It has not been easy for smaller independent publishers to prosper in the postpandemic world. Rising costs coupled with flat industry sales have forced them to seek savings, often by limiting marketing efforts. And while larger houses can use acquisitions to create better operating efficiencies to protect their bottom lines, most indie presses don’t have that option. So in February a number of indie publishers formed two groups, the Stable Book Group and Publishers Cooperative, to share resources. “Publishers Cooperative is about collaboration to maximize economies of scale,” says Ulysses Press owner Keith Reigert, who is involved with both groups.

Financial pressure is likely one reason submissions to PW’s annual fast-growing feature were at a low, with only five publishers qualifying. As in previous years, independent publishers with annual net sales of $2 million to $10 million that showed growth in 2024 over 2022 were invited to participate. Sales, title, and employee data were provided by the publishers.

Collective Book Studio, Oakland, Calif.

Angela Engel held senior sales and marketing positions at Cameron + Co., Chronicle Books, and Ten Speed Press before starting what she calls her “partnership publishing” company, the Collective Book Studio, in 2019. The pandemic, she acknowledges, put a crimp in her plans, coming less than a year after she set up shop. But since then, CBS has steadily gained its footing and Engel has built a company that publishes children’s and adult titles, audiobooks, and journal and stationery items. Though its title output has stayed relatively steady over the past three years, 2024 was easily CBS’s best year, as revenue jumped 55% over 2023.

“What a banner year we had in 2024,” Engel says, pointing to success in the food, lifestyle, gift, and children’s categories. CBS also benefitted from a return rate that fell below 9%, plus its expanding reach in specialty and nontraditional trade retailers. One book that found success in the gift channel last year after initially selling well at bookstores in 2023 was Friday Night Cocktails: 52 Drinks to Welcome the Weekend. It’s now in its fourth printing, Engel notes. Another title that did well in the gift market last year after debuting in the trade was Houseplants and Their F*cked-Up Thoughts: P.S. They Hate You. The two books, Engel says, are part of CBS’s growing backlist.

A standout from the 2024 list was Nosh: Plant-Forward Recipes Celebrating Modern Jewish Cuisine by Micah Siva. The publisher also had a New York Times bestseller with The Fly Who Flew to Space by Lauren Sanchez. Engel attributed part of the book’s success to “a great partnership with Barnes & Noble,” which included Sanchez’s visits to schools in cooperation with the retailer; the Spanish-language edition, La mosca que voló al espacio, was named one of B&N’s best books of 2024. Two children’s authors had encouraging debuts: The Sea Hides a Seahorse by Sara Behram and Patterns, Patterns, Everywhere by Kellie Menendez, which sold well in both the library and school market and at gift stores. The Sea Hides a Seahorse is now in its third printing, and the paperback edition will be released in June.

Diversion Publishing, New York City

Diversion Publishing has been carefully building its business and has grown revenue by 12% in 2024 compared to 2022. The slow build doesn’t mean the publisher has been standing still, however. Its Diversion Books imprint now publishes in the sports, music and entertainment, health and wellness, and true crime genres, and has also started a fiction list that includes six titles in the sci-fi, thriller, and historical fiction categories. Diversion has also deepened its commitment to audiobook publishing, striking a deal last year with Recorded Books to produce and distribute all frontlist and most backlist titles from Diversion Books and Diversion Publishing’s hybrid imprint, Radius Book Group. The company also continued to partner with Open Road Integrated Media to market its backlist of 2,000 e-book titles, a Diversion spokewoman says.

Even with the addition of new categories, Diversion Books has kept its new title count to roughly 25 per year, but that’s about to change. The publisher hired several experienced acquiring editors last year, with the goal of doubling its annual title output by the end of 2026. And, in what the spokeswoman called a key move, the company switched its distribution from Ingram to Simon & Schuster at the start of this year.

Diversion Books has three 2025 titles with announced first printings of 50,000 copies: Son of Birmingham by Randall Woodfin; Chief Rondo: Securing Justice for the Murder of George Floyd by Medaria “Rondo” Arradondo; and The Chosen Queen: A Novel of the Pendragon Prophecy by Sam Davey.

The Radius Book Group had a solid 2024, but Diversion founder Scott Waxman has bigger plans for 2025. Later this year, Radius will unveil what Waxman calls “a line of provocative political titles that engage in cultural discourse.” No launch date has yet been disclosed. Radius also recently formed Radius Creates, a service that supports authors through the publication process, from developing a concept to the final manuscript.

Forefront Books, Nashville

Jonathan Merkh, a Nelson Books and Simon & Schuster veteran, published his first books in 2018 under his startup hybrid Forefront Books. After strong, steady gains, sales dipped slightly in 2024. The cause for the decline was one familiar to all publishers: a major title that shipped late in 2023 resulted in big returns the following year. Still, Forefront sales were up 28% in 2024 over 2022.

