People in the book industry and authors pay a lot of attention to who publishes what, but readers are often less interested. It’s the author name that is most likely to matter. Very few houses are more famous than their creators (comics publishers Marvel and DC are probably the exception).  However, who is publishing what has quite a lot of impact on what there is available to read. Imprints are quite an issue on this score.

Look at the spine of a book and you’ll see a publisher name. There are so many of them that you may not have seen it before even.  Harper Collins imprints are easy to spot because they tend to have either the Harper or the Collins bit in the name. Once upon a time, Harper and Collins were two separate publishing houses. Arrow, Jonathan Cape, Chatto and Windus are now all imprints of Random House, along with many others. Why does this matter? Because once upon a time, all of these were separate publishing houses with their own vision and editorial policy. In practice, the mainstream of publishing is dominated by about 6 groups which have grown massive by swallowing whole other houses. The same business plans and ideas tend to dominate, and it is ever harder for new voices and approaches to find a way in at the top.

CI has a lot of imprints, but here the story is an entirely different one. Back in 2001, Collective Ink launched O Books, a publisher of largely non-fiction and spiritual material. In 2010, this started to change, as there were enough authors to form distinct groups and hive off. Pagan authors went to Moon Books, Paranormal writers formed 6thBooks and so on – for anyone curious, there’s a full list here. At the same time, new imprints opened up to carry fictional and autobiographical material as well. Some of those you’ll see regularly here (Top Hat, Soul Rocks, Lodestone, Roundfire and Cosmic Egg send this blog most content, but they aren’t the only ones). Other imprints carry some fiction when it fits with their themes. Where imprints often represent a narrowing of options, here it’s been about growth and diversifying.

One of the things the internet gives us, is the scope to build communities around publishing houses and imprints. The CI imprints all have distinct characters and identities, and those don’t always relate at all to traditional ideas about genre, either. Perfect Edge defines as ‘Perfect Edge seeks books that take on the crippling fear of other people, the question of what's correct and normal, of how life works, of what art is’ – that might or might not mean fiction. Sassy offers “Hip, real and raw, SASSY books share untamed truths, spiritual insights and entrepreneurial witchcraft with women who want to kick ass in life and start revolutions.” Sometimes fiction, more often not. On the other hand, “Soul Rocks Books will rock your soul. A fresh and fantastic list that will take the search for soul and spirit mainstream.” These are not conventional ways of thinking about how to categorise books, and I think that’s really exciting.

Mainstream publishing ties us into pretty narrow models of what can be written. I’m a graphic novel author who doesn’t write about people in semi-fetishistic clothing hitting each other. It’s hard to get that published, but easy to find an audience, oddly. I want to write about love and relationship without being tied to the romance genre. That makes me very hard to place, normally. I want to write about Pagan magic, in fiction, and that puts me outside the fantasy genre to a surprising degree. This is why the nature of a publishing house matters.

If you liked something we did here, there’s every chance you’ll like other things – not because the content is samey, but because there’s underlying philosophy here that makes room for diversity and creates possibility.

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