What we all stand to lose if our small publishers go under

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown up so many grim statistics that it’s easy to become desensitised. Against a backdrop of hundreds of thousands of deaths and many millions made unemployed, the fact that 60 per cent of small publishers in the UK expect to be out of business by the autumn will be met with a resigned shrug at best from all but the most ardent bibliophiles.

Detail from the cover of Hard Rock, compiled by Ian Parnell

Small publishers, though, are often specialist publishers, and if they go to the wall then entire communities of like-minded people will lose an important outlet for telling their stories. The books produced by these companies don’t typically sell in large numbers, but they are often the books that are the most treasured by aficionados, the books that are read over and over again, the books that feed into people’s sense of who they are. If our small, niche-interest publishing houses were to disappear, the tragedy of losing them would be impossible to convey using numbers alone.

Exhibit A: Vertebrate Publishing of Sheffield, which over the years has become the UK’s leading publisher of climbing and mountaineering books. Their latest release, a newly updated edition of the 1974 classic Hard Rock, is a perfect example of the kind of time-intensive project that a mainstream publisher wouldn’t even consider. Compiled by the climber, photographer and writer Ian Parnell, it features essays by some of the biggest names in climbing describing over 60 of the UK’s most challenging climbs. The Scotland section features such well-kent folk as Chris Bonington writing on the Old Man of Hoy, Hamish MacInnes on Raven’s Gully on Buchaille Etive Mor and Jimmy Marshall on the Carnivore route on the same mountain. Significant literary figures also feature: Al Alvarez has a sparkling essay on a sea cliff climb called Moonraker near Brixham in Devon while the multi-award-winning Jim Perrin writes viscerally about the gritstone route called The Right Unconquerable on Stanage Edge in Derbyshire, and in particular about what that abrasive surface can do to a climber’s hands.

Shortly after lockdown was introduced in the UK, Vertebrate’s director Jon Barton wrote an impassioned blog post in which he outlined the monumental challenges now facing businesses like his, but also exhibited the never-say-die attitude that makes them possible in the first place. Under the header “We lost 80 per cent of our income overnight, but we hadn’t lost our customers,” Barton laid out what lockdown meant for his company in every painful detail, from how the closure of bookshops and wholesalers had impacted on their bottom line to the difficult conversations he’d had to have with members of staff he could no longer afford to pay. It made for bleak reading, but there was an inspiring sting in the tail:

The entry on climbing the Old Man of Hoy, by Chris Bonnington

“We had lost our distribution and our sales channels,” he wrote, “but what we hadn’t lost was our customers. We also had two things on our side, two super weapons. Turned out many of our customers had time on their hands to read a book, and that after 15 years of publishing outdoor adventure books, a few people out there really liked us, and wanted to help us.”

So, Vertebrate set out to adapt to the new normal by finding ways of getting the books they did still have copies of into the hands of customers who wanted to read them. They simplified the ordering process on their website, they eliminated shipping costs and they set out to strengthen their bonds with their online community of fans. A few weeks on from his initial blog post, I checked in with Barton to find out how things were going, and while it’s clear that the long-term survival of Vertebrate is still a long way from being assured, he remains bullish about the future:

“I’ve just taken each problem as an issue that needed a solution. Yes we lost 80 per cent of our sales and about 75 per cent of the tools we needed to run the business, but we hadn’t lost a single customer so we just needed to dig in and find the customers, and start to build back up again.”

Vertebrate have a range of Scottish-specific books available for sale on their website now, from Nadir Khan’s stunning collection of mountain photography Extreme Scotland, covered in this slot a couple of years ago, to Day Walks in the Cairngorms, the new guidebook from Helen and Paul Webster of the Walkhighlands website. Oh, and there’s 25 per cent off everything. Consider each purchase an investment.

www.v-publishing.co.uk/

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