Forefront had its share of successes last year, including three titles that hit the PW and New York Times bestseller lists: Fire in the Hole!,
by GoDaddy and PXG golf equipment founder Bob Parsons; By the Time You Read This, a posthumous memoir by Cheslie Kryst that was completed by her mother, April Simpkins; and Forefront’s first YA novel, Chasing Embers by Glenn Beck. The entire Forefront list also benefitted from more direct-to-consumer sales (a trend many publishers are seeing), with Merkh reporting that one author had DTC sales of more than 50,000 copies, and another topped 30,000.

Merkh is looking for a bounce back in 2025, with Forefront planning to release as many as 80 new titles, after publishing 59 in 2024. Books by CEOs are once again expected to sell well, led by works by Mark Pentecost of It Works! and Delta Airlines’ Ed Bastion.

The title Merkh is most excited about, however, is by social media influencer Terri Ijeoma, founder of the website Trade and Travel, where she teaches Gen-Zers how to trade stocks and use the profits to travel. Her book, The Risk Worth Taking, explores those same areas and also involves a risk for Ijeoma: Merkh says she gave up a mid-six-figure advance with one of the Big Five publishers to bet on herself and Forefront.

Spiegel & Grau, New York City

Spiegel & Grau capped four years of steady sales increases with a record 2024, giving the independent publisher a 136% sales jump over 2022. Co-CEOs Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau started the press in 2020, a year after Penguin Random House closed their imprint of the same name, and from the start the women have made it a multi-platform publisher.

In 2024, S&G published seven hardcovers, five paperbacks, and two audiobook originals, in addition to releasing all its print books in the audio format. To produce its audiobooks, S&G has a coproduction agreement with Spotify. Last year, S&G produced the critically acclaimed first audiobook edition of Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus.

While audiobook sales were robust last year, e-book sales were up 44% over 2023, and hardcover sales jumped 41%. The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl and Shelley Read’s Go as a River were two of S&G’s biggest titles in 2024. As S&G’s backlist continued to grow last year, so did its sales, led by Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More, which sold more than 165,000 copies across all formats.

This year S&G will continue to lean into its audio list, which includes Bridget Crocker’s The River’s Daughter: A Memoir and Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability. Next month, the company will publish the first audiobook edition of Amy Bloom’s National Book Award finalist Come to Me. New print books include Beartooth by fly-fishing guide Callan Wink, which was an Indie Next pick and has had “terrific” sales since it release in early February, an S&G spokeswoman says. The publisher is also expecting big things from Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s debut, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, which twines science and memoir.

Magic Cat Publishing, London

The PW fast-growing list has traditionally focused on U.S. houses, but there have been exceptions for overseas indies that are making an impression here. That is the case this year with Magic Cat Publishing, a London-based children’s press whose U.S. sales more than doubled in 2024 over 2023, accounting for about 28% of the publisher’s total revenue.

Magic Cat was founded in 2019 by Rachel Williams and Jenny Broom, and originally its U.S. presence was through a co-edition agreement with Abrams. The arrangement was successful enough that a U.S. distribution component with Abrams was added last fall. “2024 was the year when the U.S. market fell centrally between Magic Cat’s crosshairs,” Williams says. “We finally had the cash and the right partners in place to reap the benefits of unfettered access to the U.S. market.”

The launch list consisted of seven titles and featured books by such authors as Waterstones prize winner David Litchfield; nature writer Robert Macfarlane; and TikTok sensation Iron Tazz. Sales from the list easily topped those from its co-edition titles last year.

Magic Cat commissions all its books from its offices in the U.K., but with a U.S. audience in mind. Williams and Broom have deep experience working
with U.S. agents and have signed popular projects like The 50 States, the Little People Big Dreams series that is published by Quarto and Slow Down for Magic Cat, which it says has sold more than 60,000 copies in North America. The company does have a U.S.-based copy editor (working at the Abrams office), and Williams estimates
that nearly half of Magic Cat’s authors and artists are American.

Magic Cat’s titles center on topics such as ideas about culture, activism, mindfulness, and the future of the planet. “For us, representation isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s an opportunity,” Williams says. One of the publisher’s 2024 releases that attracted lots of attention on both sides of the Atlantic was its Life Changing Magic series (part of the co-editions list with Abrams Kids), in which authors from diverse backgrounds introduce popular kids’ hobbies.

Magic Cat will publish 23 titles in the U.S. this fall, including 10 distribution titles. Among them are Firefly, the first in a series from Macfarlane and Luke Adam Hawker.