Regional resonance

In the course of my PhD research into whether a bias exists in the UK book industry against northern writers and writing (spoiler alert: it does), I heard so many anecdotes from aspiring and established authors who were told there’s no international market for their work. Many were also told only people from the north of England would read northern books, and it’s that limited mindset that feeds the assumption that nobody outside the UK will be interested in tales from the regions.

Except, it simply isn’t true (trust me, I’m a doctor) and here’s the living proof.

It all started with a tweet. Last week, Northbound Book Award 2021 winner Adam Farrer commented on the fact that 22% of physical books sales of his essay collection, Cold Fish Soup (Saraband) are from the US. The book details his experiences of living on east Yorkshire’s Holderness coast, a location that few people in the UK, let alone the US, may be familiar with.

"I think much of the continuing success of the book all comes down to its universal themes," Farrer says. "I wrote about mental health struggles, grief, environmental concerns, family dynamics, small-town eccentricity, love of place, and these are relatable themes whether you’re in Yorkshire or California. People are just interested in honest stories about people."

Though much of that success comes from Saraband forging a connection with US company Cincy Book Bus, the fact remains that word of mouth plays a huge part in sales, and the book wouldn’t sell if readers weren’t connecting with it. Also, this is not an extraordinary case. Indie publisher Wild Hunt Books noted that sales of Gemma Fairclough’s debut novel, Bear Season (set equally in Manchester and Alaska) has seen 50% of its sales come from the US and Canada. They’ve also sold copies of the novel in Japan, Hong Kong and the EU. The publisher’s next project, a series of novellas from northern writers called The Northern Weird Project, has already notched up 41% of reviewer requests from North America and the EU.

International audiences care more about the stories, the themes, the characters than where a book or its author comes from

That’s fiction and non-fiction ticked off. But what about children’s titles? Writer Richard O’Neill’s picture book Polonius the Pit Pony (Child’s Play) does (in the author’s words) "very well in the US and other countries. The idea that a picture book created from a real-life incident on the edge of a village in County Durham could travel across the world to the US would have been inconceivable to me as a child and as an adult fills me with a huge sense of joy and achievement. Perhaps it’s the idea – one that many of us writers in the north grow up with – that no one outside our area would be interested in our culture because we haven’t seen it reflected in the books we read growing up."

Is this a question of precedence? If publishers have – for whatever reason – rarely tried to sell regional stories into the international market, how can they really know that there’s no market for them? It’s also telling that all three of these examples come from small or indie presses. If they can do it, why can’t the bigger publishers? 
Writer and editor Roya Khatiblou hits the nail on the head with one simple statement: "America simply doesn’t care about social class the way the UK does and doesn’t recognise the north from anywhere else here."

Neither does anywhere else in the world. The UK is the only place that does, clinging onto stereotypes and biases that mean, as we say in the north, absolutely nowt. As Farrer, O’Neill and Fairclough’s experiences show, international audiences care more about the stories, the themes, the characters than where a book or its author comes from.

I’ve just signed with an Australian agent, Brendan Fredericks, who took on my novel because of its northern setting and use of Pitmatic dialect, saying "the characters really resonated with me". If a fella from Sydney can connect that deeply with the dialect and characters from a north-east pit village, then the argument that these kinds of books are too parochial for an international market is moot, isn’t it?

Perhaps it’s time for UK publishers to consider whether there really, truly is no international market for books from regions of the UK – or whether, in fact, it’s our own ingrained biases and stereotypes around class and regionalism that are putting the block on.

If the world can read and rave about books with small-town settings like Where the Crawdads Sing, The Dry and To Kill a Mockingbird then they can surely manage Leeds, Durham and Middlesbrough. As the above successes prove, they might even like it.