasn't developed into an us-and-them situation, and I think there's a real possibility of putting the full weight of both sides behind any changes we can make," Godfray said. Among other subjects likely to come up for discussion is the question of whether to continue to print prices on books, or follow the music industry's lead, letting retailers set the prices based on what they pay for the product. At one time this seemed likely to be mandated by the EEC, but since Britain at present is increasingly remote from EEC concerns, it is more likely to come, if it does, as a result of internal pressures. Publishers are by and large in favor of retaining printed prices, and authors and agents, fearing erosion of royalty payments if prices disappear, are vociferous in their opposition to change; booksellers seem divided. In any case, Godfray foresees a prolonged examination of the issue on both theoretical and practical grounds, so nothing is likely to change before next year's report.
'Internecine Competition' Among Publishers
On the other side of the aisle, at the Publishers Association, Ronnie Williams is also troubled by what he called "the internecine competition" among publishers and booksellers alike to win control of the traffic. In retailing, he sees "everyone seeking the middle ground, with the supermarkets edging upmarket, and Ottakar's moving down." The consumer book market was up 5% last year, even without allowing for the Harry Potter effect, but it seemed to be based on sales of fewer titles, he said.
Williams is forced, by Britain's big export market and proximity to Europe, to contend with many international issues, and continues to argue with the EEC over fixed prices for books. "We tell them we have a free market operating here, and it's bound to be turbulent in the early years after controls were removed, but what's happening now is nothing to do with the Net Book Agreement, it's what came after the NBA." He sees no immediate likelihood of Britain joining the EEC—"the country's solidly against a referendum"—but the subject won't go away. "Our position now is not that we won't do it, but how can we best approach it if we have to do it? We have to see how the price questions are managed elsewhere, in the music industry for example. So in the end, we'll have a structured debate rather than a scary one," Williams said.
There are currently two working parties, one in the PA, the other in the BA, examining the issues with a view to presenting a working paper. "The main thing is to get the discussion started, and there's no hurry," Williams said. He is pleased at the progress being made by the bookseller-publisher liaison group, especially on the question of coordinating launch dates, with the returns question likely to be next up on the agenda.
These advances can only help to expand the market and improve efficiency, he thinks. "Publishing is too much of an intuitive business, and a few facts do not come amiss," he quipped in his dry style. Never, he feels, have books had such a high profile in British life, with the big BBC promotion last year and now the Richard and Judy phenomenon. "All this is helping to reach a huge demographic of non-readers"—though Williams so far finds such efforts more effective in reaching young readers than adults.
In other areas of publishing, he said, the education side is "quite dire, with sales dropping nearly 20% in part of that sector. University budgets are going down, while the need for research is going up." Open access to online materials is a key issue here, and a group of publishers is working with libraries to clarify guidelines for the use of libraries' online materials.
Williams expressed quiet satisfaction at the success of the joint Anglo-American effort to end the late Friday hours at the Frankfurt Fair, and the elimination of the final Monday, and joked about the instantaneousness with which publishers could move and change direction when needed, "like a shoal of fish." It was a graphic image.
Hodder: Aiming for Fiction Lead
At Hodder, Martin Neild talked of a house that has gained market share in fiction, its specialty, and aims to be the No. 1 fiction publisher; to do this, it will have to take the lead from HarperCollins, which was helped to that spot last year by continuing Tolkien sales. Hodder, with Headline, is particularly strong in international fiction, which means mostly U.S. big names, including James Patterson, both Kellermans, Jeffery Deaver, Sue Monk Kidd, Stephen King, Sandra Brown, and Kyle Mills and Jodie Picoult (both newcomers to the list). It has been John le Carré's publisher for 30 years, despite his twists and turns in the States. On the nonfiction side, Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir was a huge success (a paperback is due in April) and The South Beach Diet was a surprise hit, considering most Brits don't even know where South Beach is. Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English, tied in to a TV series, has sold 100,00o copies (Arcade in U.S.), and after the English Rugby football team won the world championship, a fortuitously timed memoir by the team captain sold 350,000. Adventurer Ralph Fiennes on a like-minded soul, Captain Scott of Antarctic fame, is upcoming (Hyperion in the U.S.), and there will be a second book by Pamela Stephenson on her husband, comic Billy Connolly—a huge hit last year, though one of those British phenomena that don't really make an Atlantic crossing.
