04.11.16
www.thebookseller.com
THE INDEPENDENTS NEWS & VIEWS
27
other prizes—including the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year with The Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford, and the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize with Serhii Plokhii’s The Last Empire—saw sales “shoot up” 50% on the previous year (to £3.63m), making it the company’s most profitable to date. This calendar year, Oneworld’s turnover is 30% up on the comparable period in 2015, so the publisher “expects to finish on a high”, Mabey said. She ascribes the success of the company
to “publishing good books and publishing them well”, adding: “I think that for our size, we have an incredibly diverse list. But in addition we are fleet-footed in the way that we publish and we offer fantastic author care. We have an incredibly talented team of editors and being independent means we can follow our publishing vision and carefully curate a list that reflects the integrity of this company. We are unapologetically serious about everything we do, and our strengths lie not only in offering great support to our authors; we have followed that up by investing substantial publicity and marketing energy into all our campaigns.” In 2011—a “pivotal” year for the company—
Oneworld moved offices from Oxford to central London in order to facilitate better access to agents and to enable publicists and sales staff to more freely meet more booksellers, reviewers and journalists, all of whom are critical to the staff’s work. Mabey added that move also ensured the company could “attract the best staff and expand our workforce more rapidly”. The intervening five years have seen Oneworld double in size: it now employs 22 full or part- time staff. Since its London move, additions to the staff roster span across departments, with appointments including: Mark Rusher, former group marketing director of Orion; rights director Ilona Chavasse, who was previously acting rights director at Atlantic; and art director James Jones, a former Bookseller Rising Star who earned his stripes at Penguin and Orion. Of the move to London, Mabey commented:
“I don’t think it should have made such a difference, but of course it has, both in terms of our visibility within the book trade and our access to top-quality staff. Both the size of our company and our revenue have increased substantially in every year since [the move]”. Mabey added that the company is “certainly
interested” in acquiring other firms. “I think strategically it would make sense for us to look at some of the independents in the US, but we have not made any overtures in that direction yet”, she said.
COMMENT: MY AWARD-WINNING, OUT-OF-PRINT PUNJABI COOKBOOK
felt an urge to do something different. Having learnt at my mother’s side since I was
O
little, I would cook for friends and colleagues at weekends, and they would ask for the recipes to the traditional Indian dishes that I had grown up with in a Punjabi home in the UK. But there were no recipes, no measurements either, just ingrained memories. I always thought it was such a shame that the
Western world had not been let in on the secret of real Indian home cooking, as though it were a long-standing trick, our last remaining jewel. So I wrote a letter outlining my idea, and fired it off to every publisher in the UK. What I hoped for was a way to preserve these methods for generations to come, sharing with those who still wanted to re-create authentic meals that were not dumbed down, but within the demands of a contemporary lifestyle. Simon & Schuster snapped the book up, my letter having been read by editor Susanna Clarke, and Cooking Like Mummyji was published in October 2003. It sold out before publication, received public affection and critical acclaim, and won the Guild of Food Writers’ Jeremy Round Award for Best First Book. There was an enthusiasm to move on, so we quickly began working on another book, at a time when the landscape of the publishing industry was beginning to shift. The phenomenon of the celebrity chef had just begun to emerge; independent bookshops were disappearing; and books began to be sold in supermarkets and heavily discounted online. The office of the cookery imprint of Simon & Schuster (Martin Books in Cambridge) closed down, and so Cooking Like Mummyji rapidly fell out of print. All attention had turned to coming up with new ideas. But then the most extraordinary thing happened. I began to receive thousands of emails and letters from people all over the world—young, old, men, women, all ethnicities and backgrounds, a demographic that defied what Simon & Schuster had originally predicted—imploring for Cooking Like Mummyji to be brought back into print. They told me their stories of what the book had meant to them. It turns out that when it fell out of print, its word-of-mouth journey had only just begun, and so began the unexpected mounting groundswell for its return. But no one would publish it. I wrote to all of the publishing houses in the UK;
they told me they didn’t see a place for it in the current landscape. I was told I would need to write something new, or that Indian food was too niche, or that it was a competitive time for a saturated market in which TV celebrity, broad commercial appeal and novelty was key. I was told it had had its day, yet this completely contradicted what many members of the public were increasingly saying. I wondered how the publishing industry had become so out of touch with what people actually wanted. And wasn’t cookery timeless? So I dedicated six years to getting the book back into print in the format it deserved. Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, introduced me and my story to the wonderful Anne Dolamore at Grub Street, to whom I had sent a letter some years ago that never reached her. She breathed beautiful life into my vision. Now the eagerly anticipated, stunningly revised edition has been finally released, and celebrated. It’s proof that even the most unlikely publishing dreams can eventually come true.
Cooking Like Mummyji was published by Grub Street last month (9781910690307, £19.99)
ne night during the spring of 2002, I was sitting at work, waiting for a client to send a file over. As a 24-year-old graduate in advertising, I suddenly
Vicky Bhogal
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