History In The Making

How an independent publisher made a business out of a very specialised niche

- STUART DANKER

NUTMEG PUBLISHING may have been around for a while, but the startup spirit is strong within this husband-and-wife team. That’s because Nutmeg Publishing has always been a bootstrap business, and perhaps more notably, it was founded with one goal in mind: to make history more accessible.

When Claudine Sequerah and Dennis De Witt decided to go down this path in 2007, they didn’t do so out of the pursuit of profit. Instead, it was solely to publish a book that De Witt had written titled History Of The Dutch In Malaysia, which received lacklustre offers from publishers at the time.

Upon publication, the book would gain traction in its exclusive niche, leading to the subsequent opening of Nutmeg Books, which deals with the selling of books as well as antiquarian, rare, and hard-to-find titles. Little by little, the duo gained knowledge in their field, leading to the company’s growth. And the rest, as they say — which also happens to be Sequerah’s and De Witt’s favourite subject — is history.

So tell us about the beginnings of your business.

It was a learning experience, for sure. Both of us knew so little about the business at the time. But by making all those mistakes when publishing History Of The Dutch In Malaysia, we learned what to do for the next book. And that’s how we’ve been operating from project to project.

What were the lessons learned from that first attempt?