Despite growing concerns over cutbacks in booksellers' range, smaller publishers continue to be successful at getting their books in front of consumers.

A helping hand is always welcome though, and one of the success stories of the year to date, Serpent's Tail, received one when the Orange Prize was awarded to Lionel Shriver for her novel We Need To Talk About Kevin. The book tops the small publishers' fiction chart for the 26 weeks to 2nd July, with a "small publisher" defined as having had revenue of less than 4m £ through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market in 2004.

In all, Serpent's Tail has four books in the top 20, including another Orange nominee in Joolz Denby's Billie Morgan. The publisher's TCM revenue for the first 28 weeks of the year almost trebled as a result, to pass the 600,000 £ mark. That puts it on a par with the Birlinn group, whose quota of bestsellers has dropped as Alexander McCall Smith books are published in paperback by Time Warner.

Among other independent fiction specialists, strong gains were also made by Titan Books, as the market for graphic novels expands to a wider audience. Tie-ins to some of the year's biggest films--"Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" and "Sin City"--together with a second volume of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, were the big sellers for Titan, and its revenue was more than 20% up compared to the corresponding period in 2004.

Below the top 20, but selling in sufficient quantities to make the small publishers' fiction charts on thebookseller.com during the six months, were some less familiar names.

Transita Publishing, established to publish fiction for women aged 40 and over, saw its first success with Sara Banerji's The Waiting Time, while Richard Gwyn's The Colour of a Dog Running Away (Parthian Books) received enthusiastic support from Waterstone's, and in particular from the chain's buying manager Scott Pack. Other Welsh independents to make a mark included Honno with Lindsay Ashford's Strange Blood and Seren Books with Richard Collins' much-lauded The Land as Viewed from the Sea.

In non-fiction, celebrity chefs cooked up two of the four biggest-selling books of the six-month period. Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy produced TCM revenue of more than 400,000 £ for Quadrille, but the bestselling small publishers' title in both volume and value terms was Antony Worrall Thompson's Gi Diet. Publisher Kyle Cathie's share of the market expanded accordingly, with nearly 1m £ more passing through the tills on its account than a year ago.

Independents' abilities to react swiftly to trends paid dividends with considerable sales of Scoubidou and Su Doku books. The latter, in the shape of Pete Sinden's The Little Book of Sudoku, helped Michael O'Mara's revenue to increase by more than 50% in the first half of the year, with its far more lucrative period for humour titles still to come.

O'Mara also has Sue Crawford's Sharon Osbourne: Unauthorized, Uncensored--Understood in the top 20 non-fiction titles, with...