As anyone will tell you, running a family publishing business can be tough. Not tough like North Sea fishing or coal mining or being a Justin Bieber fan. No, it’s tough because you descend into independent literary publishing like you descend into any form of working poverty: slowly, inexorably, with plenty of crises and some catastrophes, winging it month by month, hoping for a breakthrough that may never come until you reach the satisfactory bottom of the paper-filled pit. At least there’s a lot to read down there in the permanent twilight.

At the end of this long descent into books you find yourself completely unemployable: cranky, non-corporate, grey skinned and red-eyed, steeped in literature the way some people are steeped in cheap cider. You have months where you dread the post, that phone ringing, that knock on the door. The cash goes out, the books come back, but somehow most, well, many, small literary publishers just keep going, against all the odds, producing a vast array of serious and sometimes completely mental books that fight their way through the undergrowth of the British book trade on their way to happy second-hand oblivion or a lifesaving mention in Nicholas Lezard’s weekly column.

Once in a while, you raise your heavy eyes from the stained breakfast table and glance at your literate children to see a look of scoffing disdain as they plan careers in other industries, any other industry than books. Circuses are mentioned. Street sweeping. Lavatory assistants. When they mention books, they do so as if they have just tasted a haddock and taleggio smoothie. Within the family books are synonymous with disease, penury and stupidity. Yet somehow, the world of books seeps into them, despite enormous levels of theatrical resistance. You know it happens when your five-year old keeps making little pamphlets and scribbles pencil barcodes on them. “What’s this wiggle on the back, darling?” “It’s the blurb.” You greet this with a kind of grim resignation. Oh god, another publisher.

In professional life, most of us experience a kind of long drawn out disregard, peppered with the odd benevolent review in the diminishing literary media (“Surely there’s more than one fucking page on books?”), as we move towards an absence of pension and a retirement filled, presumably, with disconsolate authors complaining about the speed of our responses to their complaints about the speed of our responses. Sometimes, you have a little success and manage to find a grand in the bank at the end of the month and can pay the staff. Some are lucky enough to find succour in the bureaucracies of public funding with all its deterministic quasi-business state paraphernalia – all that reporting and stuff; some find it in a private backer; but if you’re purely in the business of selling books to make a living, it can all be rather daunting – like visiting the dentist every day of your life for some treatment. Yet it’s irresistible.

I’ve faced bankruptcy twice while being a publisher – I write this with ease, but the horror of bankruptcy is something you have to live through to understand – everything you know of the world collapses, it’s like standing under Niagara Falls, carrying your children, trying to stay calm and keep everyone dry. In December of 2010 my wife and I (and all our staff) could sense that the conditions were ripe for another financial meltdown, this is, after all, the recession that keeps going, and book sales collapsed and the fragile infrastructure of our publishing business was unable to survive another month without drastic action. It was, banally, crunch time.

It is a winter’s day, a slow day off work, not quite a holiday, but a day between bouts of correspondence and marketing, my wife and I are chatting through Skype in the same house in different rooms, we take the momentous and horrible decision to close our offices, lay off our wonderful staff, sell our home and move our children to a new location. This decision takes almost a minute to complete. We don’t tell the children. We have learned, as most parents do, that involving the children in almost any family decision, while being the muddleclass proper thing to do, largely leads to a kind of weeping stasis, a violent stagnation, punctuated with slamming doors and copious gurning. This time, things would be different; this time we were planning to surprise them with news of our total collapse and imminent relocation to … to where?

Lat 52° 55' 56" Long 1° 18' 16". After a look around cheap properties in the UK (Burnley, Teeside, Oldham, Deal) we plump for trying Cromer. A faded seaside resort built on banking money in the late 1800s, when, presumably, banks had money to spend instead of keeping hold of it all as they do now. It has a surprising number of large houses, houses that can take books. Lots of books. Houses that look like they have histories and where there is the nostalgically glorious prospect of The Sea.

Unlike our home in South Cambridgeshire, Cromer is a town. It will have people that you can actually see walking around during the day. In summer, it will swell in size. There will be visitors. There is a bus service, several bus services – a thing almost unknown in rural Cambridgeshire. There are shops – real ones on the high street and not fifteen miles away in some concrete archipelago of malls and car parks. And there is the sea. This far east, you can’t travel any further north. We began to ring for details of the big houses, the cheap houses, where we could combine our offices and our home in some cohesive, understaffed, over-filled way. This is like stepping back a decade for us: contemplating a home filled with pallets and printer’s parcels, every nook and cranny crammed with overstocks waiting for booksellers to buy them in high-spirited enthusiastic droves. We know it is right, but we know it is a dramatic turning point.

