2022 was an inspiring year for cross-industry partnerships and we hope to build on those in 2023 to make this a fairer, kinder and ever more diverse industry.

We created the Sustainability Industry Forum (SIF) with publishers and booksellers working to make publishing more sustainable. We look forward to ongoing collaboration with the Publishers Association to challenge the threat of Oak National Academy to educational publishing, and with members of the Anti-SLAPP Coalition to press the Government to act decisively against opportunistic lawsuits that threaten freedom of expression.

In 2023, the results of ALCS’s latest author income survey must act as a wake-up call. We look forward to cross-industry discussions on how we can ensure that a career as an author is not the preserve of a privileged few, with more support from publishers, fairer contracts, and a review of today’s publishing economics.

Following our investigation into hybrid publishing services we have started discussions with several hybrid publishers and industry bodies. We hope that in 2023 we will start to see evidence of much needed good practice, better standards and transparency in hybrid publishing services – and an end to the model where the author finances the publisher. Sadly, we are already seeing a number of publishers going into liquidation in these tough economic times.

We will do all we can to ensure authors are supported, assisted by a generous donation from the Hawthornden Trust to fund £300,000 in grants for authors in need, and enabling a range of other exciting projects and prizes, including the launch of an outreach project in Northern Ireland, following the success of the first year of our outreach in Scotland.