Publishing, Adrian Searle admits, is a form of gambling.

"Last year we published 14 books and in 2014 we're publishing 28. It's a wee bit of a roll of a dice," the man behind Freight Books tells me as we sit in a cafe close to his office in Glasgow's Merchant City. "But what's become apparent is that we're good at what we do. We can produce good books. And there's definitely a market. It's not as big as it was five or six years ago but there are opportunities."

He pauses, sups his drink. "But publishing is gambling and you're spreading your bets." Believe it or not, there speaks a minister's son.

Adrian Searle is 45, a father, the co-founder of design agency Freight Design, an Aberdeen fan, a collector of Danish furniture, the son, yes, of a Church of Scotland minister and, for the past few years, a publisher of books. Scottish books. Funny books. Rude funny books (In Rude Health, a collection of anecdotes from the NHS has sold 25,000 copies). Photography books (including Look Up Glasgow, a reference guide to Glasgow's architecture written by one Adrian Searle; the photos were taken by David Barbour). Comic books. Poetry books, Ebooks. Even football books (Freight's first ever publication, in 2002, was an anthology of writing about Scottish football entitled The Hope That Kills Us).

Freight has published new names, familiar names (Rodge Glass and Louise Welsh have both appeared under the Freight imprint) and old names (in May Freight publishes Outside Verdun, by the German writer Arnold Zweig; a book based on the author's own experiences of combat in the First World War). Not bad for an imprint that's only being going properly for three years.

The humour titles and the photography titles, you might say, represent short odds, but if you ask Searle what he most wants to publish you'll find it's the longshots. That means Scottish fiction and poetry. Five years ago Freight Design set up Gutter, a literary magazine and on doing so found that there were a whole bunch of Scottish writers who had previously been published in London but who had been cut loose by their publishers because their books hadn't sold enough or because, foolishly, they had chosen to write about Scotland. That's where Searle steps in. "My passion is Scottish fiction and poetry. It's hugely important for the culture to have a vibrant publishing scene and it felt like nobody was really making a huge effort."

He says "what the majority want the majority gets," and in British terms the majority is English. "There's been a gap in terms of real commitment to publishing Scottish fiction. It's a hard, hard graft to try and make money out of fiction publishing." Partly, too, though, he suggests, it is political.

"I'm not a political nationalist by nature. I'm a lifelong Labour voter. But I will be voting Yes in September. Amongst other things, it's become very apparent that Scotland is a colonised culture and the dominant culture is the English literary heritage. Pride and Prejudice is being rerun on Radio 4 this week... Again. It's a brilliant novel, but there's so much more out there. Please can we have some more?

"I've seen it again and again over the last three years. Writers having their work rejected by London publishers because it's Scottish in theme or content, which isn't the London publishers' fault. There is just less of a market."

The market is political by default then. But that just means there's room for a publisher such as Freight to thrive. And maybe do things better, despite the centrifugal pull of London. "It's always going to be there. London is the death star and that's just a law of physics. I don't get emotional about it. One is brought up with the attitude that if it's London it must be good whereas when you get older you actually realise the scale of the companies, the scale of the organisations, the scale of everything actually hides a huge amount of mediocrity. On the design side of things we've come across the greatest incompetence and profligacy within these large multinationals.

"That's the great thing about a small country. You can't hide in the same way. One of Scotland's great strengths is just how self-critical we are. That lack of confidence can make us feel intimidated, but that can also be the thing that spurs us on to achieve."

Searle knows all about that. He spent the first seven years of his life in Aberdeen - hence his love of "the dandy Dons" - before growing up near Falkirk until he was 16 when his father moved to Northern Ireland. "It was fab. Coming for Scotland where as a minister's son you're a bit of social pariah - to put it mildly; You were instantly regarded as a freak. In the early nineties Protestant east Ulster was still very much a theocracy and being a minister's son had a certain amount of status which was ... jaw-dropping."

He returned to Scotland to study at Edinburgh University and then decided to join the army. "I wrecked both my knees and there was no way I could continue."

He then got a job in the Belfast office of McCann Erickson, the world's biggest ad agency. One of their accounts was the Government's confidential telephone campaign, "so we had to check our cars every day". He'd have happily have stayed in Northern Ireland for the sailing and other reasons ("the women are very beautiful"), but a job came up in a design company in Edinburgh.

He said: "Advertising is great fun but design is very strategic. You're dealing with the real fabric of companies."

He has a restless CV. He became the first ever creative industries executive at what was then known as the Glasgow Development Agency, working on Glasgow's time as UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999. He then moved on to retail marketing for the Klick Photopoint and Munro cleaners chain, which grew from a turnover of £35m to £128m in his time there, yet within five years had ceased to exist, "a classic example of a high street category - to use the supermarket terminology - being killed by digital".

Searle set up Freight Design with Freight's creative director Davinder Samrai in 2001. Searle is now managing director. He did take a year out to become National Theatre Scotland's first ever communications director, which he loved.

But he quickly realised he wasn't the best person for the job. He returned to Freight and was soon developing plans for the publishing wing of the firm. How much time does he devote to it?

"My business partner would hope that it was less but probably between 50 and 60% of my time has been spent on building Freight Books."

Despite the aforementioned market economics, Amazon's monopoly and the rise of digital he is still bullish about the future of books. Digital, he says, is just the contemporary equivalent of Penguin paperbacks in the 1930s. "I'm certain tweedy publishers at the time were shaking their fists and saying 'this is going to destroy publishing'."

If anything, he says, the book is becoming more important as an object. As a totem. A fetish even. That's why publishers are putting more effort into presentation.

"The thing I love about digital books the most is that they make crap presents. Anyone who gives you a digital book for a present doesn't like you very much. That's the encouraging thing for print publishing. The book wraps so nicely."

You could call it a safe bet.

Adrian Searle and David Barbour discuss Look Up Glasgow at the Aye Write! festival on Sunday April 6.