Somehow, we sneak away to view a property on a dank, rain-sodden day. The drive is surprisingly long, the roads are filthy and the sky is sour and black. When we arrive, we park up in a small colourless car park being used as a temporary bus station. We wander around town to get a feel for the place. We’ve only visited the place once, twenty years ago. The rain hammers down. The streets are cold and almost empty. Nothing appears open. The estate agent, who looks furtive and uncomfortable, greets us with a kind of worn aplomb. Of we go to check out our first property. If you have seen the film of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, you may recollect the scene in which Edward Norton returns to share a decaying home with Brad Pitt. This house makes that one look palatial. The walls are bowed in with water damage, we are looking at a £300K renovation project just to move in. Suddenly the Big Idea of a family move looks more like a Big Parenting Disaster. The estate agent is very forthcoming, she practically tells us to run away, fast, which we do.

The weather is turning worse and we wander around town taking the out of season splendour in, hoping to spot another property in one of the windows filled with carousels of second homes, lets and old B&Bs. We spot several. We ask for viewings on a tight schedule, as we need to be home in Cambridge to pick up the kids by three and to pretend we’ve been home all day.

As soon as we walk through the door of what is to become our new home we know it is The Right Place. It is an instant, emotional, physical engagement. All house purchases are like this. Everyone talks about location, price and compromise (I can hear Phil and Kirstie), but the reality is that we choose houses on a physical reaction to their architecture and space. You feel a house through your body and your head just has to follow on regardless of common sense. We look at several other properties, but we already know we’ve found where we will live.

We return home and quickly spring the news on the kids — they sit toad like, there are tears, there are silences; we plan a second viewing. At this viewing, a week later, despite Olympian hostility to The Idea of Moving, the children immediately begin choosing bedrooms. There is a smell of victory though it is not, as Robert Duvall remarks in Apocalypse Now!, gasoline fuelled – it has the smell of books. The bedrooms selected are of course, the lounge, the second reception room, the room we had chosen for our own bed – it’s clear there will be some jostling and scope for a new parental dictatorship. In the end, it will be the need for office space that dictates the layout of the house.

We put our Cambridge house on the market that week and it sells in a day. It sells as we are having a third viewing, and we get news on Cromer Pier watching the sea. However, the chain is a nightmare, it is like Kafka on Mogadon. Months go by while the solicitors battle it out, beetling among the ruins of property law to carve out some kind of exhausted submission from all the sellers in the chain. We work the final months in Fulbourn with our publishing assistants, pack and pack and pack, and finally, close the offices. Great vans arrive and their gaping, racked interiors are filled, box by box, desk by desk, filing cabinet by filing cabinet until there isn’t room for a mouse. Christ, where will we fit all this stuff? Publishing is irredeemably paper fuelled.

Moving a home and a suite of offices is no mean feat. The logistics are complex and intense, but before long everything we own, everything our business owns, is on the move to Cromer. We can’t believe it. We say goodbye to our seventeen-year stay in Great Wilbraham and lock the door. En route, we receive a phone call; there’s a problem with the chain. It dawns on us that the word chain is inappropriate and it should be known as a bowel – a housing bowel. We reach Cromer and are unable to take possession of the empty house. Negotiations ensue and after a day, we are allowed to place our property in the house, but not, under any circumstances, to move in ourselves. This is The Law. We can see beetles scurrying into dusty taupe folders tied with scarlet string. We begin considering that we will have to move everything back to Cambridge. It becomes a waking nightmare.

We have to find somewhere to stay. Quickly, we manage to take a local caravan for a week, and from here we send the children to school in Cromer, driving from East Runton each morning and afternoon to pick them up. They have a look of sordid justified misery – they look like tiny Russian masseuses drinking vinegar shots. A week in, on the very last day, in the empty holiday site, with all our possessions waiting to be returned, we get news that the sale has finally completed and we can move in. We take what feels like our first breath in the glorious evocative benevolent world. The sun is out.

Eleven months on and Cromer has become an odd mix of internal literary exile and new beginning. The children are settled, even happy. We are happy. I finalise and publish a new book of my own. Business is still tough, in some ways tougher, but we’re still working on new books, new publishing ideas, new lists, finding the best authors we can, producing books to the best of our ability, making the world a little bit more beautiful with each additional page. There’s still a sea of admin, too – losing our staff has meant we are immersed in a torrent of correspondence. If Satan was a publisher he’d torment you with eternities of author correspondence. Still, nothing can quite tarnish the Victorian wonder that is Cromer – the ghosts of its buildings, the humour of its people, its art and architecture, and let’s not forget the crabs. I must mention the crabs.

It becomes clear to us that this new sea-borne chapter is a new life, we begin calling it our Third Life. As people say in Norfolk, we’re going to the edge, and we have, and from here, looking out at the North Sea, we find that the world of books is a world of possibilities once again and that’s a world we like. At night, the lighthouse swings over the whole town and lights up its uncertain cliffs. It’s a reminder that uncertainty is so often the foundation of the best life changes.

Chris Emery is a poet and publisher, he lives with his wife and children in Cromer, his latest book, The Departure, is out now from Salt Publishing.