Howling with anticipation

Stef Penney, the agoraphobic British author who won the Costa Book of the Year award for her Canada-based murder mystery The Tenderness of Wolves without ever visiting the country, is the toast of veteran publisher Anthony Cheetham. As chairman of PLUS-quoted Quercus Publishing, Cheetham, former head of the Orion publishing group, stands to do well out of Penney as he and chief executive officer Mark Smith plan a dramatic push for growth.

Quercus, whose output ranges from contract and trade publishing to paperback fiction, won this year’s British Book Industry’s Small Publisher of the Year award and turned a £131,000 loss into a pre-tax profit of £319,000. The company published five titles in 2005, 50 in 2006 and hopes to publish 130 this year, with 180 the target for 2008.

Smith, a former luminary of Australian Broadcasting, aims to boost turnover from £3.6 million to £50 million by 2012 and has hired some formidable publishing industry names to attract new authors.

He has already signed up Australian crime writer Peter Temple, winner of the Ned Kelly Crime Fiction award Down Under and professes high hopes for next year’s launch of Canadian novel After the River and Soul Catcher, about a US civil war slave hunter who falls in love with one of the women he pursues. Ex-MI5 boss Dame Stella Rimington also adorns the Quercus list.