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COMPANY SPOTLIGHT ALLISON & BUSBY


07.07.17 www.thebookseller.com


Dunlop on A&B’s


50-year business Allison & Busby, which recently celebrated five decades in business, has struck a rich niche in crime and saga series which sell and sell to their devoted fans


BY BENEDICTE PAGE


The Charterhouse complex in Smithfield. A&B has been through several iterations since Busby, a pioneering black publisher, started with business partner Clive Allison in 1967. Then the independent published an eclectic international list, including works by C L R James, Buchi Emecheta, Michael Moorcock and Chester Himes. But in 1987 it was sold to W H Allen, an imprint of Virgin, and Busby departed; and within a few years Peter Day had bought the imprint and was running it as a paperback house, building the focus on crime. Day also recruited a young graduate, one David Shelley, who later took over as publishing director as Day’s health declined and the company was sold to Spanish family-run media firm Editorial Prensa Iberica. Under Shelley, A&B thrived, taking on Alan Jessop’s


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Compass for sales and focusing on hardback print runs aimed at libraries, with small paperback runs. Every so often Shelley picked up a book with a wider reach, such as Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, which could sell strongly through the high-street trade. When Shelley departed for Hachette in 2005, Susie Dunlop


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We look all the time at whether we should be repackaging and reprinting our backlist, up-speccing or down-speccing


SUSIE DUNLOP PUBLISHING DIRECTOR


(ex–Compass sales director and previously of Fourth Estate and Penguin) took over. A&B remains a small outfit, with six staff, including Daniel Scott as head of sales and Lesley Crook handling e-books and some acquisitions, publishing 75–80 new books a year and continuing to deliver a profit, with turnover “holding steady” at a little over £2m. Aside from a lucrative foray into YA fiction with Rachel Caine’s successful vampires series Morganville, it has kept to a staple of crime and saga series, with stalwarts such as Edward Marston, who writes four series for A&B, including The Railway Mysteries, the Elizabethan-set Nicholas Bracewell novels and the Home Front Detective series. “He’s so important to us,” says Dunlop, describing his books as “straightforward, quite gentle, satisfying. There is a mystery and the mystery is solved, a beginning, middle and end. We get people ring in and say, ‘I’ve now read 15 of these, what else haven’t I read of his?’ And they buy him in hardback.” Other mainstays are Anna Jacobs, who writes three


ast month, publisher Allison & Busby celebrated its 50th year, with a party for authors and staff past and present—including co-founder Margaret Busby—at


women’s fiction series for A&B and is “one of our absolute strongest sellers”; Jacqueline Winspear, previously published by John Murray, with her Maisie Dobson novels; and Rebecca Tope, author of the Cotswold Mysteries. New names include Susanna Bavin, whose gritty, Manchester-set saga début The Deserter’s Daughter is just out. The “bread and butter” of crime and saga series, as Dunlop describes it, enables A&B to take the occasional chance on a standalone novel, such as Georgia Hunter’s We Were the Lucky Ones. Based on the author’s family history escaping the Holocaust, it came out last spring, with PRH publishing in the US. “We buy quite a lot from Penguin US, funnily. I love its list. We Were the Lucky Ones doesn’t actually fit crime or women’s fiction, but fits almost in both, and we got very strong support from W H Smith Travel, sold out the first run and reprinted. Now we’re holding our breath and hoping that run holds out until the [mass-market] paperback [this autumn]. We thought, ‘We love it, we can do it.’”


STRENGTH IN DEPTH Much of the backlist “ticks on and on”, Dunlop says. “We look all the time at whether we should be repackaging and reprinting, up-speccing or down-speccing, whether we can get things to work a bit harder for us.” A&B does well with wholesalers, W H Smith Travel and Waterstones, as well as discount retailer The Works: “Where we’ve got a very big series, The Works will come in and take the first three, which will enable us to keep those books in print . . . Whereas maybe you don’t necessarily have that ongoing sale through the main trade. I don’t see it as a threat to our traditional [business].” Since January, A&B has also been selling Sikh- interest Kashi Press titles (biggest hit: John Keay’s The Tartan Turban), bringing a non-fiction strand to its sales. But A&B’s staff are also on the telephone, fielding


calls from customers. “We accept every sort of payment, including a postal order,” says Dunlop. “We get a lot of older people who are housebound, not on the internet, and they don’t want to give their credit card details to someone they don’t know. It’s money for really no effort. People say, ‘How many more [books in the series] are there? Six? I’ll have all of those’.” The publisher has also done very well with its e-books, which made up 30% of turnover last year, although sales have levelled out. “A lot of the larger publishers weren’t doing a lot of very aggressive price-promotion early on. We did with the first two or three [titles] in a long series—‘Yes, 99p, have them and we’ll see what happens.’ We had very, very strong e-book growth when others didn’t, it seems.”


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