WHEN Jamie Byng, the long-haired and casually dressed owner of Canongate publishers, picked up the Booker prize for Yann Martel's little known novel Life Of Pi, the publishing world drew breath.
Not since the 18th century, when Edinburgh rivalled
London as the centre of global publishing with writers including Robert Burns and publications such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, had the industry enjoyed such world acclaim.
Amid a cut-throat climate, dominated by a few retailing giants, massive discounting, celebrity memoirs and the well-stocked warehouses of Amazon, Scotland's small £50m industry had secured the most prestigious prize of them all.
In the following years, best-selling authors such as Alexander McCall Smith, Ian Rankin and Harry Potter creator JK Rowling continued the momentum. While London's publishing houses paid out a series of six-figure sums for flops such as The Blunkett Tapes: My Life In The Bear Pit and My Defence by England footballer Ashley Cole, a handful of independent Scottish houses continued to buck the trend.
With the help from the Government-backed Scottish Publishers Association (SPA) and Scottish Arts Council (SAC), a coterie of Edinburgh-based publishers including Birlinn, Canongate, Mainstream and Black & White quietly set about building an international reputation for Scottish publishing.
But a recent row surrounding the Government-backed quango set up to fund and promote Scottish publishing looks set to tear the industry apart and raises questions over the future of the sector. With claims of "staggering incompetence" and "bleeding cash" amid splits and resignations, the atmosphere among this small group of publishers has turned poisonous.
At the centre of the dispute is the funding of literature and publishing in Scotland. Or, as Hugh Andrew, owner of Polygon, puts it, "the lack of financial skills among those who spend the public purse".
Andrew's beef is with Publishing Scotland, a not-for-profit company formed to take responsibility for the representation and development of the publishing sector in Scotland.
Polygon, Scotland's largest publisher, which puts out 150 new books a year – including works by great Scottish writers past and present such as James Kelman and Alexander McCall Smith – has withdrawn from its membership of Publishing Scotland in protest that while the body has received an increased grant from the Scottish Arts Council (SAC), subsidies to publishers have been slashed. There are rumours others may follow suit.
Andrew points to the organisation's new "e-commerce portal" – booksfromscotland.com – heralded at launch as a Scottish rival to amazon.com and praised for attempting to encourage the growing numbers who shop online to buy books published or written in Scotland. But since its inception it has only sold a fifth of its target.
Andrew has described the sales figures as "pitiful" and accused the site of "bleeding cash". He says his own website sold "at least twice" as many books and only cost roughly £8,000 – five times less than booksfromscotland.com.
"I look at the costs to achieve a particular result, and I am staggered, and I just ask why," he said. "What has been the particular spur to my decision to resign from Publishing Scotland is the increase in grant for the body that is meant to represent Scottish publishing. It is getting from £200,000 to £260,000 per annum – a 30% increase in grant, in the same year that grants to publishers are slashed.
"In other words, the quango that is meant to represent Scottish publishing has enjoyed a massive increase in grant whereas those it is meant to help have their grants hammered. There is something seriously wrong.
"What is this grant for? A website that has received very substantial money and has achieved, by its own admission, one fifth of the number of sales that its original business plan projected."
The row has raised questions about the industry's future. A major report three years ago claimed that it was woefully under-capitalised – that to compete with London-based rivals it needed much more investment. Compared with its counterparts in Wales, Ireland, Canada and France, where millions of pounds are poured into the book trade every year, Scotland is miserly, spending less than half a million.
However, Lorraine Fannin, chief executive of the SPA, leapt to the industry's defence, claiming it was in "good health". She said: "We have punched above our weight and done very well. Only this week Hachette has announced it is going to create Hachette Books Scotland, a new imprint which will publish a small list of Scottish-originated fiction and non-fiction. So there is a lot happening but it's not easy and things are cyclical.
"We set up booksfromscotland.com after a recommendation from a review of publishing which was authored by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Napier University and it was designed to give information on all Scottish books and Scottish writers."
Bill Campbell, the joint managing director of Mainstream, which focuses on the arts, sport, health and travel and counts names such as Kirsty Wark, Gavin Hastings and Hugh McIlvanney among its authors, said: "Scottish publishing is in good health. Historically, the role of Publishing Scotland has been very important in training and promoting books published in Scotland.
"Hugh Andrew's reaction doesn't surprise me but it slightly saddens me. Publishing Scotland does a lot to help the industry.
"I have my own reservations about exactly which direction it should be going in and who it is employing but I don't throw my rattles out of the pram to make a fairly shallow point."
"Scottish publishing will survive," says another optimistic insider, "despite the layers of bureaucracy in an already over bureaucratised sector."
The full article contains 964 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
