‘Small press, big dreams’: the indie that’s reviving publishing in Brum

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that the UK publishing industry is largely limited to three cities. You might have written a pacy, potboiler thriller, a 500 page state-of-the-nation novel, or a ground-breaking thesis. Chances are it’ll get picked up — if it doesn’t go straight on the slush pile — by a press in either London, Edinburgh or Oxford.

Why not Birmingham? Aside from our conveniently reachable location and vast size, this city has an impressive literary history. If not for us, there’d be no The Lord of the Rings or The Rotters' Club. This is where W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice honed their crafts; this place produced Barbara Cartland and Kit de Waal. If nothing else, we’ve got range.

But we’ve yet to create a proper publishing sector, one that can stand toe-to-toe with the big three British centres for books. That's why I'm intrigued by a small but scrappy publishing house that, against the odds, is making big waves from it's little home in the Jewellery Quarter.

The Emma Press was set up by Emma Dai'an Wright in 2012, not in Brum but in Berkshire. However, it's since she moved here in 2015 that the independent publisher has really made its mark, primarily producing poetry and children’s books with colourfully inked jackets – and bagging a steady stream of industry awards in the process.

The ambitious founder cut her teeth in London at Orion which is part of Hachette, one of the gigantic ‘big five’ publishing houses. But while working there during her twenties, she grew frustrated with what she found to be its imbalanced culture.

“I was very angry,” she tells me over Zoom. “I worked with nearly all women in publishing, but there were a few men at the top. I was thinking ‘who has the power in publishing?’”

There were other frustrations, too. She sensed that well-connected, wealthier peers had it easier in the industry, that diverse voices didn’t get published enough. Fed up, she moved back home, took a business course, and launched The Emma Press from her bedroom. “Originally, I had an idea for an Etsy gift business,” she laughs. “I was always interested in aesthetics.”

Although Emma has once again upped sticks, swapping England for Latvia where her partner works ("when I moved to Birmingham, it was for a then-boyfriend, too. Hardly feminist," she laughs) the Emma Press continues to be run from Brum by a small team of three. Crucially, the entire enterprise is run on a shoestring.

“This one agent wanted Penguin-type money for a project,” says James Trevelyan, the Emma Press publishing director who joined Emma in 2023. “We can’t afford that.” I’m speaking to him at their shoebox-sized HQ, a repurposed artist’s studio beneath the tiny, Jewellery Quarter flat Emma moved into when she first came to Birmingham. Jenga-like towers of books surround us as we sip our herbal teas.

Of their output, James says, it’s “a potentially foolish range.” Novellas, illustrated books, short stories, literature in translation, and novels — as well as non-fiction, with a focus on identity. Not least, spineless poetry pamphlets which many bookshops wouldn’t touch are The Emma Press’s bread and butter. But they make it work. “And we already have 2027 plans: we say ‘small press, big dreams',” says James.

He's joined by publishing manager Georgia Wall and trainee, Ella; the trio all chip in on editing, designing, marketing, and holding authors’ hands. And they put a shift in, regularly showing up at reading groups and at live fiction nights, like STORIE at Kilder Bar, where they meet new writers. It’s about 'drawing back the curtain on how publishing works,' says James.

As for funding, that comes from the Arts Council, Creative Access and project grants, as well as sales. “Our bestsellers are poetry,” James tells me. “Those can do up to 8,000 copies, [but] 500 copies sold is good,” he says. Sarah J Maas and Richard Osman, this is not — but the critics are on side.

“For the [children’s poetry prize] CLiPPA we’ve got an 80%-90% success rate in getting nominated,” James says. “And those end up being our bestsellers.” Elsewhere, the Press has won the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice Award, the Michael Marks Award and the Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work.

It's paying off. “This year we turned a profit,” James reveals, sounding still surprised. “Which, when we basically pay to sell our poetry via Amazon…it’s a tough eco-system.”

Indeed, also this year, multiple independent presses went under, 404 Ink and Unbound amongst them. Indies work at the margins, releasing material that might be ignored by bigger publishers, but often goes on to get shortlisted for major literary prizes. Some have rallied to sign an open letter calling for help. “If I got into how little publishers make on a book….it’s insane,” James says.

Still, there is some cause for optimism. Birmingham now has several indie publishers: Nine Arches Press, Verve and Floodgate Press are all flying the flag for bookworms in Brum. What’s more, the Birmingham Literature Festival has come a long way since it launched in 1998. Founded by the organisation Writing West Midlands, the event might not have the prestige of the Hay Festival — nor their airs and graces — but its thoughtful programming has earned it national kudos. Plus, they draw in big-name authors like Sarah Moss and Gary Younge, alongside local, lesser-known talent.

This year, The Emma Press will host sessions on feminist translation and emergent writers. One of its prize-winning authors, Malachi McIntosh (who won the 2024 Edge Hill Debut Short Story Collection Prize for his collection Parables, Fables, Nightmares), will appear on a separate panel. 

Malachi, who once went on a Hemingway-inspired road trip of the US and now lives in south Birmingham, is a professor at the University of Oxford. But he struggled to get noticed for his fiction. “It felt like you were always being weighed up by them: a sense of big business and the bottom line,” he says. “Emma was genuine, she believed in what I was trying to do."

He thinks it's small presses that make the most interesting work. “Innovation only happens on the margins: a space for daring, and rawness, and experimentation.”

Operating on those margins is a challenge. Birmingham’s book scene is not as big as London's and it’s certainly not loaded. But, as James tells me, that shouldn’t stop people from being brave and launching their own publishers. If you do, you never know, you might just find the next JRR Tolkien or Kit de Waal.

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