27th February 2026


1 Company Spotlight


Tailored Swift: ‘In publishing, it’s the surprises that get you there’


Founders Diana Broccardo and Mark Richards on building Swift Press’ reputation for quality fiction and conversation- starting non-fiction. Tim Relf reports


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ublishing is like horse racing, according to Mark Richards ( 2). “You can give yourself an edge by studying the form, but there will always be an element of luck. A lot of books don’t


work, but you wouldn’t be in publishing unless you are fundamentally an optimist,” he says. Richards is in the south-west London HQ of


Swift Press, the indie he and Diana Broccardo ( 1) founded in 2020. Within nine months, it had notched up 100,000 unit sales, and the 10 titles it published in that first year will expand to 30 in 2026 across literary fiction, crime, thrillers and non-fiction. “We had a five-year plan and financially we’re


almost exactly where we said we’d be at this stage, but we got there almost entirely differ- ently from how we said we would,” says Broccardo. “In publishing, it’s the surprises that get you there. We didn’t try to define a brand – we simply aimed to produce books that


surprise, interest and move readers, which gives you a huge potential range of subjects and genre.” It is important, they say, to be acutely


aware of the market, but bucking trends can sometimes yield the best results. Hence books that question contemporary orthodoxies appeal to them. “We often find ourselves doing the opposite of what other publishers are doing,” says Broccardo. Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think: The Inside


Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children was one example. Swift was the only UK publisher to offer on it (it ended up being shortlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prizes) and the pair are convinced it brought a controversial topic into the public domain, changed the conversation and even influenced government policy. Another title Swift was also the only house to offer on was Richard V Reeves’ Of Boys and


2


London Book Fair Special Company Spotlight


SWIFT PRESS


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