Indie publishers lead the pack

Indie publishers lead the pack.

Despite 11% of Wellington CBD workers and residents being displaced by the earthquake less than 6 weeks ago, everyone found their Unity-bearings again, and helped Unity Books Wellington bring in another record-breaking December. What excellent localists! The web supply was thrashed, and the shop floor was full with people all thinking in public.

Our bestselling book was Fucking Apostrophes by Simon Griffin, published by Icon Books UK, originally written for the copywriting and advertising industry. Media may find it testing to advise this fruity title in full, although Unity people are aware that there are also many grammarians in the non-swearing parts of the population who might forgive it.

Fucking Apostrophes was almost eclipsed by our bestselling NZ-authored book, which roared out from our best & last launch of the year. Goneville, a deeply candid combo of memoir & NZ rock history, was written by broadcaster and bass player for Rough Justice, Nick Bollinger, and was published by feisty Wellington indie Mary Varnham at Awa Press.

Fergus Barrowman at Victoria University Press had two huge winners with Hera Lindsay Bird’s global poetry hit Hera Lindsay Bird, and Catherine Chidgey’s November release on puzzling mechanisms of power, The Wish Child. The big one from publisher Bridget Williams was Vincent O’Malley’s astoundingly well-written history The Great War for NZ: Waikato 1800-2000. Roger Steele’s at Steele Roberts publishing was Lloyd Geering’s widely popular memoir Portholes to the Past. And Phantom House publisher Grant Sheehan had a winner with the rollickingly radical business memoir Havana Coffee Works: Coffee U Feel by Geoff Marsland and Tom Scott. Astonishingly, not all of these books were long-listed for the Ockham NZ Book Awards!

A curious ‘first’ for Unity Books Wellington was that the 2016 Pulitzer novel winner The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Piatkus) outsold – by quite a high number – the 2016 Booker winner, The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Oneworld) about a young man's race trial in the US Supreme Court – and the most biting satire in the shop.

Unity people deliberated for a while last night (until our shoes stopped smoking) about whether to share our secret ingredient. We would never want to stretch the resources of the Mary Potter Hospice volunteers, but one of the best things for our December was that they ran a vigorous gift-wrapping table right outside on Willis Street. How lucky could we get?

ENDS

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