34 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ APRIL 6, 2020
Fast-Growing Indie Publishers
regional title publisher Yellow Pear Press in early 2020.
Mango founder and publisher Chris McKenney notes that
“while 2019 was full of many wonderful things,” what he is most
proud of about the year was Mango’s ability to win six auctions
when competing with representatives from the Big Five pub-
lishers. He attributes those victories to Mango’s revenue-sharing
model, which offers authors up to 50% of net sales for each book
sold, as well as its “modern marketing techniques.”
Media Lab Books, a unit of Topix Media, began life as a
bookazine publisher before launching a book division in 2015.
MLB’s initial focus was on licensed publishing done in collabora-
tion with companies like Disney, Jack Hanna, and Nickelodeon,
explains MLB v-p and publisher Phil Sexton. After publishing
25 titles in 2017, the company changed tactics to concentrate on
acquiring better titles that will have longer backlist lives, he says.
That decision delivered almost immediate results. In 2018,
sales rose 60% over 2017—and they increased another 42% in
2019, even as the number of titles steadily declined. MLB’s
bestsellers last year included Smithsonian 10-Minute Science
Experiments, Everything I Need to Know I Learned from John Wayne,
and The Unofficial Ultimate Harry Potter Spellbook.
Sexton, who joined MLB from F + W Media, says the company’s
strategy now is to work with authors and licensors “who have theplatform and desire to support their titles with us over time.” This
approach, he says, has created a “far more efficient and profitable
publishing model for everyone involved.”
MLB’s publishing model varies depending on the kind of
book it is doing and the kind of author or licensor it is working
with, Sexton says.
For some projects,
the agreement is
the traditional
advance/royalty
model. For others, where a brand or content is licensed but MLB
is doing all of the creative in-house, it may be royalty only. And
in other cases, books are original works being written by in-
house staff. “We try not to limit the kind of deals we’re willing
to come up with in order to create the book we want, so long as
we’re doing so in a financially responsible way,” Sexton adds.
Despite cutting the list in recent years, Sexton says that, moving
forward, MLB is planning “a thoughtful, measured expansion of
the list.” It will release 12 books this year, going up to 24 in 2022.
“We intend to limit ourselves to 24 titles from 2022 onward to
help ensure we’re focusing on the best projects we can,” Sexton
notes. MLB’s titles are distributed by Macmillan.
“We had another banner year,” says Familius founder and