Basic Information

This section contained four questions:

1. How many staff (full time equivalent), apart from yourself, does your company employ?
2. Into which band does your annual revenue fall (in USD)?
3. Where is your central office located?
4. On which category or categories of publishing do you focus?

The purpose of these questions was to collect a comparable set of basic data points on each respondent.

How many staff, apart from yourself, does your company employ?

Figure 1: How many staff (full time equivalent), apart from yourself, does your company employ?

Unsurprisingly, the majority of smaller publishers reported employing just one or two staff members, or none at all.

Into which band does your annual revenue fall (in USD)?

Figure 2: Into which band does your annual revenue fall (in USD)?

Again, a significant proportion of respondents reported annual revenue in the smallest bracket, USD$100,000 or less. However, over 10% of respondents reported annual revenue in excess of $1 million.

Where is your central office located?

Figure 3: Where is your central office located?

Respondents hailed from nine countries, with results dominated by respondents from the United Kingdom. This imbalance suggests that the results are less representative of the global small publishing community than they could be. Ideally, I would have liked to gather more results from the United States, due to the much larger number of small publishers operating there.

On which category or categories of publishing do you focus?

Figure 4: On which category or categories of publishing do you focus?

The 59 respondents reported operating in 21 categories of publishing. The most popular category was nonfiction, in which more than 60% of respondents were involved, closely followed by fiction, with 40%. Academic, children’s, poetry, theology, and travel were also reported by at least 5% of respondents.