To be successful, presses forge a unique path

Filling underserved niches and meeting the needs of consumers looking to understand changes in the country’s political and cultural environments helped several independent publishers make this year’s fast-growing indie publishers list. A number of these presses are relatively new, having barely been operating for longer than the three-year minimum required in order to qualify for the PW list.

Cottage Door Press has had extraordinary growth ever since it released its first titles in 2015, a year after it was founded by former Publications International president Richard Maddrell. The company’s focus continues to be on producing a range of products for babies and toddlers that align with its mission of “promoting reading aloud from birth.” 

According to marketing manager Melissa Tigges, much of Cottage Door’s growth last year, when sales grew 107% over 2016, was driven by increased distribution and an expanded list. In addition to other new initiatives in 2017, Cottage Door published its first licensed books with Baby Einstein and the Smithsonian, expanded its bestselling Early Book Song Book series, and added to its Love You Always series, which is done in a padded board book format. The company also took advantage of the gift market, expanding its seasonal offerings with line extensions in its lift-a-flap, padded board, and peek-a-flap formats for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, and Christmas. The company’s top-selling title continues to be the board book Grandma Wishes, which has more than 850,000 copies in print.

In addition to expanding its title count, Cottage Door has significantly broadened its distribution reach. Though its initial success was fueled by selling titles in targeted mass merchandisers, its recent growth, Tigges says, “is being driven by a diversity of titles and customers, including e-commerce, independent toy and bookstores, and international markets.” The publisher will continue to expand its reach in 2018 with the launch of a trade line that will feature four titles, including Cottage Door’s first picture book, Nothing Is Scary with Harry, by first-time author Katie McElligott. To accommodate its growth, Cottage Door plans to move to new offices this summer.

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Fast-Growing Independent Publishers, 2017

Almost half of the companies on this year’s list posted triple-digit gains between 2014 and 2016

In the more than 20 years PW has been doing its fast-growing independent publishers feature, it is hard to find another year when publishers on the list reported such impressive growth rates. Five of the 11 publishers on this year’s list posted triple-digit revenue gains in 2016 compared to 2014, and two publishers saw their revenue shoot over the $10 million mark in the past year.

The company that had the biggest gain on this year’s list was founded in 2014, but it didn’t sell its first book until 2015. Cottage Door Press, which publishes children’s books, released 18 titles in 2015 and another 82 titles last year. It plans to publish 50 in 2017. Between 2014 and 2016, the press also doubled in personnel, from nine to 19 employees, and it is preparing to move from Barrington, Ill., to a larger facility in the Chicago suburb of Deerpark.

Cottage Door’s 2016 revenue skyrocketed 558% from the previous year’s figure. The publisher’s debut list in 2015 focused on titles for babies and toddlers up to age three, but the publisher intends to expand its target audience to include four- and five-year-olds, beginning with a line of titles published in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution.

Though Cottage Door is a young company, its apparent overnight success might be due to the fact that most of its staff are children’s publishing industry veterans—most notably its founder, Richard Maddrell, who served until his retirement as president of Publications International. Cottage Door’s creative team conceives, designs, and produces the press’s list with the assistance of freelance illustrators. The emphasis, says marketing manager Melissa Tigges, is on high-quality books that are “on top of current trends”—such as STEM and STEAM—and “hot formats,” including padded board books, lift-a-flap, touch-and-feel, books that make sounds, and books made with engineered paper.

Every Cottage Door book has a removable sticker it calls the Early Bird Learning Guide: the sticker informs the buyer of the book’s appropriate age range and which skills the child is developing when that particular book is read. “We believe in educating and entertaining both children and their grown-ups,” Tigges said. “We choose artwork and language that interests, informs, and stretches their growing minds.”

Fast-Growing Independent Publishers 2014–2016

*Sales growth is for 2016 v. 2015

Ever since it released its first list in 2012, Callisto Media has relied on the same formula for success: increasing title production, selling more copies per title, and broadening distribution. Those goals were achieved in 2016, according to v-p for marketing Holly Smith, and revenue jumped by 111% compared to 2015. Last year’s revenue soared 286% above the 2014 figure, and the company surpassed the $10 million sales level last year.

Smith says that in 2016, Callisto had some “extremely successful” frontlist releases, including Instant Pot Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook, Kid Chef, and The Whole 9 Months. And, she adds, the publisher’s backlist, now at 383 titles, has become a “very strong component of our success as well.” New areas for Callisto, which continues to use data analytics to spot consumer trends, include parenting and kids, fitness, and self-help.

At Europa Editions, the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet has increased steadily over the past few years, propelling a sales gain of 156% in 2015 over 2014 and another 47% revenue rise in 2016. Editor-in-chief Michael Reynolds acknowledges the importance of Ferrante to the 12-year-old company’s success, but he notes that the balance of its list, focused on publishing authors from all over the world in the British and North American markets, has also contributed to its growth.

