Nathan Connolly discusses Dead Ink Books ‘growing up’ as it turns 10
The director of the Liverpool-based indie reflects on how it has developed and what comes next as it celebrates a decade in business.
While researching Liverpool-based indie Dead Ink Books ahead of my interview with its director Nathan Connolly about its 10th anniversary, I learned that it has existed in some form since 2011. During our conversation, Connolly explains: “The beginnings of Dead Ink are quite convoluted because it was actually started by a friend of mine called Wes Brown, who’s now an author and academic, as a passion project. I was running a similar thing and then we joined forces.” Eventually, the time came to decide whether to “really give it a go”. While Brown left to pursue academia, Connolly “quit the day job and went all in at Dead Ink, and that’s when we formed as a limited company, and when we track the 10-year anniversary from”.
In 2016, Connolly moved from Manchester to Liverpool, which has been Dead Ink’s home ever since. Part of the thinking behind the press was bolstering the local publishing scene. “I had been interviewing at a lot of trade publishing houses in London but could never get the money together to move there,” Connolly says. “It just felt like we deserved something in the north that could offer those opportunities, while also being northern in the sense that it could do things differently.” Another ambition was “to run a publishing house like a record label… That’s always been the aim, to run it as a cultural institution that can build a legacy for itself in the north”.
A decade ago, Dead Ink was a one-man band, but it is now a five-strong team. Its output has also expanded from three or four books a year to 17, with hopes to increase this to 50 over the next five years. The list’s main focus is literary fiction “as it crosses over into genre fiction – books that transgress boundaries in some way”, with a particular strength in horror publishing. “We’re always on the lookout for books which we think can project that cult buy-in from readers,” says Connolly. An example is Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio. “We came across it on TikTok, requested it, and that’s quickly become one of our lead titles.” Córdova’s second novel, Imps!, is coming next March and was one of Dead Ink’s “biggest acquisitions ever”.
Similarly, New Ruins (Dead Ink’s paperback originals imprint run in collaboration with Influx Press) has picked up titles from genre writers such as Nathan Ballingrud and Kathe Koja, “who are really established in the States… but for some reason, were never really recognised in the UK properly”. Connolly expands: “There is a market of readers that we are serving by bringing this stuff which they’re hungry for, and it’s just being missed… We’re all quite passionate about it and I think we’re able to market and sell it in a way where we feel confident about it.”
He adds: “One of the things we push at Dead Ink is that we are all in creative roles, and no matter what your role is, you’re encouraged to think creatively about how to make these books work.”
We’re always walking on a tightrope between working professionally enough that we are sustainable, but chaotically enough that we’re creative.
These efforts have paid off, with a recent run of critical success. Last year, Adam S Leslie’s Lost in the Garden picked up the Nero Fiction Book of the Year Award, followed by longlistings for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and Dylan Thomas Prize with Alice Evelyn Yang’s A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing and Vanessa Santos’ Make a Home of Me respectively.
An unexpected consequence of this recognition has been the closure of Dead Ink Bookshop, the bricks and mortar store opened on Liverpool’s Smithdown Road in late 2022. Connolly says of the “bittersweet” decision to shut up shop: “We don’t want to abandon the idea of Dead Ink retail, but for some time everybody was very much pulled in a lot of directions, and getting stressed out by that, because the publishing kept growing and kept finding success. So to make that work, it had to be a decision of ‘we need to focus here’… We just had to be grown-ups for a bit.”
A big priority over the past decade has been “getting serious and professionalising the outfit”. A challenge of this has been “making sure that we do that while still keeping our identity and creative freedom… We’re always walking on a tightrope between those two – working professionally enough that we are sustainable, but chaotically enough that we’re creative”. In 2023, the Arts Council granted Dead Ink National Portfolio Organisation status. Earlier this year, the company acknowledged its new era with a rebrand that encompassed a new logo, website and visual identity.
Connolly says of the refresh: “We felt the branding we had, which was full of millennial optimism, wasn’t really suiting us anymore, and the taste that we’d developed over the intervening decade had shifted to something much more serious and darker and deeper. It just felt like maybe we were still wearing kid clothes a bit.” Now, he feels: “We’ve definitely got something which much more represents us – we’ve got more studious, moody looking.”
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Dead Ink is currently establishing a plan for the next five years, with a goal to reach a turnover of £2.5m in this time. (Last year, it turned over “probably just over £500,000” and this year it is on track for £600-700,000.) Connolly says: “We’re very much having to fight against difficult circumstances, and our way of doing that is through growth and pig-headedly storming forward, regardless, and making it work as best we can with some really ambitious behind plans behind it – but plans which I think are backed by our trajectory.”
He adds: “I think it’s going to be a really exciting couple of years for Dead Ink, and hopefully we’ll be making some more waves with the books coming.”
Publishing plans include the introduction of a dedicated non-fiction list over the next couple of years. “It’s slightly outside of our comfort zone, which makes it feel exciting and dangerous, and like it’s the right step.” When I raise the recent reported decline in non-fiction sales, Connolly is not phased. “I think we can still do the Dead Ink version of non-fiction, and [have] it completely stand out… The intention has always been to be a brand-forward publisher, and Dead Ink books sell on that, so that’s what we want to do with non-fiction.”
Despite this confidence, he admits he “wouldn’t like to be starting Dead Ink now”. While in some ways the landscape for the book trade in the North has “changed for the better”, thanks to the work of the Northern Fiction Alliance, bigger publishers opening offices outside of London and more widespread remote working, the current climate is undeniably “difficult” for indies. Connolly feels that around Dead Ink’s launch there was “a brief window where the internet kind of democratised things and created opportunity”, but “that golden era has ended now, where we got that flourishing of really vibrant independent publishers doing really interesting things, and being able to make a go of it… To start from that stage again now would be a lot more difficult for a variety of reasons.”
He continues: “One of the things we’ve had to strategise around, as that window’s closed, is how do we stay sustainable?” While he laments the closure of peers such as Scottish indie 404 Ink and expects more closures going forward, he predicts that “we will start to see new presses start under these circumstances”. “What’s interesting is they probably won’t look like we expect a small press to look. I’m excited to see how the next generation of Dead Inks and Influx Presses come and show us how we’re doing it wrong, and they can do it better. I think that’s going to be fun.”