Another thing that hasn't so far made an Atlantic crossing is Hodder's own American operation, which was on the brink of realization at this time last year. Hodder was opening a New York office that was going to be based at S&S, but would acquire U.S. titles. Neild insists that this vision has not gone away but is simply on hold, as a result of the corporate soul-searching underway at parent W.H. Smith. "It remains a key strategic aim of the company, and it will definitely happen, but right now I can't tell you just where or when," said Neild. He is, as already noted, optimistic about Smith recapturing its bookselling roots soon, in time for a good bookstore Christmas next year.
Richard and Judy has been good to Hodder in the spotlighting of Martina Cole, an up-and-coming company author who is moving upmarket. Fiona Walker, a younger, hipper Jilly Cooper, has come out of Hodder's successful Irish division (an unusual development among British publishers); now the company is developing a presence in Scotland, to look for new Scottish authors.
At John Murray, a venerable London firm that was recently acquired by Hodder, Roland Phillips describes a list of 50 new titles a year plus 40 paperbacks that includes movie director Neil Jordan's first novel in 10 years and the first fiction buy in the house in a generation: an Irish gothic tale called Shade (Bloomsbury in the U.S.). It's also doing a new book by venerable journalist and social observer Anthony Sampson called Who Runs This Place?, which is essentially an updating of his classic 1960s bestseller Anatomy of Britain. Murray has its own art department and marketing and sales forces, has considerable goodwill from agents used to selling to it and, under Hodder, "better resources," said Phillips.
S&S: 'A Challenging Year'
At Simon & Schuster, Ian Chapman describes a "challenging year," in which he was forced to make some staff changes that affected morale, and to give up the Earthlight science fiction imprint; but he fiercely rejected a suggestion in a recent trade press article that there might be some lack of support for the British operation from New York. "I think our links with New York are stronger than they've ever been," he said. "Jack Romanos has been very supportive."
He described a list of about 325 adult books a year, which has been slightly reduced, plus an important children's operation; this includes local U.K. publishing as well as offering highlights from the various S&S U.S. lists, including the Free Press and Scribner. S&S also does the U.K. distribution for Byron Preiss's ibooks—120 titles a year, including SF, graphic novels and mysteries; currently there's the official Law & Order paperback, and a new Isaac Asimov Robot tale. After the recent upheavals, Chapman expects that the coming year will be free of further change: "We're looking for stability and consistency."
But there are some accomplishments to point to as well: backlist sales were up over 20%, children's sales were well up and, in the three years since Chapman took over, sales have risen 10% year on year. "Last year we were a £30 million company, this year we should be at £34 million." There were three bestsellers: the paperback of Anthony Swofford's Jarhead; Mary Higgins Clark's The Second Time Around, which was Tesco's highest-selling paperback ("She's working at last"); and Adriana Trigiano's Lucia, Lucia, pushed into a big reprint by a Richard and Judy choice. This fall S&S will have a book by Olympic contender Paula Radcliffe, a new thriller by Lynda LaPlante and a new book by popular author Alan Titchmarsh—plus a new book by Trigiano, Queen of the Big Time, for which Chapman has high hopes. S&S has taken on John Sandford with his Prey series from Hodder, and has Carrie Fisher's new book, The Best Awful, which is getting a lot of attention.
Chapman is among the many publishers lamenting the extent of the discounting going on ("How do we make any money?") and complains it's hard to get anything but "major league books" into the stores.
'Fantastic Year' at Time Warner
David Young at Time Warner described 2003 as "a fantastic year for us, by any standards," one in which TW's percentage of the gross against the market bested any competitor's, it had many bestsellers, including the author of the year (in several choices) in Sarah Waters, and had a huge success in the U.K. with Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Still, being "on the block" for some of that time (at one point apparently about to be bought by Bertelsmann) had been unsettling, and it was good to have that over.
As a seasoned veteran, Young put some of the current anxieties in perspective. W.H. Smith, he feels, is likely to recover: "They have a habit of going back to basics; the problem is that they've concentrated on the supermarkets as their competition, and didn't take care of the book buyers among their customers." As for selling to the supermarkets, "It would be a big decision not to trade with them, though we've all learned to say no the most rapacious demands. Still, they sell new books and authors for us, as well as just the old ones."
