Another trio of interviews for you from BookBrunch, and each one is a real treat for publishing enthusiasts.
First, I caught up with Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe, who was so frustrated with the state of rights sales, he decided to expand his publishing house from down under to the UK. This is one publisher that’s serious about seriously good books!
“Later on in life, I’ve realised that what drives me as a publisher, in a strange kind of way, is the Holocaust. That’s what imprinted on me the seriousness of the world we live in, and how important it was to try to understand history, politics, people, and how to tell the truth. How to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’. Books have the power to change people’s lives, and we want to put out books that demand to be published because of their intrinsic significance.”
Next, I visited Matthew Lynn and Richard Foreman, founder of the phenomenally successful digital publisher Endeavour Press, as they begin to investigate print. They tell me about how to make the most out of digital, the gold hidden in the backlist, and why traditional publishers are approaching Amazon all wrong.
“We have a mantra here that there are no new or old books on Kindle. Most publishers think of the Kindle Store as a kind of bookshop. It’s not. It’s a platform, like YouTube. You don’t need a relationship with YouTube to get your funny cat video to the top of the charts. You just need a really funny cat. In the Kindle Store, it’s our job to get a book noticed, not Amazon’s.”
Finally, editor extraordinaire, Ruth Tross from Hodder, talks about the secrets to running a successful list, the challenges ahead for publishing, and why she love crime and thriller books so much.
“With crime and thriller, you just have this really great intersection between exciting plot, characters at their most extreme states, and the intellectual puzzle of trying to figure out what’s going on before the author lets you in on it. Crime tells you a lot about the world and societies we live in, their stresses and pressures, because in a broader sense, crime is an interruption of society. It’s what happens when things are going wrong, and that’s quite revealing.”