As part of my PhD research into whether there is a bias in the UK book industry against Northern English authors and their literature (spoiler alert: yes), I have heard so many anecdotes of aspiring and established authors being told there is no international market for their work. Many have also been told that only people from the North of England read Northern English books, and this narrow-minded mindset feeds the assumption that no one outside of the UK is interested in stories from these regions.
But that’s simply not true (trust me, I’m a doctor) and here is living proof.
It all started with a tweet. Last week, 2021 Northbound Book Award winner Adam Farrer commented on the fact that 22% of physical book sales of his essay collection Cold fish soup (Saraband) is from the USA. The book describes his experiences of living on the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire, a place that probably few people in the UK, let alone the USA, know about.
“I think the book’s enduring success is largely down to its universal themes,” says Farrer. “I’ve written about mental health issues, grief, environmental issues, family dynamics, small-town eccentricity and love of home, and these are themes you can relate to whether you live in Yorkshire or California. People are just interested in honest stories about people.”
Although much of this success is due to Saraband’s association with the US company Cincy Book Bus, the fact remains that word of mouth plays a huge role in sales and the book would not sell if readers did not have a connection with it. And this is not an exceptional case. Indie publisher Wild Hunt Books found that sales of Gemma Fairclough’s debut novel Bear season (set equally in Manchester and Alaska) has generated 50% of its sales in the US and Canada. They have also sold copies of the novel in Japan, Hong Kong and the EU. The publisher’s next project, a novella series by North American authors called The Northern Weird Project, has already received 41% of reviewer requests from North America and the EU.
International audiences are more interested in the stories, themes and characters than in the origins of a book or its author.
That covers fiction and non-fiction. But what about children’s books? The picture book by the author Richard O’Neill Polonius, the pit pony (Child’s Play) has (in the author’s words) “been very well received in the US and elsewhere. The idea that a picture book based on a true story on the outskirts of a village in County Durham could travel across the world to the US would have been unimaginable to me as a child and fills me as an adult with a huge sense of joy and achievement. Perhaps it is the idea – which many of us northern writers grow up with – that no one outside our area would be interested in our culture because we did not find it reflected in the books we read as children.”
Is this a question of precedent? If publishers have rarely attempted to sell regional stories on the international market, for whatever reason, how do they really know there is no market for them? It is also telling that all three examples come from small or independent publishers. If they can do it, why can’t the larger publishers?
Author and editor Roya Khatiblou puts it simply: “America simply doesn’t care about class like Britain does and doesn’t recognize the North here compared to other parts of the world.”
Nor is this the case anywhere else in the world. Britain is the only place where this is the case. There, people cling to stereotypes and prejudices which, as we say in the North, mean absolutely nothing. As the experiences of Farrer, O’Neill and Fairclough show, international readers are more interested in the stories, themes and characters than in the origins of a book or its author.
I’ve just signed with an Australian agent, Brendan Fredericks, who took on my novel because of its northern setting and use of the Pitmatic dialect, saying, “The characters really spoke to me.” If a guy from Sydney can connect so deeply with the dialect and characters of a north-eastern mining village, then the argument that these kinds of books are too provincial for an international market is moot, isn’t it?
Perhaps it is time for British publishers to consider whether there really is no international market for books from the regions of the UK – or whether it is rather our own deep-rooted prejudices and stereotypes about class and regionalism that are blocking that market.
If the world can read and rave about books with small town settings like The song of the crayfish, The dry And To disturb the nightingale then they can certainly get a handle on Leeds, Durham and Middlesbrough. As the above successes prove, they might even like it.
