Publishing’s Big Five (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster) still dominate bestseller charts and prize lists: this year’s Booker longlist features five titles from Penguin alone. But independent presses are increasingly moving into the spotlight.
Sheffield-based And Other Stories is one such example, having won this year’s International Booker prize with Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It was “instructive” that this year’s shortlist was entirely indies, says the press’s publicist Michael Watson. Indies are “frequently the ones publishing the most interesting and exciting writers and books in innovative ways, often in the face of enormous challenges”.
You may recognise the stripped-back design of And Other Stories books, with a black and white text-based cover, launched in 2023. Distinctive, homogenous covers are a running theme across many indie presses: Fitzcarraldo Editions publishes its fiction in an International Klein Blue cover, its nonfiction in white. While this perhaps simply comes down to financial constraints, the streamlining means titles are instantly recognisable for readers browsing bookshops.
Small presses also often feature “Editions” in the name: Europa Editions, Lolli Editions, Fitzcarraldo Editions. A recent decision by Scribner – owned by Simon & Schuster – to launch Scribner Editions suggests the biggies are watching the unlikely success of particular small publishers and trying to incorporate some of the magic into their own strategies.
How have independent presses made it work? Indies can be “much more agile and accommodating” than larger mainstream publishers, says Fitzcarraldo Editions publicity director Clare Bogen, because “they aren’t always subject to market forces, or shareholder demands”.
There is “no corporate triangulation between the bottom line and recent trends”, says Ted Hodgkinson, head of literature and spoken word at the Southbank Centre. While the industry as a whole is contending with an “array of forces” from “rising costs to rising AI”, again and again “we’ve seen that a nimble indie is able to cut through the noise”.
Young readers may be driving the indie wave, suggests Hodgkinson. Small publishers including Fitzcarraldo Editions, Pushkin Press and Granta “have been at the forefront” of publishing translated literature, and almost half of translated fiction is bought by under 35s.
“My sense is that younger readers are up for a challenge,” says Hodgkinson. “It’s the reverse of the received wisdom that attention spans are shrinking, or that in our oversaturated cultural landscape audiences have no time for complex or nuanced storytelling. These stats suggest that the opposite is the case.” He says that Southbank audiences for international authors such as Han Kang and Olga Tokarczuk skew younger.
The Southbank Centre’s first Indie Night will take place in February next year, hosted by Okechukwu Nzelu, author of The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney, and Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts. The series aims to celebrate indie presses and their authors. “Independent publishing is the nutrient base from which everything positive and progressive grows in UK literature,” says Max Porter, resident artist at the Southbank. “Without our indie presses we have no counter culture.”
If you’re wanting to dig into some exciting work by UK indies, Bogen suggests looking out for Fosse’s first novel since winning the Nobel, Vaim, translated by Damion Searls and publishing next month, while Watson nominates Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben, published in August (which “rivals anything by Virginia Woolf”, according to Melissa Harrison’s Guardian review).
Banu Mushtaq, author of Heart Lamp, right, and translator Deepa Bhasthi, left, winning the International Booker prize in May. Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP
