Books & Poetry

Short Books
As the name implies, the founders of Short Books originally intended to produce only books that were, well, short: around 40,000 words long and compact enough to fit in your pocket. Initial releases covered a disparate selection of engaging non-fiction topics, from Camilla Parker Bowles to the Soham murders. They should have been great successes but sadly the literal-minded filing systems of chain book stores was their undoing. Aurea Carpenter, who founded Short with fellow ex-journalist Rebecca Nicolson in 2000, remembers popping into one of the major bookshops and being crestfallen to find ‘British Teeth’ – William Leith’s darkly humorous analysis of our fixation with all things decrepit – in the dentistry section. Feature continues

Though it now focuses on standard-format books, Short’s still a broad church: its roster includes Francis Gilbert’s horrifying classroom memoir ‘I’m a Teacher, Get Me Out of Here!’, gift-orientated books such as Harry Mount’s bestselling love letter to Latin, ‘Amo, Amas, Amat… and All That’; and lifestyle titles such as Nina Grunfeld’s ‘The Big Book of Me’ and Time Out health columnist John O’Connell’s ‘I Told You I Was Ill’. They no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts because it would leave them no time for anything else.

New for 2007 is a foray into adult fiction, a move which the team say feels like a natural progression as they love reading fiction so much. They’ll begin with five titles which couldn’t be more different, from an Icelandic saga to an ‘anti-chick lit’ dark comedy.

On the whole, the work at Short is done by committee, with everyone mucking in and deliberating over cover designs and typography. They produce between 12 and 15 titles a year. Short excels at publicity, thanks partly to the impressive contacts Carpenter and Nicolson built
up in their previous lives as journalists. Newspaper serialisation is often arranged six months before a book goes on sale.

External support comes in the form of the Independent Alliance, overseen by Faber & Faber. Members – which include Canongate, Atlantic and the hugely successful ‘indie major’ Profile, in a corner of whose Clerkenwell office Short camps out – get the benefit of Faber’s established sales and distribution network, whereby their reps sell Short’s books on to retailers in return for a percentage of their profits.

Bestseller ‘Amo, Amas, Amat… and All That: How to Become a Latin Lover’ by Harry Mount (100,000 copies).

Short Books (020 7833 9529/www.shortbooks.co.uk).