Reactions to The Swimming Kangaroo Time-Out

Posted by Colin Harvey Apr 22, 2009

When I first received the news on Monday that Swimming Kangaroo Books were taking a time-out, I was deeply shocked.

Ironically, it's come at a time when SK were finally winning wider recognition for their vision and commitment to quality publishing.

My relationship with SK is far closer than that between most authors and their publishers. Dindy is as much a friend as my publisher, something that's difficult for others to understand, but which very much follows on from the tradition at Unilever, where as a Business Development Manager, I often worked with the same distributors for fifteen, even twenty years. In some ways, some of them became like family. Which, I suspect in the cold, devious, even paranoid world of the UK Trade that now permeates that concern, probably cost us our careers.

As an author, I'm largely unaffected. I have two novels contracted to Angry Robot Books, and my collection Displacement has already entered the production queue at SK, and I have an agent looking to shop any future books around.

I had feared that something like this would happen given the state of the trade, so I'm not surprised, but I had had a vestigial hope that SK would always be there, selfishly in case I had a book that didn't 'fit' anywhere else, and because I genuinely want them to do well, with or without my presence on new lists.

But all this is jumping the gun.

It's a time-out, not a closure of the business. In eight months time the economy may well have picked up, and/or the pernicious returns issue may well have been resolved -- although I'm deeply cynical about booksellers and their short-sighted desire to kill as many golden geese as possible-- but why not be positive? Being positive is why the US electorate chose Obama.

It may well be that having had their workload eased, SK can re-evaluate their strategy and return to open submissions.

I'm looking forward to seeing them back again.