As an active participant in industry affairs, and a prime mover in the returns initiative, which he sees as "grinding on," Young welcomes the new bookseller-publisher forum as a promising development.
He has the unusual distinction among British publishers of being married to a bestselling author: Elizabeth Noble, author of The Reading Group, currently going great guns for Hodder in paperback. Her book, about the life entanglements of a group of women in one of the reading clubs popular in the U.K. as well as the U.S., is on offer in the States by William Morris, but had not sold as of this writing.
Among upcoming books Young was especially keen on were Michael Rowbotham's The Suspect, a first novel by a writer who has frequently "ghosted" for others; Tom Holland's Rubicon, a nonfiction book about the Roman Empire; and Anthony Capella's The Food of Love, a modern take on Cyrano de Bergerac. And TW is also the British publisher of Gregory David Roberts, whose Shantaram is a massive fictionalized account of how the author, an acknowledged drug dealer and gun runner, escaped from jail in his native Australia, was recaptured in Germany, jailed again, and finally found peace and a new life in India.
Thames & Hudson: Hanging Onto Price
As usual, Jamie Camplin at art publisher Thames & Hudson had some cogent things to say, especially about pricing. He noted that while the number of book units sold in the U.K. has risen by 8% or 9% in the past four years, total revenues, because of extensive discounting, have remained at essentially the same level. "Is it necessary, or desirable, to attempt to increase book sales by way of low-price policies?" he asked, and answered himself that in most cases it was not. As an example, he pointed to a Thames & Hudson title, the very successful do-it-yourself guide You Can Do It, which had sold 140,000 copies, many of them through Home Depot—style stores, without any significant discounting.
He was almost alone among the publishers we spoke to in considering the current weak dollar (against both the pound and the euro) in the pricing equation. "The going will certainly be tough this year for anyone exporting to the U.S. In addition, the consolidation among U.S. illustrated publishers and the pressure to keep inventories low compounds the problem, Camplin noted.
The fact that T&H has a worldwide presence also means that somewhere the signs are better; while the U.S. dollar may be weak, the Australian one is strong; and because most of the Asian currencies in the Far East printing countries are tied to the dollar, this is keeping prices down.
But Camplin is distressed at the way the incessant price promotions "destroy the public perception of the value of a book." There is a difference between the kind of book an art publisher creates and a cheap mass market title, and that is too easily obliterated, he said. He is delighted at the expansion in book retailing in recent years: "It provides a magnificent opportunity, and there are better—and more profitable—ways of using this resource than encouraging consumers to think that books can be had for almost nothing and are thus literally worthless."
New Lineup at HarperCollins
The company continues to be reconfigured under the leadership of Victoria Barnsley, with its latest change being the elimination of the venerable literary Flamingo line—a move that inspired some press criticism—and the launch of a new trade paperback line called, after its U.S. progenitor, Perennial, which will encompass books formerly published by Flamingo and the paperbacks that had been done under the Fourth Estate rubric.
Barnsley was one of the publishers more considerably concerned about the Cork-Tesco problem, since "we've been targeting growth in the mass market." She hoped the issue could be resolved, though at press time was still uncertain and, like most publishers with an important stake in supermarket sales, was prepared to help if possible. "It's an issue that will focus both our minds and our pocketbooks," she said with an enigmatic smile.
As the publisher of the only two nonfiction titles among the 10 chosen by Richard and Judy for their TV book club, Barnsley found the show had had "an almost Oprah effect," and demonstrated, perhaps for the first time in the British business, "the very real impact TV can have on book buying." Although the pair have announced no plans for further choices beyond April, she was sanguine that the program could continue: "We're hoping to persuade them to do otherwise."
Harper, along with Penguin, was one of the big beneficiaries last year of the BBC's Big Read promotion, since its Tolkien titles came out on top of the list of the public's favorites, and its absence this year would be felt. Meanwhile, it had been "a good year if not a great one," followed by a "reasonable" Christmas, she said. The autobiography of popular footballer David Beckham, My Side, had been a huge seller in the fall, and Barnsley was hoping for great things from an upcoming book this fall by Greg Dyke, the former director of the BBC, who left in a cloud after the huge row over a report on the lead-up to the Iraq war. The house paid a reported £1 million pounds for this, and it was a source of intense interest for serial sales.
