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Publishing is seeing a sea-change in attitudes towards the industry’s North/South divide, and is becoming alert to the energy and vigour coming from the trade in the North. Collaboration is key to the turning tide, with the Northern Fiction Alliance cohort expanding to form the new Arts Council-backed Northern Publishers Network. And it’s not only publishers: literary bodies New Writing North, Inpress and Mslexia are teaming up to create a new literature centre which they hope will cement Newcastle as a writing centre of the UK.
Building on the success of the Northern Fiction Alliance (NFA)—a project created in 2016 to showcase the output of Northern indie presses to the international market, and to promote regional diversity—project founder Comma Press will be expanding its collaborative network in order to better support more fiction publishers and, for the first time, poetry publishers from the North of England. It will include some of the UK’s most established poetry presses, such as Carcanet Press and Arc Publications, with further names to be announced over the coming months.
The initial NFA project saw the founding Northern publishers—Comma, Leeds’ Peepal Tree Press, Liverpool’s Dead Ink Books and Sheffield’s And Other Stories—generate more than £43,000 from rights sales, and demonstrated the benefits of collaborative working. Importantly, says the alliance, the project showed how sharing resources and funding partnerships can help to level the publishing playing field by providing new training, and rights and sales opportunities for small presses across the region.
Spreading the word
New network members will be able to access existing support such as quarterly training workshops (organised in collaboration with the Publishers Association), an annual Intellectual Property forum with film and TV producers, cross-company mentorships, and trade delegations to international book fairs such as those in Frankfurt and London. "This is not about joining forces so that we can become more like each other, or indeed more like the larger publishing houses in London," says Comma Press founder Ra Page.
"It’s not about following anyone’s lead, or allowing homogeneity to spread further into the independents. It’s about collectively asserting our existence, as alternative routes to being published (if you’re a writer), or finding radical new literature (if you’re a reader)."
Comma publishing manager Sarah Cleave added: "As a network, we’ve always been incredibly international in our outlook, both in the writers we publish and the relationships we have built with other publishers from around the world. As well as book fair delegations, the Northern Publishing Network plans to launch an international fellowship programme (in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University), bringing editors from foreign independent presses to the North of England to show them how we do things differently here." Cleave added: "We’re also in early discussions with our university partners about setting up a Publishing MA in Manchester, something that seems particularly pertinent given the results of the PA workforce audit last year."
Arts Council England (ACE) is a major force for funding and support in the North. With a renewed mission to use its heft to pull away from London, the body supports a number of publishers, including Carcanet, Bloodaxe and Peepal Tree. The initial Northern Fiction Alliance project was funded by the Arts Council’s International Showcasing fund.
Stephen May, author and relationship manager, literature at ACE, said: "England is not London, just as it is not the Cotswolds. There are as many people living in the 40-mile corridor between Leeds and Manchester as there are in the 40-mile stretch that is one side of Greater London to the other. And yet you wouldn’t know this from the kind of books published, and those which are given prominence." While May believes the trade is trying hard to look for writers and industry talent in different places, he says the industry will only get "real systemic, lasting change" when one or two London-based publishers follow the lead of the BBC and move whole departments to places outside London. "I’d love to see Faber in Leeds, or Bloomsbury in Manchester. It will definitely happen but it’s probably a while off still," he says.
Looking North
Last year The Bookseller reported that larger publishers, including Penguin Random House and Hachette, were exploring the opportunity of having an editorial presence in the North. While many would not be drawn on their current plans for this, they have highlighted the ways in which they have been working with Northern publishers.
PRH says it is "actively working in the region"—both in terms of sourcing new talent through its WriteNow programme, and in terms of its engagement with
the community, for example, its career workshops JobHack and Start your Story, and its work with libraries through the Puffin World of Stories programme. Rebecca Sinclair, brand and communications director at PRH, says: "Over the past nine months we have been working closely with the Northern Publishers Network to think more about how we might be able to work together. This includes co-funding a Feasibility Study to consider how a future collaboration could have real impact in making our industry more accessible to new talent right across the UK. We see the enormous potential and importance of having an editorial footprint outside London."
At Hachette, a spokesperson says there is "a lot of work" going on to look at opening more regional offices in the UK to join the offices it already has in Didcot, Chichester and Edinburgh, as well as a number of smaller offices around London (those of Bookouture, Jessica Kingsley and Short Books). Further,
a "taskforce" of senior colleagues have made visits to a number of UK cities to have meetings and round-tables with local government and creative and arts bodies, including New Writing North and the Northern Fiction Alliance. Similarly HarperCollins, which has editorial teams in Honley in West Yorkshire, Glasgow and Dublin, will be working with New Writing North on its Young Writers’ City Programme. Its parent company recently donated £10,000 to the organisation.
Nathan Connolly, publishing director at Dead Ink in Liverpool, concluded: "If we, in both the North and South, view this moment of change as an opportunity and approach it with a collaborative attitude, I think something very special could develop. At Dead Ink we have been approached by a number of bigger London-based companies, and we’re excited to see where our discussions lead us. The approaches that have been made have been very positive and hold a lot of potential."
This was written as part of The Bookseller's focus on publishing in the north of England; for more content from this focus, head here.