Wordsworth Editions primed for growth

Almost thirty years in and Hertfordshire-based publisher Wordsworth Editions still has the same mission as it did on its very first day: to be a small, family-run list that offers “great value classics” at “unbeatable prices”, says director Derek Wright.

Known for its cheap classics, which launched with an r.r.p. of £1 in 1992, the publisher has recently increased the price of its Wordsworth Classics range from £2 (the price the titles have retailed at since 2006) to £2.50, attributing it to rising paper prices and distribution costs as a result of the currency fluctuations caused by uncertainty surrounding Brexit. However, for only the second time in 16 years the press’ sales turnover exceeded £2.5m in the last financial year (to 31st May 2017) after growing by more than £250,000 year on year, according to the publisher. Sales through Nielsen BookScan TCM in the UK declined 0.9% in 2016, to £1.37m.

The education market is very significant for the publisher, and Wordsworth Editions shows its support of schools with a 25% discount across all titles. With the price increase across the Classics range, this means that schools can get their key English texts for £1.85, which “represents far better value than any other editions on offer”, Wright says.

The year got off to a “hot start” with the launch of the publisher’s new H G Wells series, as the copyright protecting the renowned author’s work lapsed this year. “That was our big launch in January. I’ve been at the company for 13 years and that was on the radar when I joined,” Wright says. “An author of that status is a big thing for us, so we did seven of the classic paperbacks.” The publisher worked with the H G Wells Society to produce the books, of which War of the Worlds and The Time Machine are its biggest sellers.

At the heart of the publisher’s planning for the year is the Wordsworth Book of the Dead, a spreadsheet with the dates of the deaths of prominent authors so the press can keep an eye on what material will be coming out of copyright. Looking to 2018, the publisher is anticipating issuing The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emma Orczy, who died in 1947. The biggest year in the near future will be 2021, when works by George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw and Edgar Rice Burroughs will become freely available. “We’re patient,” Wright says.

Wright admits he was concerned about the threat of digital a few years ago, when e-books were on the rise. “In theory, it should’ve affected us more than most because most of our stuff is out of copyright and you can get it as free content for the Kindle. So in theory, you’d think we should’ve been in trouble... but in fact it had no effect at all. We think probably the sort of people who like to read classic literature are the sort of people that like to have it as a physical book, particularly at the price that we do it at.” He adds that physical books are particularly suited to students, who often choose to annotate texts when studying.

Looking to the future, Wright says: “I don’t think [our business] is ever going to really rocket—in the sense that we’re not going to have a Harry Potter [type phenomenon]— but we’ve got a solid home market and a solid export market. About 45% of our sales still go to the export market; we’re opening up new markets all the time. We’ve recently sold to Azerbaijan and Algeria.”