Other Harper titles with high hopes include a children's book, Troll Cell by Catherine Langrish, a thriller with an American setting; Amagansett by Mark Mills; and new titles by Dean Koontz and Josephine Cox, both recently "poached" from Hodder Headline. The latter is part of a new concentration at HC UK on women's commercial fiction.
Macmillan: Some New Directions
At Macmillan, ebullient chairman Richard Charkin, in his canalside offices near the grimy King's Cross railroad station, looks out at his view with a proprietary air; the wholesale clearing of the old railyards and dingy warehouses going on below his airy terraces will make this area the London terminus for the cross-Channel services to Europe, and therefore, as he sees it, "the most important site in Europe." So what at first might seem a remote and undesirable location—local restaurants were so few and poor that Macmillan offers its workers an extensive, and free, cafeteria service, where we lunched with the chairman himself—it will not be ever thus.
Charkin is full of news of new initiatives—Macmillan recently bought the Castillo educational publishing operation, Mexico's second largest; has a unique academic recruiting scheme; is developing extensive typesetting and proofreading operations in India; and is embarking on a series of highly accessible titles in popular science—but he is also alarmed at some of the current publishing trends.
The past year, he said, has been one of the most difficult in the past 10 years, particularly in educational markets; returns are moving closer to American levels (long regarded in Britain as horrendously high), and "we have to shape the business accordingly." On the trade side, "author advances and discounts are both too high, and the marketing spend insufficient." The launch of a new popular science line, Macmillan Science, under the leadership of an extremely bright young editor, Sara Abdulla, aims to address some of these issues. There are no author advances, but a royalty as high as 30% is paid; world rights are sought, so the book can be marketed in all Macmillan's territories, and translations sold as necessary; there are low discounts to booksellers, but each title will be promoted very strongly, using some of Macmillan's stable of notable magazines (like Nature and Scientific American); and the books will be published fast, to ensure timeliness.
Remarkably enough, given these terms, Abdulla has already had dozens of submissions, even from some agents, although the imprint has only just been announced. She plans three or four titles for her fall launch, will go up to a dozen or so next year.
Charkin is also pleased with progress at Macmillan Publisher Services, which offers full back-office services for mostly small publishers; this, too, is done mostly from India, where Charkin finds the service excellent and the prices low—"and they speak excellent English, unlike many of the offshore technical operations." In the children's operation, he is pleased at the new Priddy Books, designed by Roger Priddy, who came over from DK when it was bought by Penguin, along with his signature style. And, by no means least, Macmillan is launching a number of new journals, at a time when most publishers are pulling back; "I think we're really alone in the marketplace in doing that." It's all part of his philosophy of "organic growth, rather than growing by acquisition, as other large companies tend to do." The chief growth at the Palgrave imprint is in journals, too, these days—it has 20 already—and existing scientific journals, like Nature, are being encouraged to move into the humanities.
The heart of Macmillan's trade publishing is still at Pan, where David North casts a wary eye on some current tendencies. As prices are driven ever lower by massive supermarket discounts—and he sees Cork's plight as created by its inability to function on the sort of margins it was getting from the publishers and Tesco—"you're getting in a very dangerous position, where the public perception of prices is way off. Right now paperback prices are at a four-year low. The publishers can't afford it, and nor can the authors."
Pan Macmillan has had the advantage this year of Britain's bestselling paperback, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which would shortly go through the million-copy mark, and one encouraging sign has been an increasing interest, by both retailers and customers, in the backlist. "They're taking it more seriously now, after declines in the past couple of years," which is good news for Pan, as the owner of one of the biggest paperback backlists after Penguin's. Two big American authors recently taken on at Pan, Richard North Patterson and David Baldacci, have both begun well. Solid British authors include Wilbur Smith, the ineffable Jeffrey Archer, Ken Follett and Minette Walters.
