Hello,

… And yikes! I was actually in the middle of writing a different newsletter full of news (good news) about our plans for the year ahead… And I’ll send that soon. But! I’ve had to interrupt that because we need to launch a special appeal. We urgently need readers to pre-order our upcoming books.

Long term readers of this email might remember that for the past few years we have run campaigns to get early readers for our books, alongside our beloved subscribers on the Galley Buddy scheme. This has provided a fantastic boost for us – both because it helps take the sting out of our initial print bills and because it helps build up excitement and word of mouth about our books… which in turn means they do better when they hit the shops. Long term readers may also remember me writing in a similarly high strung fashion too. I’m sorry about that. Really, it’s all very exciting. The reason we so desperately need a cash injection is that we’re getting a LOT of excitement about our list for next year - starting with After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz, a beautiful, vibrant and joy-packed novel (Selby calls it her “queer collective biography”) of a generation of sapphists, feminists, artists, women and rabble-rousers as they take on societal conventions and insist on living their own lives.

We’re also getting serious interest from book page editors. Look at this – a tweet from Justine Jordan, the commissioning fiction editor at the Guardian, last week:

And there are also booksellers! Martin Koerner, the manager of Foyles Charing Cross, called the book “astonishing” and Selby “staggering talented”, for instance. Which is just what you want to hear as a publisher.

All this building interest – and our increasing sense that this is going to be a BIG ONE is what you live for as a small press. But it’s also where the crunch starts to come in. We need to do a big print run to make sure that we can get After Sappho into as many shops as possible, in the right quantities. But in order to do that – somewhat ironically – we need to sell a bunch of copies directly. Money moves quite slowly in our book world and we need to be able to pay printers sooner than we get paid by all those lovely bookshops… And so we desperately need these pre-sales. We’re also very hopeful that we’ll get the kind of virtuous circle going that helped Mordew build and build because you’ll fall in love with it, tell people, they’ll go into shops… and so on. Well, it’s lovely to dream about that. And hope. And even think it might come true.

I also hope that you’ll get something from it too. Because it isn’t just about us. I’m as certain as I can be that the faith you put in this book will be more than repaid in the delight of reading it. I’m also optimistic that the first editions we’ll send out will become valuable objects in their own right.

(NB: You don’t just have to take our word for it, either. None other than the great Marlon James has been reading Mordew, and you know what he had to say about Alex’s trilogy? “The future of fantasy starts here.” Marlon James. He said that. He really did.)

So. Great books. That’s the wonderful news. The other good news is that our stellar backlist is going strong. But that too brings a few challenges. Not least because print bills are rising so frighteningly high.

This January, we spent £10k reprinting four of our most beloved titles – Preti Taneja’s We that are young; Adam Biles’ Feeding Time; Toby Litt’s Patience and Paul Ewen’s Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author.

This month, we’ve also been told that need to reprint Alex Pheby’s Mordew (again! yay!) and our brilliant, and very much missed author Uschi Gatward’s English Magic…. Which is going to cost a further £24k.

… We’ll also need to reprint Ducks, Newburyport at some point this year. (Of course we do. It’s a frickin’ classic.) … And the new print runs for Selby, Paul and Alex look set to cost something like £30k.

All of that means that – even though we’ve been bundling as much money as we can into the printing reserves, and they’ve never been stronger – we also need to spend more than ever… We’re very hopeful of getting some of that jam back tomorrow. But we also need some bread today.

Anyway. As I say, we need you (always, but now more than ever) – and we also want to give something back to you. If you put in a pre-order of one of our upcoming books, they will come with a special limited edition signed bookplate (available only through us), other goodies like bookmarks and postcards… And if we can get 350-500 of these orders in, that’s £5-6k worry taken from that print bill. As well as – key – 350-500 more readers for our writers… which is, of course, the vital thing, and the thing that makes everything work.

You can pre-order Selby and After Sappho here; Paul Stanbridge and My Mind To Me A Kingdom is here; and Alex Pheby’s Malarkoi here (as well as Mordew here, if you haven’t been lucky enough to read the first book in the trilogy).

We also have a special anniversary offer on our recent reprints. We’re offering a special bundle of four of them – that’s 4 stone-cold winners (We that are young; Feeding Time; Francis Plug; Patience) – for £25.

Finally, we are always delighted to welcome new subscribers to our Galley Buddy scheme. Full details here.

Okay. Thanks so much for reading this letter. It feels us uncomfortable asking for help when there’s so much going on in the world. But we at least hope we can do a little to improve a few lives with these books. And – just so you know – we will be donating 10% of each sale to the Red Cross’s work in Ukraine.

Fondly,
Sam