How do you take a publishing house on its last legs and transform it

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 27, 2002 | by Iain S Bruce

The reasons behind such success are easily divined. Veteran observers of Canongate know it to be a company where committed publishing assistants can rise to run the New York office, where staff frequently drop their lives to work around the clock and where joint managing director David Graham took a 50% cut in salary just to be involved. To put it simply: these people love books.

"There's no formula to what we do - it's all about gut feeling," says Byng. "We take in the manuscripts, read them, and then if we believe that they have something to say we publish them. It's the only way to do it, because if you're not truly committed to a title, there's no way that you can go out there and give it the push it deserves."

The gut instinct of which he speaks has certainly served the company well.

No less than five major London publishers turned down Life Of Pi before Canongate snapped it up, while no savvy suit in his right mind would have taken a punt on a relatively obscure work like Knut Hamsun's Hunger, even if the rights were available for a piddling (pounds) 1500. Byng did, and the resultant volume bucked the trend to sell a respectable 30,000 copies worldwide.

It is this kind of commitment to good literature which has attracted authors to Canongate in their droves. The Assassin's Cloak editor Alan Taylor, who when not lurking on the back page of this newspaper doubles as one of the company's bestsellers, believes this is because the company's brave approach to the book trade engenders the kind of faith most scribes can only dream of: "They pay decent advances, issue royalties on time and pour the same level of effort into publishing your work that you put into writing it," he says.

"That's all a writer can really ask for, and it's the reason we keep going back to them."

It would be wrong, however, to convey the impression that Canongate evolved into some kind of uber-publisher overnight. Despite massive press attention, Children Of Albion Rovers sales were severely dented when the book had to be pulped and reprinted twice following legal action over an all-too-autobiographical short story within it. Mistakes have been made, and Byng freely admits he has been forced to learn some hard lessons over the years.

"Publishing is an incredibly complex business and it takes years of experience to get to grips with the big picture," he says. "Some of the decisions we made in the early years were undoubtedly nave, but, largely due to the efforts of David Graham, we've tightened things up and are operating on a much more professional basis. It's been a wild ride, but we're still here."

There can be little doubt that the independent outfit from Europe's butt-end is now playing a smart business game. A key factor behind Canongate's rise from a 1994 turnover of (pounds) 500,000 to a current rate of (pounds) 2.75 million has been the company's mastery of the international market, displaying a particular skill for gaining the world rights to new works and selling them into overseas territories. Michel Faber has been translated into 19 languages and has sold 300,000 books in Australia alone, while Robert Sabbag's Smokescreen is doing brisk business in airport foyers and international bookshops.