Anthony Cheetham, the chairman of Quercus books, a small independent publisher, said: “It’s not a system you can opt out of. If Smith’s offer you one of these slots and you say no, their order doesn’t go down from 1,000 copies to 500 copies. It goes down to 20 copies.” Which is why he’s rather dismayed at having to pay for steep co-op for Costa winner Stef Penney‘s THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES because it will not make the booksellers’ Christmas selections unless Quercus pays the going rate,

Neil Jewsbury, the commercial director of Waterstone’s, defended the charges and said that the quality of books chosen for books-of-the-year lists and other promotions was not compromised by money changing hands. “Our expert booksellers, with years of experience, decide on what the best books of the last year are,” he said. “It’s only after that that we enter into a confidential commercial agreement with the publishers to decide how best to feature and promote these titles.” Well, it ain’t so confidential anymore, and it remains to be seen whether consumers, er, readers will care about co-op practices. Maybe in another world we’d see a scandal along the lines of the early 1960s payola days, but it’s not exactly the 1960s anymore, now is it?

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“This year’s Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction longlist is an absolute delight given the diversity and quality of the work,” commented Muriel Gray, Chair of Judges. “Our decision has resulted in a spectrum arching from several new novels of outstanding merit, to exciting new books from important and established authors. Subject matter varies from the minutiae of personal experience, the exuberance of free thinking, the thrilling and entertaining epic, to the witty, the highly political, the challenging and enlightening.”

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Crucial to the small houses’ marketing power, however, has been a consortium called the Independent Alliance. It combines the sales and marketing efforts of seven small publishers, including Faber and Faber, Canongate and Profile, to achieve competitive scale. Consolidation among British booksellers means that with such marketing muscle behind them small publishers can gain wide exposure for a book if it is picked up by just one of the large retailers such as Waterstone’s. “Without the alliance, we never would have had the reach or visibility for [Tenderness of Wolves] that we had before the award,” said Mark Smith, Quercus’ CEO.

Or without some luck. “[Cheetham's] ex-wife, Rosie Cheetham, was a literary agent working for Time Warner at the time,” said Mr Smith. “She loved the book and tried to buy it, but they turned it down. So she passed it on to Anthony, and he loved it too.”

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But the 10-strong judging panel, including chairman Armando Iannucci, broadcasters Kate Adie and Clive Anderson, and Carol Thatcher, daughter of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, took little more than an hour to pick Penney’s novel. “We felt that it was not just an extraordinary first novel but an extraordinary novel,” said Ianucci. “It was an amazingly ambitious undertaking which was achieved completely.”

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More coverage by way of the Times (London), the Guardian, the Telegraph, Metro UK, and Bloomberg News.

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