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Category: Publishing

Published August 21, 2015

Europa Editions’ Small Objects of Desire

23womens-arena-europa

The New York Times T Magazine profiles Italian small press Europa Editions:

Even if you haven’t heard of Europa Editions, you’ve probably heard of some of its hits. There’s Muriel Barbery’s “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” (more than a million copies sold); Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth” (now in its 20th printing); and Alexander Maksik’s “You Deserve Nothing” (so far, the biggest title by an American). Like any good branded product, the books have an instantly recognizable visual stamp: stiff paper covers edged with white borders that frame color-drenched matte backgrounds. According to Europa’s Australian-born editor in chief, Michael Reynolds, “When you see them all together, they draw you in like a bowl of candy.”

That effect is completely deliberate. Europa books are the invention of the Italian husband-and-wife publishing team Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, founders of the independent Roman house Edizioni E/O, who have been bringing the likes of Christa Wolf and Ryszard Kapuscinski to Italian readers since 1979. Because their countrymen are notoriously unenthusiastic book readers, the Ferris designed alluring covers to tempt reluctant Italian eyes.

Interestingly, Motoko Rich already profiled Europa Edition in the Times in 2009, so I guess they must be doing something right…

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Published August 11, 2015

NYRB: Publishing Serious Literary Books

Larry Rohter profiles the New York Review Books, the publishing offshoot of the literary magazine The New York Review of Books, for the New York Times:

“From the beginning, it was our intention to be resolutely eclectic, and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue,” said Edwin Frank, the house’s editorial director. “We set out to do the whole mix of things that a curious person might be interested in, which would take you back and forth from fiction to certain kinds of history.”

New York Review Books was founded in 1999, when the mainstream American publishing houses were shifting their focus to big frontlist titles and paying less attention to their back catalogs, sometimes allowing the rights to books that weren’t selling well to lapse, and also cutting back on literature in translation.

“We were picking low-hanging fruit, only no one knew the fruit was out there, hanging from the branches,” Mr. Frank said.

Over the years, the publishing house has revived work by English-language authors including Henry Adams, Kingsley Amis, Edith Wharton and Angus Wilson. In translation, it has issued works by authors like Adolfo Bioy Casares, Cesare Pavese, Raymond Queneau, Robert Walser and Stefan Zweig.

The writer and critic Ian Buruma, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, which was founded in 1963 and is published online and every two weeks in print, said the publishing arm fills an important niche.

“Because they are smaller and more nimble, they can do things that larger houses would be less inclined to do,” he said. “They pick up books that maybe 30 years ago, the big publishers would have done but now have to be careful about.”

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Published March 11, 2014

Stephen Page: Past, Present and Future

The Bookseller has posted an edited transcript of a recent speech by Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber & Faber, at the IPG and Publishing Scotland conferences:

One joy of digital is that it promotes thinking about all incarnations of reading, from the insubstantial to the disposable to the luxurious. We’re back to a place where we must imagine all the means we have of expressing value for a text. Where a reader will buy a £100 edition, let’s make that, and a 99p e-book where that’s appropriate… In the future we’ll spend a lot more time talking and listening to consumers. Whether they’ll listen will depend on our skills and the degree of fandom for the writer. If we’re successful, we’ll get a conversation going among consumers, and if we’re really skilful they’ll come back to talk some more. Having the systems and skills to do this will be the core to a publisher’s commercial opportunity, alongside taste.

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Published October 11, 2013

New Republic: Who Said the Book Industry is Dying?

The latest issue of the New Republic looks at the book publishing industry and it includes an article by Evan Hughes on the relative health of the book business:

At the individual level, everyone in the trade—whether executive, editor, agent, author, or bookseller—faces threats to his or her livelihood: self-publishing, mergers and “efficiencies,” and, yes, the suspicious motives of Amazon executives. But the book itself is hanging on and even thriving. More than any major cultural product, it has retained its essential worth.Of course, publishers think that $9.99 is still too low for popular e-books, an assessment that drove their ill-fated effort to work with Apple to take control of what they cost… It may be that a higher price would be more equitable. But other media still have reason to look at the relative economic health of the book with envy.

There is also includes a much-tweeted  interview with literary agent Andrew Wylie. Wylie is, of course, eminently quotable (I think my favourite line from the interview is this: “We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.”) and interviewer Laura Bennett has posted some choice outtakes from her print piece.

