A year after Marlon James and his indie press Oneworld beat publishing giants to win the Man Booker, three independent publishers have made the 2016 longlist. But what effect does the ‘mother of all prizes’ have on tiny teams?

Alongside heavy hitters such as JM Coetzee and Elizabeth Strout, published by imprints of the international giant Penguin Random House, this year’s Man Booker prize longlist also featured a new face: Graeme Macrae Burnet, whose second novel comes to readers courtesy of tiny independent Scottish press, Saraband.

In the midst of rushing through a reprint after Wednesday’s announcement, publisher Sara Hunt’s phone is ringing off the hook with sales, rights and publicity inquiries. Macrae Burnet’s novel, His Bloody Project, “went out of stock straight away,” she says, and she and her one full-time colleague are working round the clock to make sure it will be available to readers next week.

“It’s been crazy but fantastic … it’s hard to take in when most of the time we’re fighting to tell people about how good our books are, then suddenly everyone who hasn’t been in touch is wanting to speak to you at the same time – it’s that tricky day at work that you dream of having,” she says.

“We’ve entered this novel for absolutely everything – our experience is that we send out hundreds of copies, and review copies, and batter down the doors of people on the literary desks … It’s absolutely fantastic that it’s been chosen by the big mother of all prizes – the one where the judges read all the books, and where it’s been picked over a lot of big names.”

His Bloody Project, the story of a triple murder in an 1869 crofting community, is one of three novels from tiny independent presses on this year’s 13-strong Booker longlist, chosen by judges from 155 submissions. All three novels dropped out of stock following Wednesday’s announcement: as well as Saraband, both Salt and Oneworld are trying to meet a sudden, unexpected rush of demand from readers and booksellers.

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Salt, which has six full-time members of staff, made the Booker shortlist four years ago with Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse. This time, the Cromer-based publisher was longlisted with Wyl Menmuir’s The Many, in which a man buys an abandoned house in an isolated coastal community.

“It’s been completely non-stop. The phone’s been ringing off the hook with hundreds of enquiries,” says director Chris Hamilton-Emery, who has put through a first reprint of 5,000 copies of The Many, set to arrive in bookshops next week.

Salt initially printed just 1,000 copies, and Hamilton-Emery says it has sold just under half of that since publication in June. With “a huge number of review copies” sent out to newspapers, just “a few hundred” were left when the longlist announcement was made on Wednesday morning.

“Within about 15 minutes, they were gone,” he says. “Now we’ve got about a month to sell through what we can, and the big transition is the shortlist, which I can’t even contemplate at the moment. We’ll be ready for it, and it would be fantastically exciting, but the prize is open this year – it’s such a refreshing list.”

At Oneworld, which publishes The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, the team was a little more prepared. For one thing, staff at the independent press now number 21. For another, Oneworld is also the publisher of last year’s Booker winner, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, which has sold more than 350,000 copies since he pocketed the prize.

Still, things are fairly hectic: publisher Juliet Mabey is on holiday in Italy, and Oneworld is in the middle of a 15,000-copy reprint of Beatty’s contender. “We came back from breakfast to a flurry of missed calls [about the announcement],” she says. “By lunchtime we had got a new jacket from the book designers, and had an order sent to the printers … We are a small publisher, but we have a really strong team.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marlon James, pictured at the 2015 Man Booker ceremony the night he won for A Brief History of Seven Killings. Photograph: Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images

Mabey says that James’s win last year has “given a lot of profile to the author, of course – he’s on an international speaking schedule now – but it’s definitely given a lot of profile to the company as well. It means we can buy bigger books, and get more attention.”

“When you’re a small publisher up against the big five or six, it’s hard to get the attention of reviewers, and of bookseller promotions. But this makes it a more level playing field,” she says. “It’s especially great for indies. They already publish with heart, and it’s great to get commercial rewards as well.”

But it’s not always easy. At Salt, which was once one of the UK’s most innovative poetry publishers, Hamilton-Emery and his team took the decision a few years back to refocus on publishing just 12 books of fiction and short stories a year and to drop the poetry, following a slump in the market. “It was a terrific shame,” says Hamilton-Emery. But with Moore’s shortlisting and now Menmuir’s longlisting, and a recent bestseller in Best British Stories, Hamilton-Emery points to a “silver age of the indies”, adding: “Salt has been part of that – of course, the Man Booker list rather supports this view of a resurgence of independent presses.”

Bridget Shine, chief executive of the Independent Publishers Guild, agrees that the sector has been buoyant in the last few years, adding that membership of the IPG is currently at an all-time high of more than 600 companies.

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“Independent publishers face plenty of challenges, not least the Brexit fallout, and our recent survey of members showed us that challenges lie in store on printing costs, academic funding and consumer confidence. But independents aren’t alone in all this, and they prove time and time again that they can respond to change with agility and creativity,” says Shine.

“Getting books on to the Man Booker prize longlist can have lots of great benefits for smaller independent publishers. As well as lifting sales, it shines a spotlight on lesser-known authors and the publisher itself, raising its profile among readers, booksellers, authors and agents alike … It’s a triumph for good books, published with passion.”

• This article was amended on 1 August 2016 to correct the title of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s novel, His Bloody Project, from His Bloody Scotland as an earlier version said.