Director's Review: What we achieved in 2022
Reflecting on a year of change
I’m going to use this space to present a kind of annual report - like an AGM, I hope you will find it insightful and useful to see how Fly on the Wall Press has grown and where we are going!
About:
Fly on the Wall Press is a socially conscious publisher of politically-engaged fiction, poetry and cross-genre anthologies. Our ethos of accessible and sustainable literature extends to each decision we make, from the under-represented authors we publish, to the paper and packaging companies we work with, to the generous royalty rates, advice and time we offer to our authors.
Commercial Success and Business Growth:
With a background of rising costs across the board, all small businesses suffered this year. It has felt like slow progress, however I have to keep in mind that in 2021 we received an 11k Arts council grant for five months; in 2022 we were unfunded and still achieved a business growth of 35%.
What did we focus on? We signed with Central Books LTD in March 2023 to take our print-on-demand model of distribution up to warehousing, with the aim of improving our bookshop visibility. This had a massive impact and we developed our Waterstones head office relationship, resulting in 960 books sold to Waterstones chains alone across ten titles, where previously there had been no central office purchases at all, and a meeting with head office advising them how they could use FOTW sustainability models, from paper, packaging and working practices, to improve waste within Waterstones. In January 2023 we will be joining Inpress LTD distribution, which will gain us a book rep and increased visibility across UK bookshops. Website data revealed 95% of our shop customers were new to us, a 5% increase on last year.
This is really interesting to reflect on as keeping returning customers was a focus of mine this year - though it is great to reach new readers, rewarding loyalty is a big focus of mine, so I’ll have to think about what we do here. We did launch a website loyalty scheme this year, but unfortunately no one has yet ‘redeemed’ points, which suggests it is not needed (or perhaps the Wix system is complicated to use!) Readers are also less likely to purchase subscriptions in 2022, but I imagine this is more of a rising cost factor of living rather than a reflection on the quality of our books and marketing.
Prize and Critical Success
Small Press of the Year finalist 2022! So grateful for this, our third year running. I love that this award allows publishers to define their own idea of success.
Short story writer Dr David Hartley’s short story collection ‘Fauna’, was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2022.
Best seller from 2021 ‘History of Forgetfulness’ by Shahe Mankerian was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award.
2022 Newspaper and magazine firsts: Buzz magazine Wales reviewed all our 2022 poetry titles, our first novel, ‘Man at Sea’ by Liam Bell was reviewed or featured in The Conversation, The Scotsman, The Yorkshire Times and SNACK Magazine; both our novels this year (‘Disobedient Women’ by Sangeeta Mulay) were reviewed in The Crack Magazine
Appearances: Novelist Sangeeta and poets Sree Sen and Sundra Lawrence each performed at South Asian Heritage Month, Lawrence’s ‘Warriors’ chosen to represent Sri Lanka on their recommended reading list. Liam Bell’s novel ‘Man at Sea’ toured Glasgow (Waterstones), Stirling (The Book Nook, the University) and Aberdeen.
Evidence of market-leading books, or books that serve a niche
For the second year we teamed up with Sabotage Reviews to launch ‘In Conversation with… Literary Journals’, a non-fiction interview series which this year we took internationally. Though there are listing guides out there, but they do not offer advice, or personal reflections from the editors of each company. This was specifically to serve writers who would like to have a more intimate publishing experience, and we aimed this at creative writing students or emerging writers working up their CV to later submit a manuscript.
In 2022 we served a niche with 3 short story collections, encouraging readers who valued concise, intelligent storytelling and alternative narratives. We changed our curated series of individual short story pamphlets into one central anthology (hand-picking writers whose work complemented one another), which we launched at Manchester Blackwells. We also published seven poetry books, with a stand-out being ‘brave little sternums’ by Matt Broomfield – poetry and photography from his time as a gay journalist in Rojava, Syria, which has toured at radical book fairs around the UK.
Our second novel ‘Disobedient Women’ by Sangeeta Mulay is the first book to fictionalise the current-day culture clashes between Muslim and Hindu believers in India, set in the city she was born, Pune.
Evidence of author growth, visibility and supporting under-represented authors
I was able to elevate the voices of our writers through 7 online launches and 9 in-person launches from Scotland to London, achieving our highest visibility in chain bookstores to date.
