Welsh publishing: in depth

Although the Welsh publishing community is fairly close knit, most of the publishers themselves actually only meet face-to-face once a year many miles from home at the Frankfurt Book Fair Welsh collective stand. "We all know each other, are pretty friendly, talk a lot and share tips," says Hazel Cushion, m.d. of Accent Press. "But geographically we are quite spread out. It is much easier for London publishers to get together."  

Indeed, unlike most countries' publishing sectors, there is no recognisable centre of the industry. Accent is in Mid Glamorgan, near the Brecon Beacons National Park. Gomer Press, Wales' oldest and largest concern—founded in 1892 and still family owned, it publishes around 120 English and Welsh language titles a year—is based in Llandysul, West Wales. Poetry, drama and literary fiction specialist Parthian Books is in Cardigan. Funding bodies the Welsh Books Council (WBC) and Literature Wales are in Aberystwyth and Cardiff respectively.

While they are not close geographically, one thing that links most of the 109 publishers in Wales (as listed by the Welsh Books Council) is that they are smaller independent houses.

Helgard Krause, the director of the University of Wales Press (one of the few non-independent Welsh publishers, as it is technically owned by the university), originally hails from southern Germany, and worked in publishing in England with Routledge and Quarto, before moving to Wales in 2003. She argues that measuring Welsh publishers solely on turnover does not tell the full story. She says: "I am one of these converted Welshies and I've become a little more evangelical than many of my colleagues. Yet I think it's important to demonstrate the diversity of Welsh publishing. Most are indies, but it isn't just maverick cutting edge literary houses. It has a fully formed publishing scene, with people publishing genre fiction, specialists such as Accent and Crown House. There's a lot going on here."

New voices
One thing that has happened earlier this summer is that for the first time in Man Booker Prize history a Welsh publisher had a book on the longlist, Patrick McGuinness' The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books). Based in Bridgend (about halfway between Cardiff and Swansea), Seren could be described as one of those maverick publishing houses. Yet McGuinness' book demonstrates how Welsh publishing is evolving; its subject is the dying days of the Ceausescu regime in Romania, and it is written by a Tunisian-born Oxford professor of Belgian and English parentage. It is not a Welsh novel: it just happens to be published by a Welsh publisher.

That Welsh publishing is not solely inward-looking is hardly revealing within the country. Yet it may be news to the myopic London publishing world. Jane MacNamee is on the board of the committee which oversees Honno Press, a sort of Welsh Virago, which was founded in 1986. She says: "I think there is some validity to the view that Welsh writing and publishing used to be dominated by tales of South Wales mining valleys. That's one of the reasons why we formed; we were not hearing all from all corners of Wales. But that's in the past, and we are hearing so many new and fresh voices."

Though Honno only publishes Welsh women, it does not limit the subject matter to the country. One of its titles this autumn is Lindsay Ashford's fun sounding Mysterious Death of Miss Austen, which posits that Jane Austen was murdered, and stars an intrepid governess in Austen's brother's employ trying to find the killer.

Something that has not changed in Welsh publishing is that many of the small houses do require varying degrees of Arts Council funding. Mick Felton, publisher at Seren, says: "Welsh publishing is vibrant, though a lot of it is based on Welsh government funding. It is tough being a small publisher and there aren't very many strictly commercial publishers in Wales. We've been going for 30 years, but you're always looking over your shoulder."

Luckily Welsh publishers have, for the time being, avoided the swingeing cuts that arts funding groups have experienced in England and Scotland. The Welsh Books Council (WBC) dispenses grants to publishers, provides editing, design, book production and sales and marketing help, and has a wholesale distribution centre for Welsh books. Lucy Taylor, publishing grants officer at WBC says: "The government for the past couple of years had been looking into funding and we had been expecting some sort of cuts, but were preparing to defend grants to publishers (which we did). We haven't received any publishing cuts, though we as a body have received some over the next three years."
Wales' shallower cuts to literature funding are partly owing to the Welsh Assembly's commitment to sustaining the Welsh language. In 2010/11, the WBC awarded almost £750,000 to English language publishers and about £1.8m to Welsh language schemes.
"It's been tough. The funding is not going down, but it certainly ain't going up," says Felton. "But I'm not complaining. In comparison to Arts Council England-funded publishers, the WBC got a good settlement. We do benefit from the Welsh government's cultural mission to give Wales a voice in a wider UK market."  

On specialty markets
Caroline Lenton, marketing manager, Crown House

"I suppose we are outside of the mainstream of Welsh publishing just because of what we do. We are not publishing literature and poetry, but non-fiction, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), psychotherapy, business training and mind, body and spirit. We're 18% up year on year from last year, and that's down, in part, to the hard work we've done reaching out to our customers and authors. We are now the owners of the main NLP international conference, we're a presence at other conferences, we work closely with business training and life coaching companies. For a specialist, that is the key: staying close to our customers."

Crown House was founded in 1992 as a reseller (the Anglo American Book Company, which imported American NLP and hypnotherapy titles) and published its first books in 1998.

The 2011 Booker
Mick Felton, publisher, Seren Books

"It was great to be longlisted and we sold lots of copies. Shortlisting would have been transformational, though, as you start getting to really big numbers. We have, of course, submitted our books every year and we are always hopeful. But we are aware that it's very difficult for a small publisher outside of London to carry the heft that prize judges, particularly Booker judges, look for. It was nice to see indies on the longlist, nice to see a few outside of London, perhaps down to the fact that we had a set of judges this year that were open to anything, really."

Seren was founded 30 years ago as a poetry publisher but soon branched into fiction and non-fiction. Patrick McGuinness' The Last Hundred Days, published in June, was the first book by a Welsh publisher to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
 

Digital

Hazel Cushion
M.d. Accent Press and Xcite Books

"The exciting thing about digital is that it levels the playing field; whether you are Random House or a small publisher in Wales, the entry requirements to the marketplace are the same. Our strategy with Xcite has been to concentrate on building very clear, strong branding. We have readers who know what an Xcite book is and trust our writers."

Cushion founded Accent in 2003 and launched its sister company, the erotica imprint Xcite, in 2007.  

E-publishing
Helgard Krause
Director, University of Wales Press

"The difficulty for a smaller press is manpower and expertise. E-publishing is disproportionately challenging, not because the issue is difficult, but you need the time and resources to do it well. We are apprehensive on some digital aspects. For production and editorial standards on purely academic titles, the word flow and page breaks are integral to the overall quality of the book. To give that up with devices with reflowable text makes us worried, though this is an issue that we hope will soon be solved by better technology."

Founded in 1922, the University of Wales Press is a subsidiary of the University of Wales and publishes 70 books and nine journals a year.

Small presses
Jane MacNamee
Committee member, Honno Press

"We publish Welsh women writers because every publisher needs an angle, but particularly a small press. Yet within our criteria, we are looking to try to be very broad; we look at a book that works in its own terms and tries to reflect back from what Welsh women authors are writing about, what they are thinking about."

Honno was founded in 1986 by a team of volunteers and currently publishes about nine books a year by Welsh women writers.