It’s Only a Book!
- David Salariya
- Jan 8, 2024
- 8 min read
David Salariya on a publishing rollercoaster ride with 1100 books
"It's only a movie, Ingrid."
Alfred Hitchcock once reassured Ingrid Bergman with that line during filming. Sweet sentiment, Hitch - but for authors, illustrators, publishers, and book creators, “It’s only a book?” feels quite different.
We know better, It’s never just a book.
A New Chapter Begins
As 2024 begins, I find myself turning a page.
The Salariya Book Company – which occupied much of my professional life for over three decades – is now part of the past. Like many businesses that reached the pandemic years, its final chapter unfolded amid illness, supply-chain disruption, delayed shipments, and the peculiar logistical knots that seemed to appear everywhere at once.
It was not the tidy ending one might script in advance.
But careers in publishing rarely follow tidy scripts.
Books are, after all, living things. They move through time – through different hands, different editions, different interpretations. Businesses change, markets shift, and eventually one chapter concludes and another begins.
For me, the blank page has appeared once again.
And blank pages have always been irresistible.
Fortunately, health has returned, energy has returned, and the notebooks on my desk are once again filling with sketches, ideas, and half-formed concepts. Ideas, like eggs, require patience – they must be turned, tested, and occasionally discarded before something worthwhile emerges.
So I am curious to see what may hatch next.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
History offers many curious parallels to modern life.
The ancient Egyptians practised a form of symbolic erasure when rulers fell out of favour. Names were chiselled from monuments so that a person might disappear not only from political life, but from memory itself – a practice historians later termed damnatio memoriae.
Publishing has its own, gentler version of historical amnesia.
When the intellectual property of a company changes ownership, books are sometimes republished with altered covers, new marketing language, and a subtly redefined sense of origin. In the process, the network of people who originally created those books – writers, illustrators, designers, editors, researchers – can quietly fade from view.
It is seldom dramatic. It is usually administrative.
But the effect is not entirely neutral.
As Nineteen Eighty-Four reminds us, systems do not need spectacle to reshape memory – only repetition, omission, and a certain institutional confidence.
And yet books have long lives. Publishing history has an inconvenient habit of reconstructing itself. Librarians catalogue. Scholars investigate. Collectors compare editions. The genealogy of books has a way of reappearing over time.
The making of books, like the making of buildings or films, is rarely the work of a single individual. It is a collaborative craft – built from many imaginations working together.
Why Acknowledgement Matters
Those small credits printed at the front or back of a book may seem modest, but they form part of the cultural record.
They tell future readers – and future historians – who made the work and how it came into existence.
Behind every finished book lies an ecosystem of creativity: the writer shaping the narrative, the illustrator interpreting it visually, the designer structuring the pages, the editor refining the ideas, the production team transforming the concept into a physical object.
To acknowledge these contributions is not simply a matter of courtesy. It is part of how the history of publishing is preserved.
Books endure – sometimes for decades, sometimes for centuries.
And with them, the quiet stories of how they were made.
It’s only a book.
The Day I Closed the Company
May 2022
In May 2022, I closed my company.
It is a sentence people tend to soften. You hear gentler versions – strategic exit, restructuring, transition. All perfectly valid. All slightly evasive.
So plainly: after more than thirty years building The Salariya Book Company, I made the decision to bring it to an end.
Not because it had failed.Not because I had run out of ideas. And certainly not because I had stopped caring about books.
Quite the opposite.
I closed the company because the conditions that once made it possible to build something independent, creative, and sustainable had changed.
What Happened
The formal route was a Members’ Voluntary Liquidation – a solvent winding-up.
In practical terms, that meant everything was handled properly. All creditors were paid in full. The company’s affairs were settled cleanly and without drama.
On paper, it was a good outcome – responsible, orderly, even, in a technical sense, successful.
But paper only tells part of the story.
The assets – the real substance of the business – found a new home. More than 1,100 titles, created, designed, and in many cases originated by me, developed and refined over decades, were acquired by Bonnier Books UK and relaunched under the Hatch imprint.
What You Don’t See in the Accounts
A publishing company – at least the kind I built – is not just a set of accounts and assets.
It is a way of working. A rhythm. A network of relationships. A particular belief about how books come into being.
For years, we operated in that slightly unfashionable space between author and publisher – the place where ideas are shaped, formats are invented, illustrators are commissioned, and books are built from the ground up. Not simply written, but designed, structured, and engineered to work.
I did not wait for manuscripts. I did not rely on agents to pitch projects. Most of the books were created in-house – conceived, developed, and brought to life as complete ideas.
That model depends on a delicate balance – creative control, cash flow, production logistics, and trust. When it works, it produces books that are cohesive, distinctive, and built with intent.
But it is also fragile.
The Breaking Point
The pandemic did not simply disrupt sales – it exposed how precarious that balance had become.
Supply chains stalled. Distribution faltered. At one point, warehouses were effectively locked down – books stuck in containers, orders unfulfilled, systems grinding against themselves.
But the deeper shift was less visible.
The quiet, cumulative pressure of keeping everything moving began to outweigh the reason for doing it in the first place. More time was spent managing the machine than making the work.
