When I worked at Reed Elsevier we had a policy of not selling any spare capacity in our distribution business to third parties. The logic was that we shouldn't help potential competitors to grow in any way. At Macmillan, we take the completely opposite view. We are happy to see competitors grow while using our services and helping us to become more effcient too. As a result we offer all sorts of services to our competitors - typesetting and text processing, copyediting, website development, Asian print sourcing, advertisement design, sales and distribution in USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, India etc. It's a big set of businesses employing more than 4000 people worldwide and the scale we achieve from serving others as well as ourselves allows us to compete effectively with much larger publishing operations.
This is a preamble to a mini-review of one of our UK sales and distribution clients, the start-up company The Friday Project. It's been a fascinating ride for them and for us. The Pan Macmillan sales team represents their books to the trade and Macmillan Distribution services their orders.
Their strapline 'Turning the best of the web into the finest of books' is fine but it doesn't lead to commissioning focus. The catalogue is all over the place which is both its charm and its problem. The business has had its ups and downs. Good sales months followed by less good ones. Good books selling really well such as Blood, Sweat and Tea. Other good books not finding their market. But the key directors, Clare Christian and Scott Pack, have soldiered on and TFP is now a thriving publishing company with a stable workforce, a pipeline of new books, a backlist and one of the best websites (and blog sites) in the industry. I just hope that we can continue to work with them until they're big enough to kick us in the teeth and do their own thing.
Back-office support for independent publishers is not as glamorous as publishing itself but it can rewarding and companies like TFP can grow to be the likes of Quadrille or Bloomsbury. Fingers crossed for all small publishers.