SMALL HOUSES MAKING BIG BOOKS
The Folio Society has a habit of sending its books to convicts. The UK publisher sent a selection of its high-quality illustrated hardback books to a prisoner who had been on death row for many years after he wrote requesting some.
Lord Gavron, Folio's owner and chairman, says he also sent some unsolicited books to disgraced peer Conrad Black in prison. Black was pleased with Eyewitness to History – a four-volume set of first-hand accounts throughout the ages – and sent a letter back.
The gifts to prisoners highlight the idiosyncratic and quixotic manner in which the Folio Society is run. Lord Gavron, who made his fortune in publishing before bankrolling Folio when he took it over in 1982, describes it as a “cultural icon” that is run less for profit and more for the joy of books.
But Folio is both a profitable and an international business: the company made £1m ($1.5m, €1.1m) profit on sales of £23m last year, with only 40 per cent of its turnover coming from the UK. Along with a handful of other independent UK publishers, it shows that in an era of iPads and Kindles, there is still money to be made from physical, and often quite expensive, books. “We are a microcosm of what UK industry should be like. We are an ambassador for English culture,” says Lord Gavron in his office, which is filled on all sides with books.
Other small UK publishers such as Profile Books or Quadrille Publishing have been similarly successful in finding a profitable niche and exporting books.
Andrew Franklin, the head and founder of Profile and a former editor at Penguin, underlines the advantage that smaller publishers have over the industry giants. “Being smaller makes it easier to be nimble and not be in meetings. You are not saddled with the same overheads and, being privately owned, you can take some risks,” says the man who published Lynne Truss's bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
Mr Franklin says the idea for the grammar guide came to him while listening to Ms Truss on the radio and he then approached her. The book went on to sell 1.4m copies in the UK and 1.4m for Penguin in the US, which bought the rights for that market.
Profile publishes an eclectic mix of books, from The Unwritten Rules of Finance and Investment by the financial columnist Robert Cole to Pompeii by Mary Beard, the Cambridge professor of classics. It also has profitable collaborations publishing books on behalf of The Economist and the New Scientist.
Mr Franklin attributes much of Profile's good fortune – it made £1.4m in pre-tax profits last year on sales of £8.3m – to its being “an all-rounder”. Rather than having senior managers with only one area of expertise, Profile's editors have an eye on the business, too: “People at large companies are probably removed from the commercial [side of the operation]: they won't know how to read balance sheets.” Mr Franklin says authors are attracted to a company at which they can meet everybody from the person who pays their royalties to the head of marketing in one visit.
Quadrille, a publisher predominantly of cookbooks such as Gordon Ramsay's World Kitchen, has also carved out a niche through innovation and makes 40 per cent of its sales outside the UK.
Alison Cathie, its managing director, relates how it ran an in-house competition to design a new student cookbook. The resulting title, From Pasta to Pancakes, featured 750 step-by-step photographs arranged as a cartoon strip. Ms Cathie says that Quadrille's success is in part due to “making decisions very fast . . . [and minimising] red tape”.
Folio is one of the older and more high-profile of the small publishers. Since starting in 1947, it has produced sumptuous but affordable hardback versions of classics and obscure books alike. For every Dickens or Austen book, it has published works such as Plutarch or the short stories of William Trevor. The publisher's recent offerings include P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves short stories and Alan Moorehead's The Desert War Trilogy.
The society's 115,000 members and its hundreds of books currently in production rather belie last year's prognosis by the head of Hachette, the large French publisher, that hardback books could be killed off by e-books.
It does not work like a classic book club – members commit to buy four full-priced books a year (typically £20 to £40 each) and receive several for free in return, such as the complete Beatrix Potter or four Elizabeth David cookbooks. No books are sent out unsolicited.
Lord Gavron admits that Folio is run more as an “institution than a business” but that means a big focus on customer service and how members are treated. You cannot imagine many chairmen saying of customers that “they are such poppets”, as Lord Gavron does.