Authors less familiar to American readers North sees as up-and-coming stars here are an Italian, Valerio Massimo Manfredi, who does Italian historicals; Jenny Pitman, who is both horse trainer and novelist; a young Australian thriller author, Matthew Reilly (Scarecrow); and Christopher Sansom, whose Dissolution is a historical saga on the dissolution of the monasteries. Nonfiction surprises this year included a book on Audrey Hepburn by her son; a book called Crap Towns, about dreadful places to live; and John Simpson's survey of The Wars Against Saddam. Still, North is somber about some of the imperatives of publishing today. "If you don't get into a big price promotion, your sales and advances will be tiny, and you'll have to go on trimming the list," he said. At present Macmillan does 800—900 books a year, with adult titles down and children's up.
Bloomsbury: Focusing on Format
Alexandra Pringle, publishing director at Bloomsbury, concurred about the importance of promotions: "a book can be damaged if it isn't in one." She is more concerned about backlist, generally hidden away at the back of the store beyond the bestseller and promotion tables. "I want to tell people: 'Walk a little farther.' " Literary publishing is still the heart of what they do at Bloomsbury, "but we've proved it can sell." Donna Tartt's The Little Sister, for instance, was heavily backed by W.H. Smith even before it started getting its reviews, and one of her favorite books this year, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor, had racked up sales of more than 100,000 copies, 80% of that at Waterstone's (it's Harcourt in the U.S.).
Despite the temptations to expand after the Harry Potter bombshell, "We're trying to stay about the same," having cut fiction to three or four titles a month from half a dozen earlier. Bloomsbury classifies these as a major lead, a secondary lead and a dark horse, and try for a different format for each. (There are large numbers of formats, both hardcover and paperback, in British publishing: hardcover has royal—best and biggest—B and C; while paperback has A for mass market, B for an in-between, and C for what we in the States would call a trade paperback, with better paper, a classier design and stronger binding than either of the others.) Pringle sees this as a strong selling point in bookstores: "They welcome the different sizes and shapes, and the different perceived values.
Bloomsbury used to be perceived as bigger in fiction publishing, but of late has been building its lists in history, politics and philosophy—and it welcomes humor. Since the house now owns Berlin Verlag in Germany and has a very flourishing operation in New York, "we want to buy books in more territories, where that works for us." An example is an "extraordinary" first novel about a pair of magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Novell, to be launched in October in all three countries. This the year, thinks Pringle, "for the flowering of fiction at Bloomsbury USA," and the house is hoping to really break out Joanna Trollope on our side of the Atlantic, after other publishers have failed.
Bloomsbury is also particularly keen on a book that was sent in by president Nigel Newton on behalf of his elderly uncle William, The Two Pound Tram, which turned out to be a delight; and a very moving memoir of an orphan girl sent to a kibbutz, Rock Me Gently by Judith Kelly.
Penguin: 'Not the Way to Go'
At Penguin's palatial offices overlooking the Thames and the London Eye from halfway down the Strand, Anthony Forbes-Watson has, as usual, an Olympian view to offer on the trade as well as the city: "A crucial change over the last year is that both sides are coming to understand that selling fewer books at greater discounts is not the way to go." He continues: "We need to think more strategically, creatively and practically about offering a richer range, and promoting the product as much as the price of the product." The combination of factors—"a tighter bottleneck of retailers, whose competition reached new extremes, more sales of fewer titles and margins that, to put it mildly, were not spectacular—resulted in a massive displacement below the waterline."
Forbes-Watson himself is co-chair of the new publisher bookseller liaison group, and with trade publishers being as "extremely competitive as they are, some things are not open to discussion; we can't avoid the issues that are appropriate." In the great debate about the supermarkets, Forbes-Watson sees them as part of big business, "and to treat that as alien is a mistake. If you look at the cost of supplying them, it's not a clear-cut case—though I wonder whether they really need to discount so deeply." The aim should be, so long after the collapse of the NBA, "to build as much value for the consumer as we can. It was Oscar Wilde who defined the cynic as the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and this very intense discounting will eventually make the consumer that kind of cynic."
He added: "The change in the zeitgeist in the past 12 months is the growing realization that value is the key, that we must broaden the range of available books—sell the product and not the price. We have to keep our eye on that aim, or we'll price-cut ourselves out of business." He sees some hope in the fact that retailers are now focusing on "core stock management, which they haven't done." And so Penguin plans to concentrate more on children's publishing, and on the marketing of relevant backlist side by side with frontlist.
