Books
Twenty years dispelling myths
20.03.07 Tom Tivnan
Jessica Kingsley wasn't expecting to win anything at the Independent Publishing Awards on 2nd March. "I was at the hotel having a couple of glasses of champagne," she says. "I thought: 'Why not? I won't have to be too coherent tonight.'"
But not only did she win, she was the success story of the evening, as she and her company Jessica Kingsley Publishers romped home with both the Taylor Wessing Academic Publisher of the Year award and the overall prize for Van Tulleken Independent Publisher of the Year.
Catching up with Kingsley a week later, the two trophies are proudly displayed on a sideboard in her office. The shiny pink and plastic awards look slightly out of place against the room's white walls, sober dark woods and smattering of Asian and African objets d'art. Kingsley, however, isn't bothered.
She smiles as she gives the awards a pat and shakes her head, saying: "I'm still stunned. But it's really nice to get it in our 20th anniversary year. My first really strong reaction was how pleased I was for the small independents, because we really are independent; the company is owned entirely by me and we don't have a bank overdraft. How much more independent can you get?"
In getting the overall award, JKP was praised by the IPA judges as a "classic example of brilliant niche publishing". Kingsley believes it is that very "niche-ness" that drives the company's success. "It's a very focused list," she says. "I feel very lucky to have come from a marketing background. If we can't see who's going to buy the book, we don't publish it."
JKP's speciality is accessible academic books in the social and behavioural sciences, aimed at professionals. Since Kingsley formed her company, she has continually built up its reputation, and JKP is now the recognised leader in books on autism, Asperger's syndrome, art therapy, and health and social care. Some titles, such as Tony Attwood's Asperger's Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals, which has sold more than 400,000 copies worldwide, are viewed as indispensable in the field. Kingsley is keen to point out that sales to non-professionals are just as crucial as sales to professionals. "We sell quite a lot to parents, and parents don't just buy one autism or Asperger's book, they buy five to give to friends and family."
Kingsley has a genuine passion for the subjects she publishes, particularly autism and Asperger's. "For autism, we got there ahead of everybody else and pretty much stayed ahead. The big companies have come piling in, but people feel that we really pioneered it and, to some extent, changed the field. And what we really try to do here is to change the way people look at things. I appoint people who share our values—it's lovely to have the freedom to do that and it makes the company very cohesive. When something good happens to a book everybody is really proud of, there is a good company feel. That's very different from a corporation, even the most benign corporation."
She is proud that she has helped change public perceptions of Asperger's. "When I started publishing, the only time you saw something about Asperger's was when some criminal had done something and they had Asperger's. One of the things I really wanted to change was people's perception of it. So we published a whole lot of positive books about Asperger's. We did a lot about presenting the positive side of the condition and that gradually filtered through."
After reading philosophy at Warwick University and travelling around Europe for a couple of years, Kingsley started working in the marketing department at academic press distributor Eurospan in 1973. She worked her way up to marketing director, and then decided to branch out on her own in 1987, financed by a £5,000 bank loan. "At the time, Bloomsbury and Headline were starting up as well, and there were stories in the press about how they were going to the City to get so much money," she says. "And there I was, getting what essentially amounted to a second mortgage."
Kogan Page's Philip Kogan, whose tub-thumping lifetime achievement award acceptance speech was perhaps the most entertaining moment of the IPAs, was helpful to Kingsley at the start, giving advice, selling her the first eight titles in the JKP list and eventually renting office space to her.
From big acorns
At the beginning, Kingsley worked by herself from home. She quickly built up the social and behavioural sciences list and promoted it with "masses and masses of mailings" to professionals and support groups. The business grew: it now publishes more than 100 books a year, earned turnover of about £3.5m in 2006, employs 28 people, and has a US office. She says: "If you were to have told me in 1987 that we would be where we are now, I would not have believed you."
After recent success with a book on autism and yoga, and a humour title, All Cats Have Asperger's, Kingsley is looking to continue expanding the list. She says: "We're starting to look at ways we might go to slightly more alternative stuff. It's quite a challenge, but I feel we have a good enough reputation to push the edges a bit." She pauses and adds: "But what we are about is breaking new ground. In social work, for example, we publish a lot of books that gave kids a voice, including several books on domestic violence that really gave social workers the inside view on what it was like for the kids. No one had really done that before. That's the stuff I really like doing, changing the world."
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