Welcome to Picnic Publishing and our 2009 titles. We are incredibly proud of our second list and commend it: a true ‘picnic hamper’ of historical and political fiction, served alongside non-fiction with attitude. We remain grateful to the Independent Publishers Guild for all it is seeking to do for the small independents’ sector, and to Faber, having mentored Picnic in its inaugural year, for continuing kind advice.

As always, there are no brand messages in our titles. We provide books for readers not products for consumers. We believe the former are not making a ‘leisure choice’ – the latest faux-marketing excuse to explain collapsing sales – because reading to them, as it is to us, is essential ‘food’ for the imagination and mind. As such, we offer a cultural, visual, international, entertaining and imaginative mix.

We continue to publish what interests us, including politics - and remain unafraid to use the word. Here another swipe at 'the market'. For the most part, publishers are concentrating on the under-35s because, with the exception of, ahem, ‘old Europe’, the rest of the world is ‘young’. At Picnic, we are not so ageist. Nor are we cynical: we do not ‘target’ (another example of rubbish marketing spiel) age groups, any more than we do ethnicity and all the rest. We do not need to: we were readers before we became publishers and know our community is what it has always been - a glorious family, sometimes divided by argument or opinion, but never by age, creed, colour, nationality or race.

Of course, it would be great if we could report we have had a good first year but cannot. The whole industry appears to be in meltdown. As a result, and no matter how many events and so on Picnic’s superb writers – including its debut authors - organise, they can still not sell enough copies of their books to earn themselves a royalty. Meanwhile, publishers are subsidising the books if, like Picnic, they are doing their bit for the environment, as well as local employment, by remaining loyal to neighbourhood printers and, additionally, refusing to overprint even though this would bring down unit costs.

The answer to its sales problem, it is told, rests in 'publicity'. Nonsense. Even if Picnic was a household name - and, in another life, Picnic executives were involved in a beloved niche-independent which was indeed a household name - it would still not sell enough copies of its books, at a fair price, to cover its costs. The answer is a simple one: fair market access. Getting rid of the bungs would be a start.

Thank you for visiting this site and our very best wishes. Hoping you will return.

Enjoy our new books - they are very good indeed. We will have more good titles to announce later in 2009.

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