Five Years of Publishing Beyond the Mainstream: On Setting Up and Running Renard Press

By Will Dady

An unknown wit of years past asks, "How do you make a small fortune in publishing?" Of course the answer is, "Start with a large one!" 

I’m afraid I have to report that when we set up Renard Press we didn’t have a large fortune, just bags of passion, and somehow that, and stubbornness – and the book community’s kind support – has helped us make it to our first big milestone: five years of making books. We’ve not yet amassed that small fortune – but our bookshelves have grown rich indeed with tales from all corners of the globe. 

Setting up an indie press in April 2020 felt for a while like one of those acts which, viewed one way is a stroke of genius, viewed another is utter madness. In case you missed it, there was a pandemic on, and we were all confined to barracks – but as our first print rep said, "If you can get through this, you can get through anything." 

Despite the isolated nature of those months – years – of Covid, which I’m sure we’re all only too keen to try to forget, it was in some ways a good time to be stepping out in a new and positive light. Somehow we chanced on authors who trusted us with their words before we had a track record; and then readers, who were happy to pay good money for these little paper miracles. 

Over these five years there have of course been some hurdles, speedbumps, calamities – it’s famously difficult to keep a small press running and to achieve some sort of publicity cut-through without the huge budget that the Big Five enjoy, and let’s not even get into the disaster Brexit has wrought on exports and politics, and the turmoil of social media under new ownership. But there have also been such positives – a thriving bookish community, recognition through awards, lasting relationships with book lovers. 

At the end of last year we celebrated our fifth birthday with a wonderful, warm event in St Mary’s Islington, in a by turns hilarious and moving series of author readings, raising the rafters with lines from those first five years of publishing. 

The stats surrounding these years are quite startling. In total in our first half-decade we have published 165 books across our imprints, including 650 (living) writers, published in both single-author books and a shelf-full of anthologies, including many debut authors, and we’ve also planted some 2,500 trees. (Perhaps the last of these sticks out a bit here, but humour us – sustainability is a huge part of what we do).

Of course any press could – and will, in the age of AI – publish 165 crap books, regurgitating stolen words endlessly for the amusement and profit of the smug billionaires whose platforms promote such rot to the detriment of literature and the environment. But I’d like to think that Renard’s books are literary gems, soulful and unique, and each books sits proudly on the shelves in my office, as well as in countless bookshops and homes. There are points when a publisher stands at a crossroads, I think – most will counsel to follow the money; but a big part of what makes us different, in my eyes, is that we’re looking for different, and this means looking beyond the mass of published voices – for stories and writers who have fallen through the cracks, who aren’t flavour of the month, who aren’t seen in the mainstream. And when I talk to our subscribers, who receive a book every month, they talk about the joy of reading books they would never have found otherwise – and this is what keeps me going. "Variety is the soul of pleasure," said groundbreaking seventeenth-century writer and sometimes spy Aphra Behn – words to live by!

So it’s important to us that the list remains a broad church – from the outset we committed to gender equality in our commissioning, opting to avoid becoming another stale, male-dominated list, and I’m proud to see great and natural diversity in the shelves, be that religion, class, sexuality or cultural or ethnic context. Reading is, after all, one of the best ways to explore, to meet people and places we might otherwise not; so, like any diet, it should be varied. 

We celebrated our first five years with that Islington evening event, with crates of beer and a whole lot of authors – but we marked the occasion too with a thoughtful meditation in our Renard Press: Five Years anthology. This is a very special, limited edition of excerpts, which I hope will enchant readers, but also be lovingly preserved on bookshelves of book lovers. It is not designed to sit on a bookshop’s till point – or, indeed, in a nameless distribution city by the M1, ready for the space-going tech bro to peddle for peanuts. Even better, proceeds go to the phenomenal Bookbanks charity, who, by bringing books to foodbanks, are doing the really important work that the National Year of Reading aims for: breaking down barriers of privilege. Our partnerships with charities have been key to our work, and we strongly believe that there’s room for empathy in this big commercialised book world.

So if you’re reading this – thank you! – I hope you now know a bit more about Renard Press, and perhaps even about independent publishing – which, I remain convinced, is the antidote to our times. In an industry that is so busy navel-gazing that sales figures are considered the only important metrics in publishing reportage, how vital, how joyous, then, to be doing something different. Our first five years have been so broad in content and creativity, inspiring  and thought provoking, and we sit on the shoulders of our authors; for our part we shall continue to hold ourselves to account and aim to be a force for good, using our platform to publish beyond the mainstream, bringing together new worlds and voices that no longer have to hide their light. 

About the author
Will Dady grew up in the wonderfully named Great Snoring in North Norfolk, and now lives in London. He is the Publisher at Renard Press, and the founder of the Indie Press Network.

I.M. John Lucas, 1937-2025

By Merryn Williams

So many people are feeling miserable because John Lucas, a constant friend and with undiminished mental powers, is suddenly gone. He was 88, but he was still a ferocious worker and never wanted to slow down.

