Profile turnover up 7% after 'healthy' year

Profile Books has reported a "healthy" financial year for the 12 months to end of March 2020, with a turnover of £12.2m, up 7% on the previous year.

Operating profit stood at £485,210, 4% of the turnover, but down over 50% on the previous year's total of £983,375.

Strongly performing titles included The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (which sold over 76,000 copies across its hardback, paperback and e-book editions, according to the publisher's figures), and the hardbacks of The Forager’s Calendar by John Wright (20,000) and A Cheesemonger's History of The British Isles by Ned Palmer (17,000).

The indie said one of its imprints, Souvenir Press, had its first major success with Cribsheet by Emily Oster. And Esi Edugyan’s Booker-shortlisted Washington Black (Serpent’s Tail) was Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month, selling 31,000 in paperback and becoming the company’s bestseller in e-books..

Its best performing audiobook title was Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature.

Other autumn 2020 highlights included the reissue of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (Souvenir Press), Elif Shafak’s How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division (Wellcome), Sarah Perry’s Essex Girls (Serpent’s Tail), Matthew Cobb’s Baillie Gifford-shortlisted The Idea of the Brain, and the paperback editions of The Forager’s Calendar and A Cheesemonger’s History (the latter a Waterstones Book of the Month in October).

The publisher has said the new financial year has started well with Adam Kucharski’s timely The Rules of Contagion, which was published just ahead of the lockdown, and which has sold 18,000 hardback copies to date. Ryan Holiday’s books on stoicism have seen sales increase across his whole backlist, Profile added.

M.d. Andrew Franklin said: "Our financial year ended on 31st March, only two weeks into the first lockdown of 2020. The effects of the pandemic on the year 2019-20 were mostly limited to some overstocks and returns, which we have provided for in these figures. We have decided not to pay a dividend for the year, for the first time since 2004. So far, this year is going a lot better than we had thought it might, particularly our backlist sales though with some substantial frontlist sales as we have listed. We are very grateful to all the booksellers because we know how incredibly difficult it is for them. When they have been allowed to open they have been amazing."

He told The Bookseller: "It's very nice to see print sales so strongly up. I think reading is one of the great human activities, and it's obviously very important to people in lockdown when they can't do many of the other things they would otherwise do, and that explains the strong physical book sales."