In late 2006, when Ted and Caroline Robbins decided to downsize their businesses, they sold Trafalgar Square Publishing, the distributor of British publishers in the U.S. they founded in 1973, to the senior management of Chicago Review Press, parent company of Independent Publishers Group (IPG). But they kept their book publishing operation, Trafalgar Square Books. Although the transition of books and systems that were involved in the distribution deal has gone smoothly, there is one glitch—confusion over the name.
According to Trafalgar Square Books managing director Martha Cook, prospective distribution clients still contact the Vermont-based publisher of equestrian and craft titles instead of Trafalgar Square Publishing/IPG in Chicago. And Internet searches for Trafalgar Square Books turn up links to IPG’s similarly named distribution company, which took over the trafalgarsquarebooks.com Web address. Recently, Trafalgar Square Books launched a new site, trafalgarbooks.com, to promote its craft titles and added a link to its equestrian imprint, www.horseandriderbooks.com. Despite the confusion, Cook said, “there was never any question that we wouldn’t use some form of Trafalgar Square” as the name of the house, since Trafalgar is the name of the Robbins farm and is strongly recognized throughout the horse world. “As bookstores understand we’re not doing the distribution, I’m hoping the number of calls will lessen,” Cook said.
Name problems aside, Cook said the sale of the distribution arm has enabled her and other staffers to sharpen their focus on the book publishing side, which is a major publisher of horse books in the U.S as well as the distributor for the respected British equestrian publisher J.A. Allen. Through its distribution agreement with IPG, the 23-year-old publisher’s books are now sold in Canada; previously they were available only in the U.S. Trafalgar Square Books continues to handle its own special sales to tack shops and horse shops.
With the sale of the distribution unit, the Robbinses have cut expenses and staff. Over the past year, Trafalgar Square has shrunk from 33 employees to eight, while upping its original horse book releases and adding four or five crafts book co-editions a year. The press has also branched out its crafts list to include weaving, as well as the areas for which it is best known—books by celebrity knitters like Debbie Bliss and books on mosaics. Cook said that the press is now publishing 25 to 30 books a year, of which about a third are crafts books; it has an active backlist of 250 titles.