The company’s backlist has performed solidly, with two titles that Europa released in 2015, The Distant Marvels and The Pope’s Daughter, continuing to sell well into 2016. Frontlist books that did well last year included The Natural Way of Things, Shelter in Place, and The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery, whose The Elegance of the Hedgehog was one of Europa’s first hits.

Reynolds thinks the success of Ferrante’s series has helped Europa’s entire list gain more visibility in the market, but he also believes the company is doing a more effective job marketing its books. Title output has remained around 29 per year, and its four-person American office shares staff (designer, financial officer, production manager, and typesetter) with Edizioni E/O, its sister company in Rome.

Canada’s Greystone Books has flourished since it was relaunched as an indie press in 2013, when former publisher Rob Sanders led a consortium that bought the imprint from its bankrupt parent company. With Sanders as publisher, the press, which is best known for its books on nature and the environment by authors from Canada and elsewhere, has grown its revenue. Its 2016 sales were more than double the 2015 figure, and were up 253% compared to 2014.

Greystone, which counts among its 14 employees a U.K.-based publicist to promote books and authors there, attributes its success to a focus on international sales. According to sales and marketing manager Jen Gauthier, “Publishing worldwide is a key strategy.”

A glance at Greystone’s top sellers also reveals a savviness about making acquisitions that appeal to a broad market. Almost every year, the publisher has released a bestseller, beginning with 2013’s pictorial chronicle of devastating floods in Alberta in partnership with the Calgary Herald. The Flood of 2013 has sold 55,000 copies to date. In 2015 Greystone acquired North American English-language rights to the German bestseller Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders, which has sold 90,000 print copies and 24,000 e-books to date.

But it was a 2016 release that caused Greystone’s sales to skyrocket this past year: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, originally published in Germany, was translated into English and released simultaneously in North America and in the U.K. The Greystone edition has sold 240,000 copies worldwide (150,000 in the U.S.). The press hopes to keep up the momentum by releasing another book by Wohlleben, The Inner Life of Animals, in November.

Page Street Publishing has continued its rapid sales growth since it was launched in 2013 by Will Kiester. The press’s revenue was 31% higher in 2016 than in 2015 and up 117% from 2014. Page Street’s early success has helped to propel more success, as Kiester says he feels confident reinvesting in the company by continuing to add new employees and titles.

In fact, Page Street expects more increases in the next few years and is upping its title count to around 70 for 2017. Earlier this year, the company hired Kristen Nobles to head its effort to establish a new children’s book list. Kiester hopes the list “will serve as a significant growth engine starting in late 2018 and hitting its stride in 2019.”

In 2016, Page Street expanded beyond cookbooks, its core focus, to other lifestyle subjects. Kiester says A Touch of Farmhouse: Easy DIY Projects to Add a Warm and Rustic Feel to Any Room was a good example of a book “outside of our comfort area” that performed very well, even selling out shortly after its release in December. He notes that he is prepared to slow Page Street’s growth if he believes the quality of its products is starting to decline, but adds that “that hasn’t been the case to date.”

Diversion Books has undergone quite a metamorphosis since Scott Waxman launched the company as the e-book publishing arm of his literary agency in 2010. Diversion was spun off as its own company several years ago and signed with Ingram Publisher Services in late 2014, and the addition of print publishing and distribution components sparked a 84% increase in revenue in 2016 compared to 2014.

The lack of quality backlist e-book rights to acquire, combined with the resurgence in print sales and the decline in digital sales, convinced Waxman that more changes were needed. So in late 2015 he hired Jaime Levine as Diversion’s publishing director, and Levine began a program to put out 50–60 frontlist books annually in both print and digital formats. Waxman says the change in strategy yielded immediate dividends last year, with a doubling of print sales compared to 2015 offsetting a 30% decline in e-book sales.

Last year also saw the launch of two new divisions of Diversion: EverAfter Romance and Radius Book Group. EA is a print distribution service that offers bestselling indie authors the chance to reach more bookstores, Waxman explains. It works on a royalty-split model and requires authors to deliver ready-to-print book files and handle their own marketing.

According to Waxman, authors are joining EA due to “its flexible model—authors can retain digital rights—as well as the potential for significant bookstore distribution through IPS.” EA distributed close to 500 titles in 2016 (both new and backlist books) and plans to release roughly the same number in 2017. It accounted for about 40% of Diversion’s revenue last year, and Waxman is looking for a 50% increase in revenue in 2017.

Waxman describes RBG as a “high-end custom imprint serving entrepreneurial authors who want to self-publish by partnering with a top-tier publisher.” It offers full-service publishing but not à la carte services. He hired Mark Fretz in February as editorial director and is looking to increase sales in the unit more than 300% in 2017 over last year.

Haymarket Books is a nonprofit publisher of political and social justice titles that celebrated its 15th anniversary last year. In an October PW profile, marketing manager Jim Plank attributed Haymarket’s recent success to its commitment to “putting out books that speak to the current moment.” These include one of its all-time top-sellers, 2014’s Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit.

