I am sure you are tired of hearing about how small presses in the UK and North America struggle to survive in a world more and more dominated by larger publishers - unless you are one of the 99% of all authors who will never find an agent or get published by a Big 5 publisher - in which case, perhaps you care that smaller presses face increasingly near-impossible pressures, especially with regards to inflation and rising costs for shipping and printing.
BSPG is a micro-press, with no full-time staff, and a very small annual turnover, but we have punched above our weight in the past due to working with important books and authors of genuine brilliance. Even without any major arts grants, we have muddled through the devastating years of the pandemic, but we have seen sales decline rapidly over the past 18 months.
The good news is, we have found a major investor to take BSPG into 2025 with a strong new plan and the support to make it happen.
However, we have had to find a new sales strategy, after our previous outside sales managed to generate ZERO pre-orders into major British book chains, for a paperback book from Lee Child and Luca Veste. That this seems impossible to understand lets you into how we are feeling and thinking right about now.
Fortunately, we have an excellent US sales team and distributor, and superb contacts with the big US chains. Besides, we have excellent books on the horizon.
However, in order to protect our authors and their superb books from not being in bookshops in Britain before Christmas, which we ourselves as writers find unacceptable, we are taking the difficult and necessary steps of moving our Q4 2024 titles to Q1,2 and 3 2025.
This is not ideal, and we are only doing this due to a disastrously poor performance to date in UK shop sales for the year.
Therefore our team – freelancers all – will be taking a lot of time off from BSPG until 2025, and we will move into a holding pattern over Heathrow, until permission to land, in about 3 and a half months.
This means we will be providing our best possible skeleton crew response to emails, editorial and admin, sales and marketing, until January, 2025, but will continue to of course respond to finance and business matters with professionalism. All books orders will be handled, and all prizes will be monitored and judging remains ongoing.
Thankfully, we're not yet at the point of closing, we're repowering, and when we return with a strong new sales team for Britain, and proper funding, you'll be happy you waited, we hope.
It's important to understand our thinking - we have to be prepared to make big decisions, if the alternative is to close. Our view is, what keeps us in survival mode is best for our writers, published and forthcoming. Our main aim is always to plan how to best publish our authors so they can have the best opportunities for reviews, prizes, and bookshop placement, as possible. We have never been a "rush them out badly edited, publish them cheap, and just throw them onto an online shop" sort of press - because we are writers ourselves and never want to bring books out in a way that is akin to self-publishing, because we believe that is not the best that an author can achieve. Our ethos is patience, and getting it right is always better than a rush-job.