The company, hugely aided by the BBC's Big Read, in which 49 out of the 100 titles chosen were Penguin's, had a "satisfying" year, despite the absence, for the first time in five years, of a new book by Jamie Oliver, doyen of English cookbook authors and a huge seller. Michael Moore continued to be a vast seller with Dude, Where's My Country?, and Madonna's children's book and a tie-in with the Finding Nemo movie were strong, as was Paul Burrell's book on Princess Di; a surprise bestseller in How Clean Is Your House?; and Tom Peters's new book, Reimagine. In DK, the E-Encyclopedia was going great guns.
'Growing Market Share' at Random
At Random House, Gail Rebuck and Simon Master as usual gave a joint interview, and our notes don't always reflect exactly who said what, but their stories tend to jibe, with Rebuck waxing more enthusiastic, and Master offering the occasional skeptical hint. They agreed it had been, "a fantastic year, in which we took market share from some of our closest competitors" (a key measure in a business as closely competitive in a small territory as Britain's).
There was no really huge title except Dr. Atkins, but the success came across a diverse range of titles, from Mark Haddon's bestselling and prize-winning Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which went out in separate versions for adults and children; Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane; a new Bill Bryson (vastly popular in his adopted country), Short History of Nearly Everything (550,000 copies sold, far in excess of what it did in the U.S.); chick lit queen Sophie Kinsella; and, of course, The Da Vinci Code, which was big but not the phenomenon it is in the States (though Random expects million-plus sales for the paperback). The house was also a Richard and Judy beneficiary, with the Star of the Sea, the single biggest gainer among the club choices.
As for the retailing hassle, Master is "eternally optimistic" about Smith's finding its way again, but adds: "Are we all mad, to support supermarket pricing?" He noted that in the past year, some publishers had declined to supply certain titles for price promotions there, and also observed that, though they are seldom called to account, and not part of any discussions, agents created part of the squeeze on margins by hiking their advances on books likely to be big mass market sellers. Rebuck said she is "now against discounting in itself, but there are times when it goes too far; knocking another 50p. to 60p.($1 to $1.20) off the rack price of a mass market paperback certainly doesn't help."
The only major change at Random in the year was the very recent merging of two literary imprints, Christopher Maclehose's Harvill Press (bought a couple of years ago) and Secker & Warburg, into Harvill Secker. Geoff Mulligan of Secker will be the publishing director of the combined imprints, and Maclehose, who is nearing retirement age, will become editor-at-large, concentrating on acquiring the European authors for which the list was celebrated. The move was essentially "succession planning," to ensure a smooth transition, and Rebuck described the new joint imprint as "sort of creating our own Faber."
Although part of the Random group, Transworld is still very much a world unto itself, and Patrick Janson-Smith is, as always, a witty guide to it. In his view, the market seems to be contracting, with all the attention focused on "that front-of-the-store stuff." He thinks "that extra discount is shrinking the market, with customers likely to be every more selective as they go only for the best price promotions." All this makes him "a bit anxious. We have to work a damn sight harder to stay in the same place."
As always, he has a favorite book—not necessarily his own—and this year it's The Societyof Others by screenwriter and playwright William Nicholson. He's taken on Carl Hiassen, whose work he loves and who, he thinks, has never been adequately published in the U.K., and he was about to go hiking in the Ardennes with another favorite, Bill Bryson.
Orion: New Leadership
The big news at Orion, of course, was the departure a few months ago of Anthony Cheetham, the driving force of the house for many years, and the rise to fill his place of Peter Roche, his quieter but infinitely resourceful second-in-command. Our interview was with publisher Malcolm Edwards, who described a good year, but one that was hard put to beat 2002, when the house had Michael Palin's No. 1 bestseller, Sahara (ex-Python Palin is huge in the U.K.), plus the surprise hit What Not to Wear. Orion is one of the houses dealing with Cork on a cash-only basis until the crisis is resolved, but it's an anxious time, for Tesco is an important market, especially for Orion's fiction line. The chain, Edwards said, could drive a book straight to the top of the paperback list. A particular gripe with Smith's that he described—but which was certainly not unique to the house—is inconsistency in its use of publisher price promotions. "They were in a real mess over Christmas," said Edwards, who reports going into a Smith's branch near his home and finding that out of 16 promotions Orion had agreed on with the chain, only three were actually in place. On the whole discounts question, he had a wry comment: "You could draw a line in the sand over discounts, but then you'd find everyone suddenly standing on the other side of it."
