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Triumph of the small publisher. At the big houses, caution and groupthink reign. It's the little shops that are taking risks exciting readers »
A quiet revolution is afoot in British publishing. Earlier this year, when American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis brought out his latest bestseller, The Shards, the book came to UK readers not from his usual publisher, Picador – his home for nearly four decades – but from a small independent company, Swift Press, a freelance-powered outfit so light on overheads it doesn’t even have an office. Likewise, Sheila Heti, the prize-winning Canadian author of zeitgeisty autobiographical cogitations Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, recently announced that her next book won’t be out with her regular publisher, Penguin Random House, but with south London indie Fitzcarraldo Editions, not yet 10 years in business. Last year’s Booker winner, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, came to us courtesy of the smallest publisher ever to win the prize, husband-and-wife indie Sort Of Books. In 2022, all the glittering literary prizes went to indies – not only the Booker, but its sister prize for translated fiction, the International Booker, as well as the Nobel, the Goldsmiths, the Pulitzer and Australia’s A$100,000 (£80,000) Victorian prize for literature. The last four remarkably were all won by Fitzcarraldo, the UK home of celebrated French memoirist Annie Ernauxand foremost among a wave of new small publishers punching above their weight. What’s going on?
“The thing about the publishing world is that most people don’t understand how it works,” says Valerie Brandes, chief executive of black-owned London indie Jacaranda Books. “Even people in publishing don’t understand how it works! But I’d make so bold as to say the real publishing is happening at the bottom.” It’s a view that is increasingly widespread in the industry. The argument runs something like this: because commercial pressures at large houses encourage cautious commissioning (see the way every breakthrough success, be it Sally Rooney or Richard Osman, heralds an attack of the clones), nimbler indies – operating with tighter margins – step into the void and give choice-starved readers the books that corporate imprints deem unsaleable or otherwise risky. Whether these are from veteran authors left on the scrapheap (according to Ellis, Picador didn’t want The Shards), boundary-pushing first-timers such as Sheena Patel (author of I’m a Fan, recently the winner of a British Book award) or foreign greats deemed tricky to sell (witness Fitzcarraldo’s wonder trio of overseas Nobel laureates, Ernaux, Svetlana Alexievich and Olga Tokarczuk), all are finding homes with upstart maverick publishers that – as their prize success indicates – are reaping the spoils.
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