You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Faber reports 'very good' year with top-line turnover at £25.4m
Faber has reported a “very good” year ending March 2023, with top-line turnover at £25.4m, slightly down from the previous year’s £27.9m, but still the company’s second highest result.
The publisher’s operating profit was almost half of last year’s, at £1.4m compared to £3.1m in 2022. The report said administrative expenses in the period were elevated "due to one-off costs relating to the exit of the company’s lease in Great Russell Street, but the underlying result is strong, putting the company in a good position for the years to come".
Gross profit in the year was £12.7m at a margin of 50%, compared to £14.8m at a 53% margin in 2022. According to the statement, the gross profit reflects the impact of higher paper, print, and distribution costs during the year. Profit after tax for the year was at £1.2m, down from last year’s £2.4m.
The company increased its net assets to £17.2m from £15.3m in 2022, while cash at bank and in hand was at £9.9m, from £13.7m the previous year. Movement in cash during the period was driven by dividends, as well as a bonus scheme payout and capital investment in the new office space at the Bindery, Hatton Garden, which the company moved to in April 2023.
Chief executive Mary Cannam said that “2022–23 was an excellent year". She added: "We increased audiences for our exceptional writers across all areas of our list and published outstanding new talent. Every area of the business performed well, and I am very proud of the team for their collective achievements during the year. It was a period in which we built on our past successes and invested in our future.”
Faber’s bestselling titles this year included Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Women’s Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Indie Book Award, among others. Booker-shortlisted Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan was also a top seller for the publisher, as were The Golden Mole and the Baillie Gifford-winning Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell. Jo Browning Wroe’s A Terrible Kindness and What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde, as well as the paperback of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You, were also top sellers for the publisher in 2022-2023.
In fiction, there were successful new books from some of Faber’s longest-standing writers, including Kingsolver, Keegan and Sebastian Barry, whose ninth novel with the publisher, Old God’s time, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun continued to chart on the bestseller list with big sales throughout the year, and was shortlisted for Indie Book Award and the Arthur C Clarke Award.
New talent to feature on the fiction list included Dizz Tate with Brutes and Ashley Hickson-Lovence with Your Show. A new generation was also established on the non-fiction list, as the publisher launched Rundell’s adult non-fiction publishing career and published Sam Knight’s Premonitions Bureau, Hyde’s What Just Happened?! and James Vincent’s Beyond Measure, among others. The poetry list also continued to publish debut talent, including Maggie Millner’s Couplets and Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet, which was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and won the Rathbones Folio Prize for poetry.
The children’s list published new work that included Christine Pillainayagam’s Ellai Pillai Is Brown, which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and won the Brandford Boase Award. In March 2023, the publisher launched the World Book Day Book, Dave Pigeon Bookshop Mayhem! by Swapna Haddow and Sheena Dempsey, which sold over 100,000 copies.
The company gave an inflation-related pay award to all staff in April and a one-off lump sum paid to those earning under £55,000 to help with the cost of living in October. The company also increased its starting salary to £27,700 in April 2023.