Since the election of Donald Trump as president in November, Haymarket’s sales have, Plank says, “shot through the stratosphere,” with such frontlist releases as Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions, which has already sold almost 20,000 copies in paper since its March release. Solnit’s earlier work, Hope in the Dark, which was originally published after the 2004 election, has sold 32,000 copies in paperback and 5,000 digital copies since November. (In addition, Haymarket gave away more than 31,000 Hope e-books as part of a promotion.)

The press finished 2016 with a 21% revenue increase over the previous year and a 67% gain compared to 2014. And Haymarket is off to a good start in 2017, with net revenue to date of almost $700,000.

Seattle-based Sasquatch Books followed up a 20% increase in sales in 2015 over 2014 with another solid year in 2016, when revenue was up 55% compared to 2014. Little Bigfoot, the company’s children’s imprint started in 2014, had another year of gains helped by its growing backlist.

The biggest sales driver last year, however, was Sasquatch’s 52 Lists journal series by Moorea Seal, who refers to herself as a creative entrepreneur. The series, which features The 52 Lists Project and 52 Lists for Happiness has more than 375,000 copies in print, according to senior publicity and marketing manager Corinna Scott. Other standout titles in 2016 included Dead Feminists and The Hidden Lives of Owls. The company has another Seal title coming this September, Make Yourself at Home: Design Your Space to Discover Your True Self.

For the second year in a row, Graywolf Press has been named one of PW’s fast-growing indie presses, as it held on to the large year-over-year revenue gain it posted in 2015 and finished 2016 up 49% from 2014. Its focus continues to be on literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Citizen by Claudia Rankine, which was published in October 2014 and accounted for a significant portion of Graywolf’s huge spike in revenues in 2015, is still the literary nonprofit’s bestselling release, with 200,000 print copies sold to date. In September, Citizen even popped back onto the New York Times’ bestsellers list when Rankine received a $625,000 MacArthur “genius” grant and announced she is using the money to study whiteness. Two newer titles have also made important contributions: David Szalay’s novel All That Man Is was a Booker Prize finalist, and Somaz Sharif’s collection Look was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry—and the critical acclaim for these books translated into strong sales.

“We’re not really doing anything different,” notes sales and marketing manager Casey O’Neil, pointing out that Graywolf released 34 new titles and reissues in 2016, up from 30 in 2015. “Rankine’s out there in the media often, and our books across the board are simply performing at a stronger level than in previous years,” due in large part to academic course adoptions and support from indie bookstores.

Nine Graywolf books were named Indie Next titles in 2016, and six Graywolf releases are Indie Next titles this year through May. “Indies are doing better, and we’ve benefited from that,” O’Neil says. “Plus, more people seem to be reading poetry these days. We’re seeing an amazing surge in our poetry list.”

Canada’s Nimbus Publishing realized the benefits of stepping up its international marketing and promotion in the fiscal year that ended Mar. 31, 2017, which included a 31% increase in revenue compared to fiscal 2015. The press, which is based in Halifax and is approaching its 40th anniversary next year, releases adult and children’s books primarily about the Atlantic Canadian provinces.

General manager Terrilee Bulger attributes much of Nimbus’s growth to a tenfold increase in funding from the Nova Scotia provincial government, which allowed the company to invest in production, marketing, and innovation, and to grow its staff. The press has added new editors to increase output and, for the first time, hired an international rights editor, a publicist who focuses on export, and a digital marketing specialist. Nimbus is also expanding its marketing reach to the rest of Canada by hiring freelance publicists in major cities to better promote its titles to their local contacts.

Although exports to the U.S. have accounted for 5% of the company’s business and international rights 2%, Nimbus expects, with the added resources, to grow these areas to each account for 10% of its revenue. “Increased investment from our provincial government has allowed us to take our marketing initiatives to a higher level, which in turn, drives sales and profit,” Bulger explains. “Increased investment has also allowed for increased production. The more books we sell, the higher the sales and the higher our capacity to do more.”

Shambhala Publications may have only posted an 8% growth in sales in 2016 compared to 2014, but after seven years of steady gains, the company will not be eligible for next year’s list of fast-growing indie publishers, since participation is capped at annual sales of $10 million. Shambhala president Nikko Odiseos says the company’s growth is due to “a multiplicity of causes”: new imprints, acquisitions, readership building, and export editions.

Shambhala started its lifestyle imprint, Roost Books, in 2012, and the unit has become a bigger part of its business. Roost sales were boosted by the fact that its books won James Beard awards in each of the past two years. Snow Lion Publications was acquired in 2012, which cemented Shambhala’s position as the largest publisher of Buddhist books in English in the U.S. And in May 2015, Shambhala acquired Rodmell Press, which not only buttressed its Buddhist list but doubled its line of yoga books.

Shambhala has also increased its overseas business by partnering with several publishers and distributors in Asia to print books in English that are priced for the Asian market. To better market its growing list (it will release 100 books this year), Shambhala sends out between 1.5 million and two million targeted emails per month to specific segments on its email list.