It’s easy to feel little when you are a small publisher – going
to book fairs and looking at your panel of twenty novels lost in the vast space
dominated by the Penguin, Random, Harper Collins, MacMillan, Simon & Schuster
and Hachette and all their glossy titles.
Thankfully I belong to the Independent
Publisher Conference (IPG), a guild of small, innovative, hard-working publishers
who are filled with enthusiastic zeal and wholeheartedly believe that their
books have merit with consumers. I have to confess, joining them has been a boon
– I no longer feel alone, or wonder why I think I can match the big boys at their
game (actually, I frequently wake up wondering why I think I can do this).
I
remember my first trip to the London Book Fair, full of gusto that quickly
shrank as I saw the reality of hundreds of thousands of new titles and realising that ours would struggle to find air, never mind sunlight. It’s
difficult to have faith in such conditions – but thankfully, I seem to have an optimistic
core and a huge belief in our authors and readers. Authors themselves need massive self-belief to think that readers will give the eight plus hours it takes to read their work. Yesterday it felt like all that
core belief paid off. I was at the IPG’s autumn conference and three times
other delegates said they had heard of Hookline. I was stunned. “Really!” I
asked the first. The second got a smile. However, the third person almost got
the biggest hug I could muster (thankfully, I stayed cool, as though such
recognition was normal).
It may not be much, but to me it was like a mention in
the Sunday Times (which will come one day – I promise).