Published in this week’s Bookseller Magazine, article by Tom Tivnan.

Having stood as the Conservative candidate in Norfolk North in 2005 and been on the Tory shortlist in another handful of constituencies, Iain Dale is no stranger to giving speeches.

But the Biteback Publishing founder was perhaps not prepared for the reaction to his tub-thumping keynote speech at the Independent Publishers Guild conference in March. Dale hit out at big booksellers in general and W H Smith in particular for what he said were unfair practices, including taking marketing fees from publishers and “doing nothing in return”.

After the speech, it took Dale about 20 minutes to leave the room as fellow publishers chatted with him, and he has since been inundated by positive emails from the trade.

“I was slightly taken aback,” Dale says from Biteback’s 10th floor office with its stunning views across the Thames of the Houses of Parliament. “I wasn’t saying anything that people in the industry don’t know about. But I guess the positive reaction was because I came out and said it on a public platform.”

One entity that has not gotten in touch with Dale is WHS. “I am completely ambivalent if I sell WHS a single other book,” Dale shrugs. “Any organisation that misleads its customers deserves to be exposed [Dale accused the chain of selling places in its bestseller charts]. I know for a fact that our books come back in the boxes unopened. If you have paid a so-called marketing fee, then you expect the other party to deliver their side of the bargain.”

Politico’s

Dale originally entered the trade in 1997 when he founded Westminster-based political book store Politico’s. He started a publishing arm a year later but left the trade in 2004 largely to concentrate on politics—in addition to standing for Norfolk North, he ran David Davis’ 2005 Tory leadership bid (“neither of which were my finest hours”). He sold Politico’s online bookshop to Harriman House, the publishing business to Methuen, and closed the physical bookshop mostly due to Westminster’s enormous business rates.

He never intended to return to publishing, but started Biteback in 2009 because he thought that big publishers were avoiding non-celebrity political books. He is a “sucker for any political memoir, biography or diary”, and the Biteback list reflects this: new titles include Gillian Shephard’s now timely The Real Iron Lady; 5 Days in May, former Labour minister Andrew Adonis’ insider view at the collapsed Lib Dem/Labour talks after the last election; and long-time Tory MP and minister Brian Mawhinney’s memoir Just a Belfast Boy. Yet, there is scope for out of the ordinary political books. The Speaker of the House John Bercow, for example, will be writing two titles on the greatest tennis players of all time (Bercow was once Britain’s number one ranked junior tennis player).

Biteback expanded in 2011 by launching The Robson Press, Jeremy Robson’s celeb bio, humour and general non-fiction list. “In the end we couldn’t expand this business if it was just politics,” says Dale. “Jeremy is brilliant at publishing general books and this gives us the opportunity to publish whatever we want.”

A big venture this year was the Biteback Paddy Power Political Book Awards. The eight separate prizes were launched with a stellar cast of judges from the media and all sides of the political spectrum, such as Ann Widdecombe, Alastair Campbell and Sky’s chief political reporter Adam Boulton. The ceremony itself was a rare beast in an event’s first year: it made a profit.

The awards were not borne out of a wish to pat politics publishers on the back, but out of the necessity for publishers to diversify. “We had a meeting last year and thought, if in the doomsday scenario of high street collapse, how do we survive? New revenue streams like this are part of it.

“All publishers have to look to forming better relationships with individual customers, and by that I mean people not bookshops. We are going to have to reach out to people, to retail more. That’s not telling booksellers that we want to cut you out of the equation, but if they can’t sell the books, then we have to sell them, in part.”