One book after another: indie publisher Joffe Books continues to rise
Heloise Wood enjoys a guided tour of the London office from the publisher’s founder and its editorial director, who tell her what is in store for Joffe Books’ growing team
To enter Joffe Books’ office, one must first navigate several levels of a dark and dimly lit stairwell in a Shoreditch office block – a heart-racing endeavour in more ways than one. But on reaching it, a New York loft-style haven of light and space beckons. A more informal and talkative office atmosphere than some traditional publishers, there is a palpable sense of energy – perhaps aided by the smorgasbord of luxury chocolates in the kitchen. A permanent fixture, I am told.
I am here to speak with founder and chief executive officer Jasper Joffe and editorial director Rachel Slatter, not long after the indie made yet another acquisition, the Severn House list. This takes the imprint count to five, with turnover cresting £10m, Joffe says. Much of this is generated by the digital-first company’s e-books base, but print is growing, up 16% in 2025 to £231,000 through NielsenIQ BookScan.
It is a far cry from the company’s launch in 2014, which was inspired by Joffe wanting to publish his mother’s novel following its rejection by traditional publishers. “It was just me and a few freelancers,” Joffe tells me. “This used to be my flat. Each time we’ve bought a company, though, I’ve had to scale up.”
There will be the nine new staff members from Severn House, formerly an imprint of Canongate, into the Joffe office, currently filled with 26 employees. “Normally we buy a limited company [and] it’s a little easier. In this case, we’re buying the list and the people are transferring over with the list... So, bringing [Severn] in – which has an amazing history going back to 1974 – is an inflection point.” Joffe hopes he can do for the Severn list what he has done for the plethora of previous publishers he’s acquired.
I know lots of people are a bit doom and gloom about things, but I think we’re in the most exciting time to be in publishing since the invention of the e-book – Jasper Joffe, founder of Joffe Books
The Severn House addition follows a string of recent acquisitions for Joffe. “We bought Lume [Books] and Choc Lit in 2023. And we bought The Book Folks [last year], which was a small crime and thriller publisher, but we’ve already doubled their sales, which was really satisfying. Each list we’ve brought in, we’ve really massively increased sales.”
What is the secret to reinvigorating smaller lists? “We don’t treat backlist as backlist. We treat all books as – I’m tired of saying it, it sounds like a cliché – books that people haven’t read yet. So, we’ll get a book from 1974 or 1994 or 2010 and we’ll repackage it and we’ll treat it like a new release. And so, in the digital space, 99% of people won’t have read that book. People are seeing it for the first time.
“We do everything from scratch, effectively, with previously published books, or what people call ‘backlist’. We call them ‘previously published’ internally, so we don’t have this hierarchy between front and backlist. And then we spend serious amounts of money marketing them. We’ll spend more than £1m this year just on digital ads.”
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The backlist bug
Joffe first caught the backlist bug when he was a child. “I was really into going to charity shops and trying to find some particular first edition that I thought would be valuable. I once found a first edition of Tolkien’s The Hobbit before it was actually a lot of money – I sold it when I was broke.”
While the publisher has diversified – “We’re known as a crime and thriller publisher, but we’re not anymore, we publish every single genre,” Joffe tells me – it still has a meaty crime offering. Slatter talks me through 2026’s big launches, with both “grit” and cosy appearing – served with some spice, of course. “We’re going to start off Q1 with some fabulous dark romance for the first time. So, there’ll be three big new series. And I’m told by our head of Choc Lit Becky Slorach that 2026 will be the year of small-town spice.”
Slatter adds that “we do great with cosies” reeling off a few highlights such as Judith Cutler’s mysteries with a “feisty, nosy antique dealer” doing the sleuthing; the Shrewsbury-based coroner Martha Gunn books from Priscilla Masters, whose previous titles for Joffe also include the 15-strong DI Joanna Piercy books; and new author Ashley Kane, whose Jersey-set Gull Bay Mysteries are centred around a café. “But on the vastly opposite end of the spectrum, we’re doing some really good sales with grittier thrillers,” Slatter says.
She mentions US author Christopher Newman’s Lt Joe Dante titles – “million-copy sellers in the ‘80s and ‘90s” – which Slatter acquired last November in a nine-book deal. She says: “They are kind of hard-hitting thrillers set in New York. I think readers are getting more of a taste back for that kind of gritty action... We’re definitely seeing potential there. And there is a box set of Adrian Magson’s lone mercenary international action thrillers, because box sets do really well for us... We often price [the e-books] at 99p. Or a lot of our sales are actually through Kindle Unlimited, because our readers just love to start and then really binge-read.”
There is general expansion on the way, with Germany’s booming market a particular area of interest. “We’re launching our own German imprint now and a German team, and hiring more editors overall,” Joffe says. “I’ll start experimenting, but I think there’s a massive opportunity for [sending] translated British books into Germany. [German readers] don’t really love British police procedural, but they do like psych thrillers and we’ve got a really good psych thriller list now.”
“I think we would be looking at all that, whole-language territories, probably Spain, Italy, France to follow... We’ve certainly got grand ambitions to expand in America.”
The company’s recently appointed business and sales development manager, Laura Milford, is looking to build Joffe’s print distribution in the US and boost audio overall. “We sub-license all the audio, but we are thinking about producing it ourselves,” Joffe says. “I was just talking today in our senior meeting about creating an audio team.
“And our big, four-year goal is to build a £100m revenue publisher... It’s not going to be easy. We’re on about £10m at the moment.”
In line with his disruptive streak, Joffe believes that artificial intelligence (AI) is a golden opportunity for the industry. “I know lots of people are a bit doom and gloom about things, but I think we’re in the most exciting time to be in publishing since the invention of the e-book, which, I think, is an underestimated change in publishing.
“With all the AI tools, with the way in which it’s going to transform work – again, people are bored of hearing me talk about AI – but where we can make it work for the people we work with and our authors, it’s massively going to transform everything we do. And we don’t even know what’s going to happen. And we are a very agile publisher which looks at opportunities day by day, minute by minute, and thinks: what can we do to make our authors as successful as possible, using the technology and the tools that we have available? And this is the best time to do that ever.”
