Publishing loves an anniversary and houses often celebrate with backlist reissues, perhaps a little brand rejigging and certainly a big knees-up. For its 25th birthday this year, Atlantic Books had a central-London bash in June attended by authors including Oyinkan Braithwaite, Hannah Beer and Mark Forsyth, plus former bosses Will Atkinson and Toby Mundy, the latter of whom launched the indie in 2000, initially as an offshoot of US-based Grove Atlantic.
And while Atlantic has been using the year to celebrate its enviable back catalogue – including Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize winner The White Tiger (by some distance the company’s top seller since launch); Christos Tsiolkas’ 2010 water-cooler smash The Slap; Hollywood-boosted hits like André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild; and Braithwaite’s all-conquering 2019 debut My Sister, the Serial Killer – managing director Drummond Moir says the quarter-century mark has also been a way to think about what comes next.
He explains: “I’ve been here 18 months, and one of our missions is to become a distinctive and thriving independent publisher. If you look at some of our colleagues on the [Faber-led sales collective] Independent Alliance like Profile or Canongate, there is an immediate sense of their character, their identity. I felt there wasn’t that instant clarity with Atlantic – and I think many in the business and other people in the industry felt the same way. So something we’re working on is thinking about who we are as a publisher, what are our strengths and what makes us distinctive.”
So Moir sat down with Mundy and Grove Atlantic founder Morgan Entrekin to get to the nub of why they started the list: “It was founded on these principles of being a prize-winning literary fiction house and having really proactive and timely non-fiction. And that’s exactly what we are doing, drawing a line from those early founding principles through to what we’re doing now.”
This is a bit of strategic blue-sky thinking twinned with urgency as Moir came over from his Ebury deputy divisional publisher role at a difficult moment. Atlantic had had a rough post-pandemic run with flat revenue and soaring costs; in its last full-year Companies House accounts before Moir joined, Atlantic posted a loss of £1.6m. Atlantic perhaps can weather financial stresses better than most smaller publishers as it is backed by the relatively deep pockets of Australia’s biggest indie, Allen & Unwin, which became the majority shareholder in the business 11 years ago. But Moir was brought in to right the ship, and part of that process was a restructure that led to the departure of some long-serving staffers such as James Nightingale, Kate Ballard and Poppy Hampson.
The restructure was tough, but I felt it absolutely necessary because you have to have that discipline around costs
Moir says: “[The restructure] was tough, it was difficult, it was very painful. But I felt it absolutely necessary because you need to have that discipline around costs, particularly as an independent publisher. And it wasn’t just the case that we would do a restructure and that would fix everything, it is just one of the measures we’ve taken. The finances in 2024 were significantly better than 2023 and they’ll be better again this year.
“But it all comes back to the 25th anniversary and our identity. There was an absolute logic to the expansion in Atlantic’s publishing over the years to this huge breadth of publishing. But I felt that we were spread a bit too thinly, trying to do too many things. I felt that we would do better if we focused on our strengths and shift to wanting to be masters of certain areas, rather than trying to compete on everything.”
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Part of this has been overall streamlining, but in a “publish fewer but better” strategy. Atlantic’s sales through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market rose 15% in volume in 2024, compared to 2023, on 15% fewer books published. This has happened across Atlantic Fiction, Atlantic Non-Fiction and the commercial fiction list Corvus, but the biggest part of the shift was remaking the previously catch-all Allen & Unwin imprint to a non-fiction list with an emphasis on smart thinking and mental health. Although the imprint’s transformation has been led by the 2019 publication of Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s self-help tome The Courage to Be Disliked. Moir says: “Publishers often love to whinge about the market; we love to complain. But we started thinking, ‘What are the opportunities?’ So we were looking at The Courage to Be Disliked and it was a backlist book that often sold better than our frontlist. So we thought, ‘Why don’t we make this our Atomic Habits?’”
It has come pretty close to aping James Clear’s evergreen bestseller. With a campaign devised by group associate publisher Clare Drysdale, non-fiction boss Ed Faulkner and creative director Felice McKeown, Atlantic exceeded its target to shift 200,000 units globally of The Courage to Be Disliked in 2024 by more than 100,000 copies (McKeown would end up winning an Independent Publishers Guild Impact Award and was shortlisted for the 2025 Marketing Strategy of the Year Nibbie for her work in the title’s reinvention). And still it rolls on: The Courage to Be Disliked has been in every Paperback Non-Fiction top 10 in 2025, barring the first week in January – when it was 11th – and has sold just over 105,000 copies through the TCM this year, the UK’s fourth-bestselling non-fiction book (that is 5,000 copies ahead of Atomic Habits’ 2025 haul, incidentally).
Moir says Atlantic Fiction, overseen by publishing director James Roxburgh, “remains the jewel in the crown”
Moir says Atlantic Fiction, overseen by publishing director James Roxburgh, “remains the jewel in the crown” and the imprint is gearing up for no doubt its biggest launch in years with Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters. But in addition to the more highfalutin side (like one of the critical hits of the summer, Elaine Castillo’s Moderation) there is a “genre-inflected” strand (Colin Walsh’s literary thriller Kala, for example) plus what Atlantic calls “workshop” and other publishers might call IP, led by Tony Santorella’s comic-horror hit, Bored Gay Werewolf (the follow-up, Shy Trans Banshee, is out this October).
Atlantic is Moir’s first foray into the indie sector in his nearly 20-year career. He grew up in Edinburgh’s Trinity district, studied medieval literature at Oxford and, after an internship at Random House, bagged an editorial assistant role at The Bodley Head (his clearing of Cape publishing director Dan Franklin’s circa 700-manuscript slush pile towards the end of the internship helped him get that first permanent role). Moir subsequently went between Hachette and PRH, including eight years at Sceptre/Hodder and six and a half at Ebury.
He says: “There is not much difference in the day-to-day from what an editor at an indie does compared to a corporate. But I do like that there is less red tape in indies. You can make decisions and get stuff done. I brought in an employee assistance programme when I started at Atlantic and it took about three weeks from saying ‘We should have an employee assistance programme’ to having it; that would have taken two years in a corporate. Of course, we can’t spend £500,000 on a massive novel that [superagent] Jonny Geller is selling. But we aren’t actively trying to do that, we have to find other ways. There is an integrity in that, in this underdog mentality – it takes courage, persistence and there is a nice sense that you have to find opportunities in places in which other people aren’t looking.”