INSIDE PUBLISHING – A LITTLE BIT OF LUCK
Books take time to make. As you will know from all those doomed university essays (why is 2,000 words so many?), word counts are pesky things and books need at least 30,000. We also need time to put them into our publishing programmes: design the cover, plan the release date, order paper for the printers and all the hundreds of other little tasks that make it happen.
One schedule I manage has a programme for 2013 sketched out, and we’re in the middle of finalising our 2012 publishing programme as, I imagine, are most other publishers. 2012 is a big year – Olympics in London, Titanic centenary, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Readers will want relevant books and with only 20 months to go, we’ve got to get cracking.
We do this on a smaller scale every year, not just for blockbuster events. Spooky books at Halloween, beachy books in the summer, and of course Christmas books at Chanukkah. It’s not just a cynical marketing ploy (although, let’s be honest, it is that, too), it’s careful planning of our resources to make sure we get the best sales and the readers get the most relevant books at the right time.
But some things you can’t plan for, and sometimes fortune is on your side. Before I started working there, my company published a book on pirates in an established series. As luck would have it, its publication coincided with the first ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ film and the book made huge sales. We had managed to catch the swashbuckling zeitgeist.
Fickle fortune can also swing the other way – when I was an intern in 2008, the company I was working for was pulling together a beautifully produced cookbook that retailed at £100. It was to be part of their Christmas offering… And Christmas 2008 turned out to be right in the middle of the recession. Not really the right time for luxury items. You win some, you lose some.
It’s all part of not really being able to predict what will be a bestseller and what won’t. But, as luck would have it, we’ve just published a book on volcanoes…
