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PUBLISHER OF THE YEAR OVERVIEW
Choosing a winner from the bestseller- laden contenders for the Publisher of the Year is always one of the British toughest tasks; indeed, pick the best division of Penguin Random House from the four nominated here. With Faber, Hachette, HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan in the mix that incorporates many of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed books of the year.
EBURY Ebury topped off a fine 2019 with Charlie Mackesy’s
smash Christmas hit The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, and began 2020 with the Costa Book of the Year Award for Jack Fairweather’s The Volunteer. It scored 22 top-10 bestsellers and a 23.1% jump in TCM sales, and restruc- tured into four distinctive, market-led “Ebury Hubs”.
FABER Faber has won the Independent Publisher of the
Year award at the Nibbies for two years in a row, and more than holds its own in this corporate company. It marked its 90th anniversary year with record sales, and its top seller last year, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, wasn’t even a 2019 release—a reminder of its enormously rich backlist.
MICHAEL JOSEPH Michael Joseph played to its strengths as a rela-
tively small, author-focused part of the PRH empire in 2019. Its TCM sales leapt by nearly a third, thanks in large part to Hinch Yourself Happy by Sophie Hinchcliffe (left), the fifth-biggest-selling book of the year. Jamie Oliver, Jojo Moyes and Liane Moriarty were among its other stars.
PENGUIN GENERAL Penguin General is the current holder,
LAST YEAR’S WINNER
and the title that swept the 2019 Nibbies, Michelle Obama’s Becoming, led another good year. But there was underlying growth too, with stalwarts John le Carré and Pat Barker the fiction stars and Philippa Perry its breakout début. Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker was the icing on the cake.
HARPERCOLLINS UK boss Charlie Redmayne (above) picked up this award
in 2018 when, as now, HC was powered by David Walliams. But a 1.6% rise in TCM sales came from many more brands besides, with non-fiction particularly strong. It launched four new imprints—One More Chapter, Mudlark, HarperVia and TLS Books—and set the pace for the industry in audio.
PAN MACMILLAN Pan Macmillan won this award in 2017 and 2015 under
m.d. Anthony Forbes Watson (right), and in both cases it was rewarded for superb strength in depth rather than one or two blockbusters. But last year it had the UK’s biggest book of all, Pinch of Nom by Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone, which led it to a 25% leap in TCM sales.
VINTAGE Vintage grew its TCM sales by 15.7% in 2019, and had
the biggest novel of the year by value—Margaret Atwood’s joint Booker Prize winner The Testaments. Its books spent 123 weeks in the Sunday Times’ charts, and added Costa, Forward, Betty Trask and several other literary awards to the Booker. Its audio sales grew by more than 50%, too.
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HODDER & STOUGHTON Hodder & Stoughton rode high in the
bestseller lists throughout 2019, its four number ones led by John Grisham’s The Reckoning. It was a vintage year for other big author brands, including Stephen King, Peter Robinson and Jodi Picoult (above), and there was sizeable growth in audio and international sales too.
THE VOLUNTEER WON THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR EBURY
JACK FAIRWEATHERS
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