Running a small creative company means absorbing everything – editorial, design, production, sales, HR, compliance. Systems designed for organisations the size of Tesco are applied, without adjustment, to businesses of five or ten people. What would be a department elsewhere becomes the responsibility of the owner.
It is manageable – until it isn’t.
The Decision
Closing the company was not a collapse. It was a decision.
A recognition that continuing in the same way would lead to diminishing returns – creatively, financially, and personally.
There were also signs, across the industry, of increasing volatility. Books could move from success to liability with unsettling speed – cancelled orders, pulped print runs, decisions driven as much by perception as by substance.
It raises a simple question: who wants to spend years creating something only to see it disappear almost immediately?
More importantly, I came to a clearer realisation – that the work and the structure that produces it are not the same thing.
The company was one way of making the books. It was not the only way.
So I chose to separate the two.
The company could end.The work did not have to.
What Remains
What remains is not simply a backlist of titles, but a body of thinking.
How visual storytelling works.How information can be shaped into something engaging.How children can be drawn into subjects they did not know they cared about.
Those things do not disappear when a company does.
If anything, they become clearer. Stripped of the day-to-day pressures of running a business, you begin to see what mattered – and what did not.
What Comes Next
Closing a company has a curious effect.
From the outside, it looks like an ending. From the inside, it feels more like a release of pressure.
You stop maintaining.You start thinking again.
Which, for someone who has spent a lifetime making books, is not a bad place to be.
David Salariya FRSA is an author, artist, designer, and publisher who has spent over four decades reshaping how children engage with non-fiction. Born in Dundee and trained at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, he founded The Salariya Book Company in 1989, along with its imprints Book House, Scribblers, and Scribo, creating more than 1,100 titles translated into over 35 languages. He is the originator of internationally bestselling series including You Wouldn’t Want To Be… and Spectacular Visual Guides. Known for combining visual thinking, humour, and rigorous research, his work challenges the idea that learning must be dull. He also revived Old Bear, bringing Jane Hissey’s much-loved books back into print. He continues to create, write, and advocate for books that genuinely connect with young readers. He is currently developing new projects in publishing, illustration, and writing
Stepping Back from the Machine
When David Salariya closed The Salariya Book Company in 2022, it was not because he had lost interest in books, publishing, illustration, writing, design or the peculiar industrial ballet by which an idea becomes something with a spine.
Quite the reverse.
The closure, when it came, followed a difficult period of pandemic-related trading disruption, changing market conditions and the accumulated pressures familiar to many independent publishers. All creditors were paid, and the company's intellectual property was subsequently acquired by Bonnier Books UK, where the books are now being republished under Hatch Press.
That, however, was an exit from running a publishing business - not an exit from publishing.
There is a difference between loving the theatre and wanting to spend the rest of your life repairing the plumbing under the stage.
For more than three decades, David's working life involved the whole book-making chain: originating ideas, designing formats, commissioning writers and illustrators, developing series, selling rights, managing production, worrying about stock, watching warehouses, reading sales figures, signing contracts, and discovering that a spreadsheet, if stared at for long enough, can begin to resemble a minor Victorian punishment.
Closing the company allowed him to step away from the corporate machinery of publishing - the payroll, the overheads, the logistics, the meetings, the returns, the trade pressures and the permanent balancing act between creative ambition and commercial survival.
It also allowed him to return to the things that drew him into publishing in the first place: writing, drawing, designing, thinking, remembering, arguing, and trying to explain how books actually get made.
His continuing essays and blog posts are therefore not the mutterings of a retired publisher rattling the railings from outside the building. They are part of a new phase: a more independent, reflective and occasionally sharper way of engaging with the book world.
David now writes about publishing from the position of a book-maker who has been inside publishing and knows where the levers, trapdoors and missing safety notices are located. His articles explore the craft of children's books, the history of publishing, the importance of illustration, the fragility of creative credit, the threat posed by piracy and unlicensed AI use, and the continuing need to defend human authorship in a culture increasingly tempted to treat creative work as raw material.
He also writes to help new authors, illustrators and curious readers understand a trade that can often seem mysterious from the outside. Publishing is frequently described as if books arrive by magic: a manuscript floats in, an editor waves a pencil, and a finished book appears. The reality is stranger, more collaborative and often much messier.
There are briefs, roughs, dummy books, page plans, budgets, rights deals, jacket meetings, metadata, printers, proofs, sales channels, permissions, reprints, warehouses, returns, and the occasional moment when everyone gathers around a colour proof and pretends not to panic.
David's work now is partly to demystify that process.
It is also to preserve publishing memory. Children's books, school books, Ladybird books, illustrated non-fiction, book clubs, educational series, novelty formats and mid-century design all shaped how generations learned to read, look, think and imagine. Much of that history is too easily dismissed as commercial ephemera, when in fact it helped build the visual and verbal imagination of millions of children.
So, no - David did not leave publishing.
He stepped back from the machinery of running a publishing house in order to return to the larger, older and more human business of making sense of books: how they are created, how they travel, how they are misremembered, how they are exploited, how they survive, and why they still matter.