This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Not long back, the Society of Authors’ journal, The Author, printed what can only be called a jeremiad by a small publisher named Sam Jordison.
Mr Jordison, together with his wife Eloise Millar, run a distinguished independent press whose successes include Eimear McBride’s career-launching A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Louise Ellman’s Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport, which was ushered onto the Galley Beggar list after its author had been shown the door by messrs Bloomsbury. Galley Beggar are, without doubt, a very good thing.
The gist of Mr Jordison’s lament, supported by a great deal of forensic detail, was that the economics of publishing had become so skewed that it was all but impossible for him to make a profit.
Rising print and paper costs, not to mention Brexit (Galley Beggar export, or rather try to export, books to Europe) had all played their part in this debacle. His conclusion was that whilst in 2015 the margins on a £10 paperback allowed the publisher a small profit, in 2025 he would be lucky to make a few pence.
By chance, Mr Jordison’s j’accuse was followed, a month or so later, by the launch of a new independent, Conduit Books. All the broadsheet newspapers covered the story, which seemed odd until one realised that over the firm’s founding principle rose the scent of novelty. Or rather controversy.
Conduit, helmed by a novelist named Jude Cook and noting the terrific gender imbalance in UK publishing, intends to specialise in novels by men, and “cerebral” ones at that. As Private Eye remarked, “All you middle-brow hussies can keep your distance.”
These news stories seem to be connected. The first shows that the economic model of a certain kind of publishing has all but collapsed. The second suggests its access points are in danger, too.
Just to ram this point home, the Conduit launch coincided with a Sunday Times bestseller chart in which none of the books featured in the hardback and paperback top tens was written by a man.
To quote again from the Eye’s anonymous correspondent, summing up the relationship between publisher and male author: “Unless you write lurid thrillers or cosy crime and/or have some kind of celebrity, we’re just not interested.”
Like any other industry, the publishing trade abhors stasis. Or rather, being a notably unreflective and short-term business, it is resigned to the fact that stasis eventually has to be dealt with.
Nothing could be more static than its current state, where profits are being kept up by price rises and the only thing keeping the market going is those “romantasy” novels full of hot action in mystical never-never lands.
Clearly, the time is ripe for a new publishing firm or two that can make the situation work to its advantage. But what kind of firm? Publishing what kind of books?
The Secret Author, as he has more than once remarked, is not a Conservative. On the other hand, even a non-Conservative, surveying the modern publishing bourse, will be uneasily aware that its much-vaunted pluralism excludes a large amount of contemporary opinion.
There was a wonderful moment, shortly after the Brexit vote, when someone enquired of a left-leaning ornament of the trade whether he might like to publish something that would be of interest to the millions of people who had voted “Leave”. What was he supposed to do, this titan mused: print books about Morris dancing?
If there are to be new publishing houses in the UK, they will undoubtedly come from the Right. The Left hasn’t the money or, one suspects, the interest.
Are you a seriously wealthy (i.e. north of £100 million) individual with a hankering for literature? Well, start a publishing firm. Staff it with over-fifties who have been let go by the major houses and commission work by writers who seem to have fallen off publishers’ lists in the past few years.
Encourage novelists who can write books about the 1980s in which Mrs Thatcher is a hero rather than villain and trades unions are seen as a tedious impediment to wealth creation.
The Secret Author wouldn’t necessarily buy these books, but he would like to see them exist, if only as an antidote to the terrible air of orthodoxy that currently hangs over an environment in which dissent from bien-pensant opinion is virtually a sacking offence.
Talking of sponsorship, these new firms, underwritten by private wealth, might even be able to nudge their authors towards solvency. They would certainly not make what Simon Raven once called the “businessman’s usual and vulgar mistake of expecting cultural services to come cheap”.
No doubt such measures would horrify Mr Jordison. On the other hand, the British publishing industry needs shaking up, and, if one of the results is Lionel Shriver: A Symposium (Rant Press, £25), then we shall just have to grit our teeth.
