It's a truth universally acknowledged in publishing that imprints mean little to most readers. Indeed, you might be thinking as you read this, 'what's an imprint?'. Well, an imprint is the (rough) equivalent of a record label. As certain labels are known for putting out a certain kind of music, so imprints are known for publishing a certain kind of book. Penguin itself is an imprint: a paperback imprint, under which all our paperbacks – from Marian Keyes to JK Galbraith – are published (except for Penguin Classics and Modern Classics, which are imprints themselves). But we have various hardback imprints too, and these hardback imprints are known – to agents, authors, bookshops, journalists, literary editors and other publishers, if not the General Public – for different things.
In Penguin Press our hardback imprint is Allen Lane. Allen Lane is known for publishing a certain kind of high minded non-fiction, books on subjects or by authors that have to be known about, from Nassim Taleb on Black Swans to Richard Overy on the second world war. And yet we've always published books that, while close to our hearts, aren't truly on subjects that you have to know about but more on subjects that are fun to know about. These are books like Albert Jack's Pop Goes the Weasel, or Britain & Ireland's Best Wild Places by Christopher Somerville.
Last January Penguin Press had an away day and we started to think that perhaps these books deserved their own home. We thought about the qualities these books shared, and about a name and colophon (or logo) that would represent them. We talked with booksellers about other books and other publishers and imprints who publish well in this area. We asked them what they liked. And in the end we focused on the idea that these books are fun to know: the subject matter is fun to know, the voice of the author is passionate and characterful, the physical book is charming. Georgina Laycock, Editorial Director, came up with the name: Particular Books. Stefanie Posavec conceived of the origami rabbit. The name and the rabbit gave us a visual reference point and helped us focus.
We began to talk with agents about the kind of book we hoped to publish in Particular Books, and launched the imprint at our sales conference in February, with (among other things) a presenter on the books that can be turned into a fortune teller. This year we will publish seven titles with a rabbit on their spine. The first two books are published in July: Why Is Q Always Followed by U? and The Country Alphabet by Geoffrey Grigson. Books that follow, this year and next, include books about collective nouns for animals, the history of pub names, odd words from the English language, gardening, how to build a made-to-measure bike, and more.
So why do we think imprints matter? The reasons are, I suppose, all associated with purpose. Lots of decisions get made in the process of publishing a book. An author decides to write a book or proposal, an agent decides which imprint and editor to send that to, the publishing team decides whether it wants to publish the book, the author and agent decide who to sell the book to... Once the book is bought we all make decisions about format, price, the jacket, the title and subtitle, the kind of publicity we aim for, where the book will sit in bookstores, and so on.
Of course, many things happen to a book over which we have no control, and making decisions doesn't mean we shouldn't be open to changing our minds or thinking anew. But we hope having this new imprint will help us think clearly about the decisions we make, and open our and agents' eyes to publishing opportunities we might not have seen before. An imprint helps everyone imagine what a book might be and fosters, we hope, a sense of common purpose.
Helen Conford, heading up Particular Books with Georgina Laycock
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any plans to print more copies of atlas of remote islands under the particuar books imprint? i for one would like another copy and know of a few others who are also waiting
thanks
Posted by: b machnik | February 24, 2011 at 10:28 PM