In Cheetham's day, there was often talk of opening some sort of beachhead in the American market. Such notions, like Hodder's, are on hold for now, Edwards said, and the company distributes in the U.S. via Sterling. Had the latter's acquisition by Barnes & Noble had any effect? There was some downside in that other chains are not dealing with Sterling now; an upside in extra B&N orders for some titles. In Canada, Orion titles are in the hands of the lively McArthur & Company.
Changes in Orion's profile include a bigger role for fiction at Weidenfeld & Nicolson now that Helen Garnon-Williams has been brought over from Hodder as fiction editor. Prominent titles here include Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes's first novel, Snobs; a new book by Alan Furst; a new book by the Orange Prize winner Valerie Martin (Property) called Italian Fever. Orion's nonfiction list has a major book on Catherine de Medici, John Gielgud's letters, a new book by Richard Dawkins and, further ahead, a much-anticipated new Michael Palin, on the Himalayas.
Orion's own fiction list includes Ian Rankin, with each book improving on the sales of the previous one (his next is Fleshmarket Close);— Maeve Binchy (now edited in New York by Dutton's Carole Baron), who has Nights of Rain and Stars on the way; and there is what Edwards calls "a small but perfectly formed children's list," with Michelle Paver (Chronicles of Ancient Darkness) as its star, and a series of Horrid Henry titles. Gollancz, another Orion imprint, has Stephen Donaldson's resumption, after many years, of his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series. The various Orion imprints do 250 titles a year (not including paperbacks); Weidenfeld does 175.
Canongate: A New London Base
Canongate's peripatetic Jamie Byng always has a surprise in store, and this time it is the new London office he is just setting up, in a row house on a long, nondescript street in North Kensington. Here he is establishing a Canongate office in the basement, and his companion, Elizabeth Sheinkman of New York's Elaine Markson agency, will set up Markson's London base on the top floor. In between are their living quarters, including a couple of rooms that can be used for writers who need to crash for a night or two in London.
Phone and high-speed Internet connections were being installed even as we visited, and much of the furniture belonging to the house's previous owner, a minor rock star, was being tossed out (though his purple-painted sauna remained). "I used to come down to London every other weekend," said Byng. "Now I'll spend less time in Edinburgh."
The company that started so small and has enjoyed such striking success in the past three years now has 20 people and a new finance director, Andy Miller, formerly of Fourth Estate. This year, Byng expects the company to pass £4.5 million ($9 million), "but we don't have what I think is the unnatural desire to grow the business indefinitely. What we need is some stability, so we can stay around a long time. The trick is to combine caution with a degree of risk-taking."
The risk-taking continues, of course. Byng is one of the holdouts against selling to supermarkets, which badly wanted Yann Martel's prize-winning and bestselling Life of Pi, but Byng refused to sell it to them (Martel has a new book under way at this point). Byng was amused and faintly irritated by a recent Scottish press flap suggesting that his publication of non-Scottish writers like Martel meant has was abandoning the firm's Scottish roots. And he continues to look beyond Scotland for new titles: he is particularly struck at the moment by Brass, by Helen Walsh from Liverpool, a vivid novel of big-city life as seen by a girl in her late teens, which has "great Liverpudlian vitality." And a memoir called Ghosting by Jenny Erdal, about a woman who spent her life writing for others, is being auctioned in the U.S., with, said Byng, both Broadway's Gerry Howard and Harcourt's Drenka Willen "bowled over by it." There will also be a new book by Glasgow author Louise Welsh (The Cutting Room) and a fictionseries based on great mysteries of the past, e.g., the death of Christopher Marlowe.
Byng continues to be regarded by some of the more conventional London publishers with a degree of bemusement that someone so intemperately enthusiastic and—to put it kindly—rather unkempt in appearance should have done so well. In fact, one publisher earlier in the day of our Canongate visit said, only half in jest, that he had heard Byng had had his unruly hair cut. We can hereby report that it's not true. The hair's still there.
