Publishers Weekly - March 7, 2016

Fast-Growing Indie Publishers

Agate’s first foray into children’s literature. “We remain committed to creating opportunity for African-American writers, which I continue to feel are perennially overlooked by big publishing,” Agate says.

Agate’s biggest seller in 2015 was Grant Park by Leonard Pitts Jr., who has now published five books with the house. Agate will bring out Grant Park in trade paperback later this year.

Like Morgan James, Agate’s experimentation with different businesses has had some misses, but it also had one big hit: Agate Development. The division, originally called ProBooks, provides content-development services for a range of clients such as textbook publishers, for-profit education companies, traditional schools, corporations, and nonprofits. Agate Development accounted for over half of the publisher’s business in 2015. “It’s been a real engine of growth for us,” Seibold says.

Midway Books, an imprint launched in 2012 to focus on Midwest regional topics, has grown, Seibold said, but Agate Digital, which was established to do standalone e-books, has not fared as well. Though Agate has released scores of e-book-only titles, “we haven’t found a big readership for them,” Seibold says. The venture did not require a lot of capital, he explains, and the Chicago Tribune, one of the companies it worked with to develop titles, has proven to be a great partner. “We’ve published a number of print books with the Tribune that originally came out in e-book first, and for the most part the print titles have done better,” Seibold says.

Seibold is excited about prospects for
2016. In addition to the paperback edi-
tion of Grant Park, Agate will release its
own paperback edition of Freshwater
Road, a novel about the civil rights
movement, which Agate published in
hardcover, and for which the company
sold paperback rights to Pocket Books.
That license expired, and Agate’s paper-
back is due in April. Anupy Singla is
Agate’s most successful cookbook author,
and a paperback reprint of Singla’s Indian
for Everyone will come out in the fall.
Oakland, Calif.–based publisher
Berrett-Koehler had a 11% increase in
total revenue from 2013 to 2015, with
almost all of that growth occurring in
2015. Digital sales increased 18.8%
between 2013 and 2015, and B-K’s dig-
ital sales made up 20% of its total reve-
nues. This increase in digital is due in
part to B-K’s expansion from 50 digital
distributors around the world in 2013 to
75 in 2015, and the launch of an audio
program in which all new B-K titles are
published simultaneously in digital
audio as well as physical audio. Audio
sales exceeded expectations in 2015, and
good gains are expected this year as well,
according to Katie Sheehan, B-K’s senior
communications manager.
Reasons for revenue growth in 2015
include a 12.8% increase in print sales,
due to an increase in title output and
strong sales from a number of books,
including two by Richard Leider: The
Power of Purpose and Work Reimagined,
which were promoted through AARP
marketing programs. Leider’s work was
also featured in a PBS special titled The
Power of Purpose with Richard Leider,
which aired from Nov. 28 to Dec. 13,
2015, in 115 cities.
In addition to successes by newer
books, B-K’s two biggest-selling back-
list titles—Leadership and Self-Deception,
originally published in 2000, and Eat
That Frog!, originally published in
2001—both saw big sales in 2015
because of new marketing efforts by the
authors, Sheehan says.
B-K sales, and profits, were given a
boost by a substantial decline in returns
from Barnes & Noble, which cleared out
old B-K inventory in 2014. Strong pro-
motional efforts at B&N, and a lot of
work by B-K’s Ingram Publisher Services
sales rep for B&N, led to more accurate
buy-in numbers that cut returns,
Sheehan explains.
B-K’s two biggest books for 2016 are
expected to be The New Confessions of an
Economic Hitman by John Perkins, which
is off to a strong start, and The Outward
Mindset by the Arbinger Institute. ■
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