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Published March 22, 2011

“Fuck The Midtones” — How To Make A Book With Steidl

Screening at MoMA next month, How To Make A Book With Steidl is an award-winning documentary by Jörg Adolph and Gereon Wetzel about book publisher Gerhard Steidl:

(via Coudal. Of course.)

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Published March 21, 2011

Benedikt Taschen | CBS News

A short profile of Benedikt Taschen from CBS Sunday Morning:

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Published February 18, 2011

Margaret Atwood : The Publishing Pie

Author Margaret Atwood used to come by the bookstore where I worked in Toronto. It was always slightly surreal selling books to her, but certainly no more so than watching her on YouTube (YouTube!) deliver a great keynote speech at O’Reilly’s recent TOC Conference:

Atwood expands on her talk in this interview with Gretchen Giles:

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Published February 3, 2011

Merchants of Culture | The Book Show

Another really interesting interview with John Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture, about the past, present, and future of the book business.  This time he talks with Ramona Koval for The Book Show on ABC Radio National:

ABC Radio National The Book Show: John Thompson Mp3

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Published January 26, 2011

Merchants of Culture | Beyond the Book

An interesting interview with John B. Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, at Beyond the Book:

[R]eaders are going to be faced with a growing proliferation of possibilities in terms of the ways that they read and consume the written word, and people will make different choices about that. I think what we will see is some readers will migrate effortlessly into an electronic environment and will welcome the emergence of a variety of different ways to read texts online or in dedicated e-book readers or on iPads or other forms of device that will enable them to read in different ways and different contexts… Others will find it less attractive and will continue to value some aspects of the printed book that are important to them, because for many readers, books are not just reading devices. Books are cultural artifacts. They are social objects. They are indeed forms of art, which they like to own and possess and to put on a shelf and display and to share with others and to return to time and again and read on various occasions in the future. And they will continue to cherish that physical objective character of the printed book. And so, some will not choose to read in an online or an electronic form, because for them, the book matters as an object.

Beyond the Book John B. Thompson Mp3

(via MobyLives)

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Published August 11, 2010

LibraryThing for Publishers

Book cataloging website LibraryThing has launched a new service that allows publishers to add their titles to the site and connect with the LibraryThing community. Five publishers have already signed up. Fun stuff.

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Published August 5, 2010

On Publishing 8 Faces

Following on from Craig Mod’s recent essay ‘Kickstartup’  (and to some extent Derek Powazek’s older essay ‘How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half’) designer Elliot Jay Stocks has written an interesting step-by-step post on traditionally publishing the first issue of his typography magazine 8 Faces:

Right now, in an age of print-on-demand for real-world publication and iPads / iPhones / Kindles for virtual publication, it would — on the face of it — seem unwise to launch a magazine like 8 Faces, especially as it’s targeted at such a niche audience. As I said in the introduction of the magazine, “everything about this project shouldn’t work.” But it has, and it’s done so in a bigger way than I ever would’ve imagined. I was confident that there was going to be a demand for the first issue, but I had no idea that it’d sell out in under two hours…

The essay is full of practical insights and 8 Faces is another great example of how people are using the web and traditional print media to publish in new and innovative ways.

(link via Eightface)

How to Publish a Magazine in a Day and a Half

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Published August 5, 2010

Opportunities and Charm

In a recent op-ed for The Financial Times (registration required), John Makinson, CEO of the Penguin Group, outlined the opportunities e-books offer to publishers:

What is being missed in the debate about the division of digital spoils is the opportunity offered by e-books to authors and readers, as well as to publishers who have the specialist skills to exploit it… [W]e should not forget that the growth of the book market has always been driven not by changes in consumer demand but by the availability of new channels of supply. It was true of supermarkets and book clubs, and it will be true of digital platforms and formats.

While e-books mean that publishers can develop new products that expand on the traditional book, says Makinson, digital technology will also provide them with “rich consumer data” that can inform decisions about pricing and content. Furthermore, social networks and online communities  will allow for greater reader engagement in the publishing process.

According to Makinson, technology will redefine the industry but, so long as publishers are adept at learning new skills, it will enhance their role rather than diminish it. And even with the “explosive growth” of e-books, Makinson is optimistic about print:

Perhaps the charm of the physical book will be lost one day. But I doubt it. Readers of all ages retain a remarkable emotional attachment to the thing. It is portable, convenient and a pleasure to own… There’s life in the old book yet.

(link)

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