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Review of the Year: The grand Alliance – Indie group steps up a level
The Independent Alliance earned more than a Big Four list for the first time, as eight of its members posted TCM-record returns.
Sales for the Independent Alliance (IA) collective hit the highest point since the group’s formation in 2005, with total revenue eclipsing a Big Four conglomerate for the first time.
The IA sold £92.8m through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) last year, £2.8m more than Pan Macmillan, as seven of its members notched double-digit year-on-year percentage jumps. Impressively, eight members – Faber, David Fickling, Granta, Pushkin, Fitzcarraldo, Swift Press, Duckworth and newcomer Bedford Square – scored all-time records through the TCM.
The IA has been nipping at the Big Four’s heels since around 2015, when it expanded to 15 publishers following the closure of Faber Factory Plus (membership is now 18, though The School of Life’s TCM sales are recorded under distribution partner Duckworth). But the post-pandemic years were particularly fecund for the indie group, with its two biggest players, Faber and Profile, recording their top three BookScan years in that time.
Faber benefited from the 2024 boom in Fiction: its top 15 sellers were all from the category, led by Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (£2.6m). In the TCM last year, 31 novels topped £1m: Rooney’s is the only one from a British-based indie. Just over 60% of Faber’s TCM revenue came from the Fiction sector and backlist played a huge part: of those 15 top sellers, eight were published in first format prior to 2023.
Major prizes had much to do with Granta’s 8% leap to its TCM highwater mark. Former Booker winner Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (£306,000) soared in paperback and was its bestseller, albeit just £4,000 ahead of Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann’s International Booker winner, Kairos. The Nobel only rarely means a tidal wave at the tills, but Han Kang received a nice splash for claiming the 2024 honour: sales of her trio of Granta-issued titles rose 47% year on year, to £367,000.
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Burgeoning romantasy star Tricia Levenseller forged the way for Pushkin, selling £335,000 with The Darkness Within Us, hitting the UK’s overall top 10 at launch. Serial Nobel publisher Fitzcarraldo has benefited from the selections of “De Aderton”: 2018 winner Olga Tokarczuk shifted 29% of the list’s £1.8m, while 2022 champ Annie Ernaux chipped in £250,000.
The return of Matt Haig (£1.6m) was a big part of Canongate’s TCM value jump of 11.2%. It also had one of the hits of the autumn in Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare (£646,000), her chronicle of moving to the country and finding, by chance, an abandoned leveret. Rick Rubin’s 2023 hardback, The Creative Act, was the indie’s third-biggest seller last year (£557,000), while another backlist star, Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, was Canongate’s sixth-biggest book of 2024, seven years after its release.
A couple of the IA houses with sales contractions had good years contextually. Profile was down 8.6% to £15.3m, but that is coming off a 2023 that was by far its TCM record; 2024 is its second-best 12-month period. GT Karber killed again, with his now five-strong Murdle stable chalking up £3.6m. Rock-solid backlist helped; in fact, Profile’s second-biggest book of 2024 was published a quarter of a century ago: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert “the modern Machiavelli” Greene shifted £646,000 in its main edition. Oneworld, meanwhile, fell 13.4% to £3.9m, but that is against 2023 and the Booker triumph of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song; 2024 was still Oneworld’s third-best annual BookScan result.
