Publishers Weekly - LBF Show Daily April 16 2015

Would I set up as an independent publisher again? The answer is “yes” in spades; it has been the greatest of fun, writes Kyle Cathie. At times challenging, at times worrying, most times exhilarating but, above all, the people who have written for us, and worked for us, have been the best and I thank them so much.

On our first list in 1990 were six books and the last of them went out of print after

24 years, but is coming back in 2015– The Complete Verse of Kipling, foreword by M M Kaye. Five new independent publishers started in our year–Sinclair-Stevenson, Garamond, Smith Griffin, Chapman and us. Woohoo! Kyle Books is the only one left standing! Gollancz Services, now morphed into the wonderful Littlehampton Book Services, distributed our books and is still working with us today.

The year 1994 was a landmark year; we were pushed, by an amazing author of only one book ever, Camellia Panjabi, into photographing every single recipe in her book, 50 Great Curries of India, which has been translated into 12 languages and is well on its way to selling two million copies. Since Clive Norman’s day it has been on Waterstone’s Core Stock as Super-tier.

A backlist seller

Establishing a book as a backlist seller then was so much easier than it is today; harder work now… Also that year came the wonderful Jekka McVicar, whose Complete Herb Book notched up its first million copies with a celebration at the RHS last September. What she doesn’t know about witches isn’t worth knowing. I remember picking up Chris Rushby, then buyer at WHS, with our lovely Sales Director, Emma Bittleston, in Swindon and driving them down the motorway at roughly

100mph to visit Jekka. At a certain point he muttered: “How
many do you want me to buy?” “ 7,000 copies,” I said. “Done,”
he said within the instant, “and please will you slow down?”
More wholesalers existed then–long gone is the visit to
Stoke-on-Trent or to Edinburgh. And those wholesalers sold
to more bookshops on the high street. My little locality in
London had five bookshops; there’s now only two.

Gorgeous people run wholesalers now–Bertrams, Gardners, Bookspeed–but my one big wish is that they would buy firm sale and not rely on us to mop up, to take responsibility.

Can publishers really not form a pact to sort out returns– be they from the supermarket, the indie or the wholesaler?

The demise of trade on the high street is fuelled by the rise of the
supermarket. To begin with there was Sainsbury’s and Tesco, now
there’s five or six of them, all competing with the big two for
book sales. For Kyle Books, Waitrose is important; they have the
occasional opportunity to offer the unusual book, the quality
book, the ravishing book that
others would say hasn’t made the
Chart–what joy! For cookbooks,
this is always challenging when
faced with the plethora of
television tie-ins, but we fight
for our little bit of space and
often with great success. Glynn
Purnell’s Cracking Yolks & Pig
Tails was selected by Tesco last
summer (I don’t think they read
the swear words in the book, but
what chef doesn’t use them, and it’s funny and genuine–he’s
a great talent.) And then of course we’ve been affected by the
internet too. Funny to think now that it didn’t exist when we
started. Love it or loathe it, where would we be without it?
We have, as a bunch of 20 people, the ability to be nimble
and to respond to trends very fast. In 2010, we published
Antony Worrall Thompson’s GI Diet; our amazing Sales
Director, Julia Barder, who has been with Kyle Books for a
few years now, said we’d be the third book on GI out there
and was worried. Antony triumphed and she sold 310,000
copies in five months. It made for a really nice year. It
showed too that the investment we put into the quality of
the book paid off–it is still in print today.

New gift list

This year, our attention is focused on a small, but exquisite, new gift list; well-priced and beautifully produced. The shareholders in Kyle Books don’t always like the amount we spend on photography, design and production, but our diligent and clever editors choose to work with some amazingly creative people–and have a huge respect for their talents. We want to make books that can stay in print for yonks. These books reflect another change in the market; not only are the high street independent bookshops having a revival, but there is a new market in the gift stores such as Urban, Joy or John Lewis, or garden centres. It’s invigorating to see how well they can do with the right book.

Since 1990, when we began selling rights (our first title, Voices of Glasnost, was bought for a five-figure sum by the Sunday Times) and then entered the co-editions business as our titles became four-colour throughout, we’ve built up some lovely friendships and business partnerships–Guy Saint Jean in French Canada, Fontaine in Holland, Christian and Bassermann in Germany, Barnes & Noble in the US, Sunchoh in Japan, among many others. This area of our publishing brings lots of printings of titles for the gorgeous and hardworking Production department Gem, Nic and Lisa; always patient, effective and unperturbed, they are great. And it provides merry fun for the M&M show (aka Mette & Marta).