Diverse readership for diverse books: With Sangeeta, Sree, Sundra and Dal being debut authors, and with it also having been the 75th year of independence for India and Pakistan, we teamed up with South Asian Heritage Month to offer interviews with the authors across YouTube, social media and utilised our blog for thought pieces surrounding the conflicts explored in ‘Disobedient Women’. Sangeeta and Dal’s titles went ‘on tour’: I teamed up with a range of book bloggers of multi-faith and dual heritage backgrounds to review these books, ensuring that the books would reach a wide audience.
I ran both the Northern Publishers’ Fair this year and a four-year celebration of Fly on the Wall Press at Manchester Central Library, whereby we had a full day of FOTW author performances, workshops and a talk by myself.
As FOTW has a large rooster of Irish writers, we ran a festival of our authors in Clonbur, Republic of Ireland. Over three days, my authors led workshops and gave performances. The festival also ran a writing prize in poetry and flash fiction categories. I’m immensely grateful to Kathryn Slattery and Mary Beth Lee who run All Saint’s Heritage Centre - the festival was a great success thanks to their love of writing and the Arts and their vision.
Evidence of innovation in promotion, design and marketing
As a small press, I take time to empower my authors. Book marketing is my specialism, and I give presentations to my authors which outline what they can be doing in person and online to give themselves as a brand and their book as their product, visibility. We cover PR and marketing techniques and assess where their skills are, and where they can add to existing marketing plans created by FOTW.
Our aim to be accessible and ethical extends to design considerations. We utilise a sense of fun and an in-yer-face quality with our distinctive cover font and we use the same bold font (our second house font for covers) to achieve a clean and modern feel. We also choose thick, FSC certified bookwove paper for our titles: a quality reading experience; pleasurable to hold and touch. Soft-touch lamination has been a new addition this year, as we improve on our book’s ‘keep-sake’ identities.
Particular success in marketing
The PR campaign for our December 2022 short story collection, ‘I Wanted To Be Close To You’ by debut author Katie Oliver resulted in our highest order from Waterstones head office & Blackwells to date: 200 copies. We presented the gothic, eco-focused short stories as dilemmas for booksellers to solve, subject lines reading as, ‘What would you do if your mother turned into a sunflower?’ and answered these questions within the bodies of emails! We also encouraged readers to post pictures of the book next to their potted plants (in the book these plants turn sinister and their spines grow legs…)
Partnerships and outreach:
We built fantastic university and school relationships this year, touring a university talk geared around practical skills for working within the editing and book sphere post-university (in the light of universities closing down English courses and departments due to government seeing the employability from these courses as low, and therefore classing the degrees as ‘low-value’, we saw a need for students to hear from a one woman publisher, and a self-starter in the industry with no prior industry experience.
We also toured workshops for years 9 and 10 surrounding National Poetry Day’s theme of the environment, visiting schools in the Midlands and the north, armed with our flagship Ecopoetry and artwork anthology ‘Planet in Peril’, which fundraises for WWF. Feedback from teachers was that they found out about FOTW through being a writer themselves, and that they use our Ecopoetry books as inspiration for students within their syllabus. Indeed, we are seeing more educational institutions across secondary schools and university degrees using our titles within their teaching frameworks in 2022.
A note on novels for 2022:
FOTW is new to the fiction sphere, and so, as we did with the short stories, we chose to build up our visibility as a publisher of novels slowly, publishing two in 2022 (and with 2023 taking on four novelists). As a political publisher, the sphere of fiction is an exciting one: with ‘Man at Sea’, we approached politics with a more obvious approach, with the novel spanning twenty years from WW2, from Malta to Scotland. With ‘Disobedient Women’, the war is very much of culture and faith. Both offer challenging questions whilst being a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing story, with multiple storylines to keep a reader engaged. Our aim with novels going forward is that they become a staple of book groups: much-loved for memorable characters, perhaps even enjoyed as amusing and satirical plots, but with a real meat to their subject matters.
So that’s our year in review! It could never cover everything, and indeed I feel like I’ve missed half of what I did, but it has been a year of resilience and I’ve ended the year with an immense gratitude to my talented authors and the people who make FOTW what it is - it is nothing without the community.
Thank you.
Isabelle x
Congratulations on the hard work! You guys do a great job!