No Niche Too Small
Watkins Media’s head of marketing says its unique titles are finding success in the U.S.
Watkins Media is a familyrun company founded in 1893, working in book and magazine publishing—and bookselling, with Watkins Books, a two-story shop near Leicester Square in London.
While our office is in London, the U.S. is imperative to Watkins Media, with 60% of our trade sales and 50% of our total sales (including direct sales and rights sales) coming from the U.S. and 35%–40% of our authors based in the U.S. As such, we deeply value our relationship with our global distribution partner, Penguin Random House Publisher Services, and finding and fostering strong relationships with North American bookstores and libraries for events is always a priority. That said, with such a long history and variety of projects, a reintroduction to our list is in order.
The Watkins nonfiction imprint and our cookery imprint Nourish focus on authenticity, outstanding design, and cutting-edge approaches to wellbeing.
Recent and forthcoming U.S. publishing highlights include TikTok sensation Alessandro Vitale’s Rebel Gardening, Ryan Martin’s groundbreaking books on anger, Catland Books co-owner Melissa Madara’s The Witch’s Feast, and reality TV stars Corjan Mol and Christopher Morford’s The Jerusalem Files.
The Watkins imprint also prides itself on bringing English culture to a U.S. audience, as evidenced by the success of Weird Walk, from the creators of the eponymous zine; Neil Philip’s The
Watkins Book of English Folktales; and the forthcoming Time for Magic by the late Jamie Reid, Stephen Ellcock, Philip Carr-Gomm, and John Marchant.
At Repeater Books, we’ve found that our music titles exploring Western pop culture have done particularly well lately—especially Joe Molloy’s Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music, Aaron Leonard’s Whole World in an Uproar: Music, Rebellion and Repression 1955–1972, and Enrico Monacelli’s The Great Psychic Outdoors: Lo-Fi Music and Escaping Capitalism. These and our other music titles have really captured the imaginations of our readers by offering both escapism and political inspiration during complex times.
Angry Robot Books continues to appeal to a wide range of readers. The U.S. has always been a vital territory for AR, and we actively look for American authors like S.T. Gibson, whose forthcoming polyamorous secret society novel Evocation is set in a Boston filled with magic, and Al Hess, whose Key Lime Sky is a sci-fi celebration of neurodivergency. From The Cabinet by Un-su Kim to TikTok sensation and Australian author Stacey McEwan’s Glacian fantasy trilogy, we are always after bold voices.
Representation across the board remains central to our ethos, and books exploring mental health, loneliness, and the importance of communication (such as Mothtown by Caroline Hardaker) are still reaching readers on both sides of the Atlantic. With the continued rise and celebration of queer bookshops and queer books, we look forward to being the U.K. publisher of P.H. Low’s These Deathless Shores, a genderbent retelling Captain Hook’s origin story, due out this fall.
Datura Books, the recently launched crime fiction imprint, has seen the greatest U.S. success among our imprints with both Mother Howl by Craig Clevenger and Kimberly G. Giarratano’s Death of a Dancing Queen. Datura is a boutique list, and we’re actively looking for more U.S. writers, as well as collaborations with the huge array of indie crime bookshops there.
Finally, Collective Ink is our sister publisher that uses technology to work directly with authors, specializing in titles that other publishers would consider too niche or risky. A small but dedicated team oversees imprints such as Zer0 Books (radical left-wing counterculture), Moon Books (paganism), and O Books (mind-body-spirit). Most popular titles include Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (Zer0 Books), The Heart of Tantric Sex by Dianna Richardson (O Books), and the bestselling Pagan Portals series (Moon Books).
From esoterica and mind-body-spirit books to music, crime, and niche titles, Watkins covers areas other publishers may have overlooked or undervalued, and we believe we have much to offer the U.S. reader.
“50% of our sales come from the U.S.”