Scribe to establish UK office in 2013
Independent Melbourne-based publisher Scribe Publications has announced that it will expand to the UK next year.
Scribe said in a statement that it will establish an office in the UK ‘in the new year’ and plans to publish between 20 and 30 books a year in the UK. The publisher’s UK print sales and distribution will be handled by Faber and Faber’s distribution service Faber Factory Plus and Scribe will continue to handle its own ebook distribution.
Scribe publisher Henry Rosenbloom told Bookseller+Publisher that the Scribe UK office will open in February or March, ‘when selling-in will start’. Rosenbloom said he will also be attending the Faber sales conference at that time to launch the Scribe UK list, which will include local titles as well as UK-originated titles. Among the first local titles that Scribe will publish in the UK are Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy, Futurevision: Scenarios for the World in 2040 by Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman, and JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing by JC Kannemeyer.
Heading up the Scribe UK office will be publicity director Rina Gill. Gill has previously worked in publicity for publishers Corvus, Cornerstone and Century. ‘Later on, we’ll appoint a managing editor to manage the list and work on UK-originated titles,’ said Rosenbloom. ‘We already have a couple of UK-originated titles that we’ve commissioned.’
Rosenbloom said that he has been ‘mulling over this move for a couple of years’.‘This is a big step for a small company to take, but the reasons for it are compelling, on both the buying and selling sides,’ said Rosenbloom. ‘It will give us the capacity to acquire UK and Commonwealth rights in some overseas-originated titles that would otherwise be denied us, and it also means that many more of our books, which come from many sources, will be available in much of the English-reading world.’
Rosenbloom adds: ‘It means that we’ll have more chance of overcoming the ANZ rights-splitting problem that I and other Australian publishers have been complaining and campaigning about for many years.’
Rosenbloom said Scribe has been acquiring UK and Commonwealth rights from local authors ‘wherever possible for some time’, but the UK office will give Scribe ‘even more reason to do so’. ‘There may occasionally be compelling reasons to do otherwise, but in general we’ll no longer try to license rights in those titles in the UK; instead, we’ll commit to either distributing or publishing them there,’ he said, adding that this is the first time Scribe will have distribution in the UK.
Director of independent publishing services at Faber and Faber Will Atkinson said in the same statement that ‘Henry [Rosenbloom] embodies all that is great about independent publishing’. ‘Scribe Publications have consistently represented the highest standards throughout their long and distinguished history,’ said Atkinson. ‘We are immensely proud to be partners and to be able to bring Scribe to readers in the UK.’
Tags: faberfactoryrightsscribeuk
Category: Local news
