La Bella vita: Guppy Books founder reflects on five years of creative freedom
Half a decade after going independent, Guppy founder Bella Pearson looks to expand into the emerging reader space.
“I feel quite positive about this year, despite the general gloom,” Bella Pearson tells me as we sit down to chat about her Oxford-based independent children’s publisher Guppy Books over Zoom. She certainly ended last year on a high, celebrating five years since launching the business with a party in November. “It was fantastic. I have a team of freelancers all over the country – it was really nice to get everyone together and say ‘thank you’ to them. It feels like we’ve done so much in the past five years. It’s quite a tough market at the moment and it just reminds you that you’re doing the right thing.”
Pearson began her publishing career at Transworld Children’s Books before moving to David Fickling Books, where she spent 17 years in a variety of roles including publishing director, winning the Branford Boase Award twice along the way. After leaving DFB in 2018, she launched Guppy in September 2019. “While I was given lots of freedom [at DFB], I really just wanted my own list,” she explains. “Once I started talking about it with people, it escalated and almost became a thing before I’d even worked it out. I was putting out feelers and the enthusiasm from my contacts was so great that I thought: ‘Right, am I going to go for it?’ And I haven’t regretted it.”
Though she remains the only person on Guppy’s payroll – with a regular roster of freelancers supporting her, as well as Scallywag Press publisher Sarah Pakenham selling rights and Michael O’Mara Books looking after sales and distribution – that may change soon; this year, she’s launching a new imprint for a younger audience, Mini Guppy. It aims to bridge the gap between picture books and reading books with illustrated chapter books for emerging readers. Pearson says: “There’s a lot of talk about the lack of joy in reading that children have these days. For Mini Guppy, that was part of it – making learning to read as fun and accessible as possible. So that’s the idea, to produce very tactile, colourful, entertaining books that are not your run-of-the-mill reading scheme titles.”
We are publishing books that don’t fit the mould and trying things out that may not be taken on by bigger publishers because they’re risky
The Mini Guppy list will kick off with two series: Amelia Cheeseheart Investigates, written by Cat Weldon and illustrated by Nene Lonergan, in which a courageous aviator mouse-detective and her spider sidekick solve mysteries in a museum; and Fairytale Fiasco, written by Myles McLeod and illustrated by Evgenia Golubeva, featuring a girl who climbs into fairytales and fixes them. Pearson says of the books she’s signed to the Mini Guppy imprint: “They’re very different. Some will have more words, and some will be mainly pictorial, so they’re for children of all abilities to enjoy.” She plans to release 10 Mini Guppy titles a year alongside the regular programme of eight to 10 publications and predicts that this will lead her to grow her team over the next year or two.
On the main list, Guppy’s “really exciting” book for the year is Best of All Worlds, a speculative YA thriller by Canadian author Kenneth Oppel, in which two families with opposing political and moral compasses are trapped inside a dome. Pearson describes it as “absolutely page-turning, gripping, and also thought-provoking”. On the political element, she states: “I think it’s going to be very interesting to see how it’s received. I hope it will bring Ken the audience he deserves in the UK.” Guppy will be publishing in hardback in June (the first it has brought out in a while), with paperback publication to follow in April 2026.
Pearson characterises running Guppy as “a lot of spinning plates” and admits that it has been “harder than I thought it was going to be financially”. Despite previously working for a fairly small publisher, she did not realise “how difficult it would be actually getting books into shops”. She adds: “I think that’s a problem for all publishers, but it’s particularly difficult for small indies. The indie bookshop market is fantastic, but the chain market is much smaller than it was 10 or 15 years ago. So that has been my biggest challenge and the thing that probably keeps me awake at night more than anything else.”
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Regardless, she remains positive about launching her own venture. “There’s a lot of pressure that comes with it, but I wouldn’t give that up for the creative freedom I have. We are publishing books that don’t necessarily fit the mould for every publisher and trying things out that may not be taken on by bigger publishers because they’re risky. Sometimes they really, really work.” One example is Nadia Mikail’s YA debut The Cats We Meet Along the Way, winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2023, which Pearson found through an open submissions competition she launched during the pandemic.
She has continued running the competition every year since. “That has been phenomenally successful for us. It’s a huge amount of work and every year I think: ‘Have I got the energy and time to do it?’ And every year we find someone amazing.” Other winners include Carrie Sellon, whose Pizza Pete and the Perilous Potions (illustrated by Sarah Horne) triumphed in The Week Junior Book Awards’ Younger Fiction category last year, and current Branford Boase longlistee OR Sorrel, author of Apocalypse Cow. She adds: “I feel really fortunate to catch them at that early stage, and they’ve all stayed with me, which is brilliant.”
Winning awards, though, is “not as good for sales as I thought it would be”, Pearson admits. “There seems to be a lack of connectivity between winning an award and [the winning books] then being put in the shops... so that has been quite tricky to navigate. It feels like there are so many people working very hard to pick out the books that kids are going to love reading and then there’s no response to it. There is a massive gap there, and that frustrates me as a small publisher.”
As such, the press is actively looking to diversify its routes to market. “This year, we’re going to be focusing on indie bookshops, making sure that we’re putting together a plan to create strong partnerships with specific indies. We’re also looking at the education market, which is such an important one for us, and providing resources for teachers and for school libraries and not relying on getting the books into the big shops.” Pearson adds: “I think our reputation is really strong and now we have to work on making sure that the next five years is spreading the word about Guppy. Mini Guppy is going to really help, I think.”
Despite the challenges, Pearson is “absolutely thrilled about where we are, because we’re further ahead than I could have possibly imagined”. She continues: “I’m so proud of the awards we’ve won. It’s made a huge difference in terms of making me aware that we’re on the right path. It can be quite lonely, especially as we have so little money to put in to, say, marketing. We have to work a lot harder, but when we do get that sort of recognition it’s hugely rewarding, not just for me, but for the authors and illustrators who are doing something different and not just following the market.”
“One of the things that Guppy doesn’t do is follow the market. We tread our own path. That’s our role – to do something different.”
