We're always going on about how challenging it is right now for small presses - and the numbers bear us out. But, despite losing 90% of our sales this past year, we have kept battling on, doing our best to survive, so we can publish more of the books we believe in - from poetry, to mysteries, to non-fiction, to memoirs, to literary prose works, and beyond...
We've fallen woefully behind in our publishing schedule. We have numerous reasons (not excuses, mind you, legitimate reasons...) like Brexit, the pandemic, Inflation, millions of self-published books flooding Amazon and making it harder for quality works to stand out, personal and family health challenges - but, every year since our BSPG merger, we have kept publishing, and chipping away at our schedule, doing our best.
We apologise to our writers who are waiting longer than expected to get their books out. We don't have multiple reasons ultimately for these delays - there's only one: lack of sales, hence lack of money - no money to print or pay our editors to do more. We don't have major arts funding, we rely entirely on book sales, loans, and investment when we can locate it.
So, our Plan A - to generate revenue and sales working with major crime writers on our CrimeBits series - is dedicated to saving the press, and permitting it to afford to be able to publish all the books it wants to publish.
We do as much as we can, as often as we can, and the more we can make CrimeBits a success this Christmas season, the better for us all as publishers and writers working with BSPG. Already Barnes and Noble and Waterstones have ordered thousands of the paperbacks, which, if these sell, is a gamechanger.
Thanks for staying on the adventure with us - it's very tough these days but we'll keep doing our best for as long as we can.
