A business which provides publishing services for other book companies and helps people publish their own books has put £400,000 into new warehousing and offices.
Troubador Publishing has moved into new premises on the outskirts of Market Harborough, in Leicestershire, which will set the business up for future growth and allow it to broaden its book distribution operation to other publishers.
The business has also invested in its online systems with various partners allowing it to send daily price and availability updates to clients and bookshops.
The business was launched in 1996 and set up the Matador self-publishing imprint three years later, which now publishes around 400 new titles a year.
Troubador, which runs the annual Self-Publishing Conference at the University of Leicester, acquired The Book Guild Ltd in 2015 which offers publishing contracts, and it has since expanded the company’s publishing programme to 130 titles a year.
The company employs 25 full time staff at its Market Harborough facility, along with freelance editors and illustrators.
The company acquired the new premises on the Airfield Business Park last June, and has spent six months amalgamating stocks from three warehouses into the single new warehouse.
The offices include meeting rooms and a bookshop where titles from the company’s Matador, Book Guild and Troubador imprints will be sold.
The new warehouse can hold more than 700 pallets of books while a dedicated ‘pick and pack’ facility holds more than 3,000 titles ready for despatch.
The new building boasts more than 40 solar panels, generating enough electricity to reduce the company’s power use by 40 per cent a year. Troubador also plants a tree for every new title it publishes.
Managing director Jeremy Thompson said: “This marks a significant step up for the company as we have changed the way in which we distribute our titles to the retail trade for the better, with new arrangements that are faster, cheaper and more robust than when previously using a third-party distribution company.
“By investing heavily in new systems and processes, we can not only offer our authors and retail customers a better service, but we reduce our environmental impact by minimising road miles for our books.”
Operations director Jane Rowland said: “We have been aiming for some time to strengthen our book distribution capabilities, as we knew that our distribution could be done more efficiently and at a lesser cost (financially and environmentally) if we managed this ourselves.
“This has meant significant investment in both back office systems to supply price and availability data daily to retailers, and warehouse infrastructure to manage the distribution process.
“Both are paying off as we are seeing increased sales of titles across our imprints already.”
The company plans to make its bookshop and retail distribution services available to smaller publishers in the near future, giving better market access to publishers or self-publishers who have multiple titles.
