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Atlantic Books' sales rose 21% in 2015, from £5m to £6m, Will Atkinson, m.d. of Atlantic, has confirmed following publication of the company's latest accounts.
The publisher recorded a loss of £168,000, down from £405,000 the previous year.
Atkinson said the company was "generating cash most months" and described the results as a "considerable improvement on last year, which was a huge improvement on the year before that". The "small" loss was the result of "tough provisioning and tidying up a few things from previous years", he said.
Key titles racking up sales in 2015 were Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Steve Silberman's Neurotribes, winner of the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize. "We've had a good run with prizes; prizes don't always mean huge sales but certainly Samuel Johnson is very significant," Atkinson said.
Atlantic grew its e-book sales in 2015 by 13%, against the market. The growth was attributed tby Atkinson to the hard work it put into e-books, and the flexibility of its e-book pricing combined with investment in research into the “sweet spot of pricing" with the creation of a new data information manager role.
Atkinson said: "With a slightly stronger autumn we would have made it [into profit]. Autumn was a wee bit disappointing. We had high hopes and it didn't quite fire up... Gulwali Passarlay's The Lightless Sky, which booksellers were very supportive of, was the first book account of a refugee travelling from the war in Afghanistan to a successful life in the UK. We are extremely proud to have published him; but the book didn't do as well as we thought. It's a book that everyone should read," he said.
Of the challenges facing the company, he said: “For the types of books we publish for the UK, there aren’t that many channels. If Waterstones doesn’t support it in a huge way, and they don’t support much in a huge way from the get-go, your publicity is either incoherent or too spaced out. You can’t always control the publicity. Your Amazon sales will be fitful. And often for books like that you are only in those two channels. W H Smith is extremely supportive of our endeavours. They don’t support across a wide range of stuff but when they do it’s fantastic. And the independents, are good for us too. But once you’ve counted one, two, three, four, the channels are not that wide. And yes we have books in the supermarkets but the ones there are not supported elsewhere.
"In order to get a good bestseller you need an ‘all channels books’ - and for publishers like us, that doesn’t happen with every book we publish. A diverse ecosystem of channels, the lack of that is a challenge in the UK. We managed to grow our sales by 21%, and Wild was through all those channels … Getting non-branded books out of the door is a challenge. It remains a 'winner take all’ market.”
Atkinson has been looking to turn the company around and into profitability since taking up the role of m.d. and publisher two years ago. In 2012 Atlantic saw a loss of £5.1m on turnover of £6m.
The company’s total number of employees grew from 25 to 30 in 2015, after bringing in two Allen & Unwin employees, two assistants and non-fiction editorial director Mike Harpley, who joined from Oneworld in July 2015.