Feal the fear and publish anyway

As I write this on Halloween I’m anxiously flicking between tabs to check how our scariest project of the year is going. It’s far more frightening than any man in a hockey mask, more anxiety-inducing than the latest electricity bill, even more terrifying than the frantic knock of a passing pick-and-mix of sugar-frenzied children. It’s our first foray into publishing and it launched today on Kickstarter. Under the moniker Dead & Read, we’re aiming to bring three horror classics back to life with screen-printed posters and t-shirts and a heavy metal twist. 

At some point it must have seemed like a good idea. At this precise moment though I’ve absolutely no idea what (or who) possessed me. Bookselling, like all retail, is hard enough at the moment, and that’s with five years experience of owning a bookshop. Publishing is a whole different world. Yes, it may be adjacent to bookselling, but it’s far from the same thing. A bookseller becoming a publisher is like a Footlocker assistant launching a shoe brand or the meat counter manager at Waitrose headed off to become a pig farmer. I know what books are but there’s nothing in my job that teaches me how they’re made. Yet that’s what I’ve decided to do.

Then again, there was nothing in my last job (digital advertising) that taught me about bookselling. And there’s little in the description of ‘bookseller’ that covers the scope of work that running a bookshop involves. Retail assistant, librarian, event organiser, marketer, child carer, accountant, graphic designer and shop fitter - I’ve had to don all these costumes over the past five years. Perhaps then, with all this jobs-sharing, it’s no wonder that quite a few of us booksellers decide we can, naively/arrogantly/optimistically, add yet another string to our bow or string section to our orchestra.

Balham’s Backstory has been open little more than a year and yet they’ve just launched a literary magazine. Even taking into consideration that owner Tom Rowley was previously a journalist for The Economist, I have no idea how he’s done this after just one year of owning his shop. When I think back to how bewildered I was after our first year of operation, I could not have contemplated let alone pulled off the feat of a monthly magazine. Tom’s either a madman or a far more competent man than myself. I think I know which.

A bookseller becoming a publisher is like a Footlocker assistant launching a shoe brand or the meat counter manager at Waitrose headed off to become a pig farmer

Mr B’s Emporium in Bath are veterans in comparison to Backstory, which perhaps explains how alongside their shop they somehow manage to run not just a podcast series (A Flamboyancy of Children’s Authors) but also publish forgotten gems under their imprint Fox, Finch & Tepper. The latest, Winter Love by Han Suyin, is a short novel first published in 1962, about an adulterous affair between two young women during the winter of the London blitz and it’s really, really good. Damn them.

A few miles down the road from our Portishead store lies Clevedon’s Books On The Hill. Their publishing arm, BOTH Press, began on Kickstarter with the mission of releasing dyslexia friendly versions of existing titles by a wide range of authors, including Bernard Cornwell, Gareth L. Powell and Arthur Conan Doyle. They were deservedly shortlisted for Small Press Of The Year at the 2023 British Book Awards.

So there is some reassurance for me that booksellers can become publishers. Maybe I will sleep tonight. Or maybe I’ll lie awake worrying that our first publishing project will fall flat on its face and I’ll end up looking more than a little silly. The fear is real. The hope is too, though. 

Anyone working in bookselling right now, anyone working in retail right now, is living with at least a little fear. The Christmas uptick in sales seems slow to arrive. The ongoing rise in costs is less so. The monster may not be at the door but it’s certainly lurking down the street. Yet despite that independent businesses can still survive. The lucky ones can even find ways to thrive. By summoning every ounce of bravery and stepping into the unknown the likes of Backstory, Mr Bs and Books On The Hills have shown potential horror stories can become epic adventures.