The X Press regroups

The X Press, the UK's largest independent publisher of black interest titles, has been "regrouping" for the past nine months, focusing on a major online marketing push.

Since August, the publisher, co-founded in 1992 by journalists Steve Pope and Dotun Adebayo, has been promoting its books on www.colourtelly.com, a video streaming site which caters to the black community. The X Press produces videos for the site using content from its books, largely from its Single Black Female and Baby Father series.

The company says it had a handful of sales in the first six months of the project, but is now seeing 20 to 30 orders a day generated from colourtelly. Adebayo said the move was partly prompted by retailers' shifts to central buying. He added: "When the chain shops had more local control, we could sell 1,000 copies of a title in one shop. Now shops often don’t have black sections, and they just take two or three copies and the books just get lost on the shelves. I don’t see that the black community is being served by the retailers."

Adebayo said that its digital strategy enables The X Press to compete with other publishers on a level playing field. "In this game you either sit and die, or move and try to survive. What we are trying to do is bypass the controls and stranglehold that book store accountants have on the industry," he said.