As you can tell from the image above, we’ve had a pretty big year. On top of releasing all of these amazing books, here are the highlights!
Gill Hatcher was nominated in the categories of Best Writer and Best Graphic Novel by SICBA for The Beginner’s Guide to Being Outside back in July. Then in November she was shortlisted for the British Comic Awards Young People’s Comic Awards. We got past security and were able to attend both ceremonies and felt like proper big shot publishing moguls when they read our name out.
Congratulations to Gill on the success of her book, which couldn’t be more deserved!
We had a great time at a number of festivals and smaller shows, including LICAF, Thought Bubble, CECAF, DIY Art Market, Comiket and Bristol Comic and Zine Fair. It’s always good to get to meet the people that buy our books, so we can’t wait to do them again next year.
We also had two amazingly well attended parties at Orbital Comics and Gosh!. I think we may even have covered the cost of the drinks bill in sales as well…almost.
We arranged a couple of distribution deals and also struck up direct relationships with some new shops, including Page 45 whose reviews of our books and incredible support have been a massive plus this year.
A number of our books have made appearances in the end of year polls and we were even nominated as Best Publisher of 2014 in the Broken Frontier Awards! Thankfully we didn’t win otherwise we might have lost our charming underdog status…
So how do we plan to try to top this in 2015?
Well to start with we’ll be focusing more on the AHArts line, with 2015 seeing the welcome return of both Tiny Dancing and Fronts. We’ll have books out by a couple of AHP regulars, both of which will be tied to exhibitions, and one by a creator who we’ve never worked with before, but have been mentioning on social media a lot.
On the comics side of things, we’ll be rounding off the last two issues of this volume of Reads and the last three issues of Metroland. We’re going to be introducing one creator from the US and one new artist from these shores – you may not be familiar with their work just yet, but we guarantee you’ll be blown away by them. There will be at least one major new graphic novel and a couple of other comics from some of our favourite creators who we’ve wanted to work with for some time…we’ll be confirming names and projects soon!
Oh, and the might just be some big news on the digital front…
So, it’s been a big year for us and it looks like there’s another bi one coming up! We’re pretty tired…so let’s just end by saying thanks to all of our class of 2014 in a big long list:
Tim Bird (Infrastructure, Grey Area, Reads), Gill Hatcher (The Beginner’s Guide to Being Outside), Luke Halsall (Reads), EdieOP (Maleficium, Reads), Owen Pomery (Reads), Eleni Kalorkoti (Reads), Simon Moreton (Days), Julia Scheele (Metroland), Rebecca Strickson (Metroland), Jazz Greenhill (Metroland), Alex Potts (A Quiet Disaster), Mike Medaglia (Last Days of Nobodies), and Gareth Brookes and Steve Tillotson (Manly Boys & Comely Girls)!
As ever, thanks to Richard Hardiman of Comic Printing UK , he’s AHP’s Fifth Beatle, Fourth Musketeer and Third Ronnie all rolled into one.
Also, big thanks you to our main stockists, Orbital Comics, Gosh!, Page 45, Foyles and Waterstones!
And finally, thanks to everyone who has purchased anything that we’ve put out over the past year, we can’t describe how happy it makes us every time someone buys the work of one of our creators from us. Not just because it means we get a little bit of room back in our flats whenever we sell something.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (image by EdieOP)!
