Handheld Press founder Kate Macdonald reveals reasons behind indie’s closure

The founder of Handheld Press, Kate Macdonald, has revealed more about the pressures behind the indie’s closure, including the impact of Brexit and the cost-of-living crisis. 

The Worcestershire-based publisher dedicated to lost or forgotten classics is publishing its final title next month and trading will close completely in June 2025. 

Macdonald founded the press in 2017 to uncover the lost works of women writers and was inspired by the Women’s Press, Virago Press and Persephone Books. Sales and distribution for the company were handled by Ingram Publisher Services UK. 

Over seven years, Handheld will have published 50 books and more than 80 forgotten authors with two more titles due this summer, featuring in the likes of the Washington Post and the London Review of Books.

However, Macdonald described how the financial pressures and greater number of competitors had contributed to the decision to close.   

“Partly it was financial, as we are too small to print and market the volume of books that we needed to, to achieve sustainability for the business,” the literary historian, novelist and academic told The Bookseller. “I was also concerned about my ability to keep finding titles that I wanted to publish.  

“We’ve published six or seven books a year since 2018, and for every book I decided to publish, I must have rejected about 20. I was wondering: when will the supply of superb forgotten fiction by lost authors run out? I have a long list of in-copyright authors whom I really want to publish in new editions but whom we can’t afford since their rights are too expensive for us.”

Rediscovered titles published by Handheld included What Not (1919), Rose Macaulay’s lost cautionary tale of science fiction and eugenics, and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s fantasy story collection Kingdoms of Elfin (1977).

Macdonald, who is visiting research fellow at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing, believes there are more publishers in a similar space now. “We have competitors: when I set up Handheld there were a few other reprint houses doing very well; now there are many more selling to the same market, and we’re all scrabbling away in the archives for the same kind of books. We all have our preferred title and author profiles, which is why Handheld Press titles are different to those published by Persephone or Dean Street or the British Library, for example.  

“But there are overlaps, and those are getting larger and larger as the finite supply of un-republished and rediscoverable works shrinks. My instinct is always to step away, to get off the treadmill and walk away from a situation where I know that the end is in sight. I don’t fight a battle that I can’t win; I reserve my energies for something else.” 

She spoke of the major issues facing small presses in general such as “the refusal of paper prices to go back to where they were before Brexit and the Ukraine war and the rising costs of the overheads, like transport and energy costs for our contractors”.  

She added: “The cost-of-living crisis, which shrinks the amount of cash available for spontaneous book purchases on the high street and by our committed online customers. Being unable to sell our books into the EU directly any longer, without doing unfeasible amounts of customs paperwork for each sale. Watching slice after slice of our profit margin disappear into the bank accounts of the book trade’s many, many middlemen.” 

She revealed that while the press has “generated hundreds of thousands of pounds in income shared between the estates of our authors, bookshops, printers, distributors, wholesalers, advertising publishers and some brilliant contractors,” there has never been enough to pay her a living wage. 

She added: “As a small publisher we take all the risk, put up the cash up-front, and have little or nothing left to show for it months later except the lovely feedback from our readers. But you can’t pay the bills with feedback.” 

But there has been an “amazing” response since announcing the closure, Macdonald said, while the “online sales went through the roof, with loyal customers completing their Handheld collections”. 

Additionally Macdonald said there had been some enquiries about the business, and some interest in the rights that Handheld will be reverting. 

The monthly newsletter will continue until June 2025 and the publisher will also continue to offer free online talks and interviews with Westminster Libraries and the Guildhall Library London.