S&S buys four Graham Swift backlist titles

Scribner UK has acquired the rights to four backlist titles from Booker Prize winner Graham Swift.

The recently revived Simon & Schuster imprint has bought the books from Picador and PRH’s Hamish Hamilton and will publish them later this year. This follows the success of Mothering Sunday, published by Scribner last March.

The "intensely moving and beautifully written novel" Tomorrow (formerly Picador) and The Light of Day (formerly Hamish Hamilton), which is both a "gripping crime tale and a remarkable love story", will be republished in May. New articles will be added to the non-fiction collection Making an Elephant (formerly Picador) which features essays, portraits, poetry and “reflections on a life in writing”, to be published in October, while Wish You Were Here (formerly Picador), will be published in September and was described as the collection’s “focus” by S&S UK c.e.o and publisher Ian Chapman. The books were bought from Caradoc King at AP Watt at United Agents. However Swift's 1996 Booker-winning Last Orders and the novel Waterland remain with Picador.

Picador had been been Swift’s long-standing publisher, aside from a brief departure in 2003 to publish The Light of Day with Hamish Hamilton. Swift returned to Picador for Tomorrow (published in 2007), before joining Simon & Schuster for England and Other Stories in 2014.

England and Other Stories was the first book published by the revived Scribner imprint.

About the new acquisitions, Chapman told The Bookseller: “We are really excited. We are wanting to make a big noise about the backlist and get copies out there. The strategy is to focus on Wish You Were Here. I think Wish You Were Here is a great, great book and want to get it into more people’s hands. It deserves a wide audience."

He added: "There will be a piece from Making an Elephant in the Guardian. We will be using our partnership with Waterstones as well. We are not going to keep quiet about these books. We all love publishing Graham. Graham is a special man and a special talent, I consider him a genius.”

Chapman said that publishing Swift’s acclaimed 2016 novel, Mothering Sunday, was a “a hugely exciting moment for us”. He said: “It had been a while since Graham had anything which had featured on the bestseller list. [Before we published Mothering Sunday], we had a trade dinner with booksellers...and introduced him to the trade to generate the sense of an event. We had a focus meeting every two weeks, got it edited and chose the right jacket quickly. We built momentum to get him back on the bestseller list where he belongs. It has been a pleasure and a delight.

"We didn’t own the world rights but even so I gathered all the foreign publishers to have a dinner with Graham, and the French publisher has now sold 20,000 copies, they have had several printings. We consider it a masterpiece and it sold 23,644 in hardback through Bookscan. We have just heard that Film4 has just optioned it with Number 9 Films."

Swift said: “My experience at Scribner UK with England and Other Stories and Mothering Sunday has been a very happy one and I’m delighted these four earlier books are now also with them.”

The London Evening Standard had claimed in 2014 that the author’s departure from Picador was not “entirely amicable” because the author had been dissatisfied with the publisher’s handling of Wish You Were Here. However King told The Bookseller at the time that Swift’s “tough” decision to move to S&S wasn’t “in any way” unamicable. King said: “Graham made the decision after a lot of anguish because Picador has been his longstanding publisher whom he has a good relationship with. But he made the decision based on the passion Simon & Schuster had to publish these stories, which Graham showed directly to Ian (Chapman), not to me.”

Mothering Sunday has sold 23,644 copies in hardback in the UK according to Nielsen BookScan. It is Swift's biggest seller in hardback and has sold more than twice the number of copies of his 2014 hardback title England and Other Stories, which sold 3,464 copies (and only 7,050 in the 2015 paperback). His biggest sellers are 2004’s The Light of Day, with 68,989 copies in paperback, the 1996 edition of Last Orders with 51,111 and Waterland, with 38,154 copies sold (also a 1996 edition).