Abstract
This article establishes a quantitative and qualitative model of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) publisher ‘Tiers’, in order to enable researchers and cultural policy makers to have a more granular understanding of the impact of publisher size. Through an aggregated set of case studies deriving from the UK, the article also develops an understanding of how to build a cultural support model for publishing based on publisher size, sustainability and company life cycle. What the Tiers model underpins in terms of cultural policy funding for publishers is a rigorous and developmental sense of a publishing ecosystem, offering a framework which is attendant to industry and broader contexts, and enables cultural policy funding to take into account publisher development, challenge and growth.