He was probably the last academic on earth who refused to use the internet. Books were his life (he also loved jazz and cricket), and he published around sixty of them, short and long: studies of Dickens, Clare, Arnold Bennett and Ivor Gurney; a memoir of the 1950s (he was an authority, too, on the 1920s and '30s); novels, poems, travels around Greece - I could go on!

But while some writers are interested only in their own careers, John constantly and enthusiastically made space for other people's work. Poets will be especially grateful to him for creating the splendid Shoestring Press in 1994. It really was run on a shoestring, and dozens of talented people were helped into print, and the press also brought a wider audience to the Georgians, Vernon Scannell and Ruth Bidgood.

John disdained the internet, instead firing off letters and postcards to all concerned (although his beloved wife Pauline did once drag him on to a Zoom). He would never have let himself be conscripted into an army or accepted a title. He loved "England, literature, cricket, criticism, history, teaching, publishing, politics, poetry, beer, jazz .... common experience, the regional and the radical, the demotic and the democratic, the poetics of saying what you mean and the politics of meaning what you say." He is going to be missed by, I do not exaggerate, hundreds of people, and I am still aching.

I don't know whether Shoestring will survive. But John's books are still there, and still worth reading, and I hope that some of us will soon be able to get together to share our memories of him.

Scarlett Ward Bennett (ed.), "Elements: Natural & The Supernatural"

About Elements: Natural & The Supernatural, ed. Scarlett Ward Bennett

Elements is an anthology of poetry inspired by the natural and supernatural elements of the universe and beyond. From the molecular chaos of running water and the impatient budding of leaves in Spring, to the whispering aether that fills the darkness of night, this anthology explores and celebrates the natural world, spiritual entities, and the forces at work all around us. It is the first title published by new publisher, Fawn Press, and is edited by Scarlett Ward Bennett with the help of Lexia Tomlinson and Konnie Colton.  

About the editor

Scarlett Ward Bennett is a poet, workshop facilitator, editor and Director of Fawn Press. She founded Fawn Press in August 2021, with a vision of helping to bring beautiful poetry anthologies, pamphlets, and collections into the world. Her debut poetry collection Ache was released in 2019 with Verve Poetry press, and her work has featured in Under the Radar, Eyeflash Poetry, and Burning Eye. She is a workshop facilitator for Writing West Midlands and Homegrown 31, and visits schools around the country to deliver fun and engaging workshops to young people. She has worked as editor for On Your Doorstep Magazine and has worked as an editor for single-poet projects. She came runner up in 2019’s Verve Community competition, judged by Joelle Taylor, and the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Competition, judged by Roy McFarlane. Scarlett was nominated for a Sabotage Award for Best Spoken Word Artist in 2018, and in 2016, her poetry evening Cafe Del Nino was nominated for Best Spoken Word event.

About the publisher

New publisher Fawn Press aims to publish beautiful books of exceptional poetry, as we believe that poetry has the power to change lives through that transcendental connection between writer and reader. Storytelling lies at the very soul of our experience as human beings, connecting us since the dawn of time. We hope to be a platform that welcomes all writers, rejecting elitist and pompous attitudes to publishing in favour of an inclusive approach, whilst maintaining a high quality of exceptional writing that excites and inspires: “Poetry that takes you by the hand and leads you into the woods.” Fawn Press emerged from a passionate love of books and literature, as well as the recognition that the world needs more representation of new and under-represented poets. We are dedicated to the continual growth, education, and application of diversity.

Below, you can read two sample poems from our new anthology.

 

From Elements

Oxygen

Think of a million mouths pursed into an O
and inhaling together, one giant in-suck.

Forget that dream where you always wake
gasping and clutching at your throat.

Think of bubbles rising in a lake –
like them we must release ourselves towards air.

Now that the cool has come, the edges
have softened in the garden a little, our wren

is at ease with herself and we of late
have taken to sitting out, fanning ourselves

and watching the deepening shadows.
There is an art to this – to breathing easy;

half lung-capacity and half blind faith
that the next breath will come, 

that we will not flounder and choke
on our filthy emissions, on sticky particulates,

that we will, somehow, mostly, get it right.
Not unlike like that river fish, the pike,

who lords it over his river underlings,
his green slime-shimmer stalled among the weeds,

his razor- jaws, so cruel, so cannibal,
his habit, or if you like, his trick

of flicking his prey to swallow it head first,
and whole, and live.

How he only rarely misjudges, gags,
thrashes a little, turns belly up and dies.

- Róisín Tierney

 

Ode to the Mirror Carp

I.
Look! How they spin, fins vibrating and O-mouthed, 
scales beating in a blood-rush. 

Mother asks: have you ever heard a fish scream? 
It’s like a body rupturing, eating itself whole before re-entering the womb.

This is how girl becomes woman.

II.
There’s a burning in their stomachs only death can cure.
Their hunger? Watch it rage, it’s the only thing that draws fish out of water. 

See their bodies pirouette for the last time,
they’ll stop squirming soon. 

This is how a woman lives. 

III.
Mother reels them in. 
I have her hands – I know, mine are just as impossible to hold.

Dinner will be served soon. 
I open and close my mouth, and swim, and swim. 

This is how we survive. 

- Nabeela Saghir