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Accent goes to America

21.04.08 Jo Young

Welsh independent publisher Accent Press is to open its first US office in New York on 1st May, having signed a new North American distribution deal with NBN Inc.

The company, based near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, has parted company with its previous North American distributor Dufour Editions, which has controlled sales of the publisher's titles in the US and Canada for the past four years. Accent's founder and managing director Hazel Cushion said that the company needed to sign a new distributor as the company's list "became more commercial", and needed to publish US versions of its books to improve sales.

"Dufour did consistently sell our books, but not in great quantity, and we realised that in order to get the quantity we needed to really succeed, we needed to print separate US editions of our titles. We are quite a bit more commercial than when we started, so NBN is a much better fit for us now. We felt it was important to set up our own US office so that we had someone there to coordinate things, including author marketing and publicity," said Cushion.

The New York office, which will be headed up by Kimberley Clougherty, will release six titles before Christmas this year, including Simon Hall's The Death Pictures, The Amber Knight by Catherine John, and three titles from Accent's erotic imprint Xcite books, all of which were recent UK publications. Accent is planning to release a further 12 titles in the US in 2009. All the books will be produced in a US format, with publicity and author tours co-ordinated from the New York office.

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