Production costs are fairly high as books can be typeset in one location, printed in a second and bound in a third, many of these in continental Europe. “We don't stint on costs – we have big print, high editing standards and good artists,” he says. But quality is the main reason people return as evidenced by recent awards for design and exports.
Lord Gavron even admits that Folio could charge more for its books: “Nothing is as profitable as it would be if it were run for profit.” He makes no money from the publisher: he draws no salary and takes no dividend, he pays for all his books and he bought Folio its London headquarters so it pays no rent. But he makes sure it is cashflow positive and the feeling persists that it would not be the same if it was part of a big publishing house. At least there would be fewer idiosyncrasies such as the time it hired a van to ship hundreds – if not thousands – of books to the south of France for one rich individual.
“What we want is for our members to have the opportunity to be widely read across the whole scene,” he says, to explain the company's breadth of books by writers from Boethius and Vita Sackville-West to those by Walt Whitman and Richard Dawkins. “The model is that our members discover things. They want a balanced diet.”
FT reporter Richard Milne is a member of the Folio Society
小出版社也能赚大钱
英国出版商Folio Society有向囚犯赠书的传统。一名关押在死囚区多年的囚犯致信该公司，索取几本书籍，该公司将自己出版的一套优质插图精装书送给了他。
Folio 的所有者兼董事长加夫龙勋爵(Lord Gavron)表示，他还主动给关押在狱中、也有着贵族头衔的康拉德•布莱克(Conrad Black)送了几本书。布莱克很喜欢《历史目击者》(Eyewitness to History)一书，还给他回了一封信。《历史目击者》一共四卷，是对几个时代的一手报道。
赠书给囚犯，突显出Folio Society堂吉诃德式的独特运营模式。加夫龙勋爵将其形容为一种“文化图标”，更多追求的是阅读的乐趣，而非利润。在1982年收购Folio之前，加夫龙通过出版业务发迹。
但 Folio既有钱可赚，同时也是一家国际化企业：该公司去年销售额为2300万英镑，实现利润100万英镑，其中仅有40%的收入来自英国。它与少数其它 英国独立出版商共同证明，在这个iPad和Kindle横行的时代，人们仍然能够通过往往较为昂贵的实体书赚钱。“我们是英国出版业应如何发展的缩影。我 们是英国文化的传播者，”在自己堆满了书的办公室里，加龙夫如是说道。
英国其它小型出版商——如Profile Books和Quadrille Publishing——也同样成功找到了有利可图的利基市场，并成功地从事图书出口业务。
安 德鲁•富兰克林(Andrew Franklin)是Profile总裁兼创始人，曾担任过企鹅出版社(Penguin)编辑。他着重指出了小型出版商相对于行业巨擘的优势，“规模小让 你更容易迅速做出反应，不用每天开会。你不用承担像大公司那样沉重的管理费用，而且，作为私人公司，你可以冒一些风险。”林恩•特拉斯(Lynne Truss)的畅销书Eats, Shoots & Leaves就由富兰克林出版。
富兰克林表示，他在广播中听到特拉斯的讲话时，脑海中突然闪现了出版这本语法指导书的想法，他随后便接洽了特拉斯。Eats, Shoots & Leaves在英国售出140万册，而购买了该书在美国市场出版权的企鹅出版社，也在美售出了140万册。
Profile 出版的书题材多样：从金融专栏作家罗伯特•科尔(Robert Cole)的《理财投资不成文规定》(The Unwritten Laws of Finance and Investment)，到剑桥(Cambridge)古典学教授玛丽•比尔德(Mary Beard)的《庞贝》(Pompeii)。它还有一些有利可图的合作项目，即为《经济学人》(The Economist)与《新科学家》(New Scientist)出版图书。
Profile去年销售额为830万英镑，税前利润为140万英镑。富兰克林将这种好运气主要归因于它的 “全能型”战略。在Profile，高级经理人不是只有一个领域的专业技能，出版社的编辑也关注企业运转：“大公司或许不让编辑插手商业（运营）方面的事 情：他们不会知道如何阅读资产负债表。”富兰克林表示，作家们之所以受到吸引，是因为他们来公司一次，就可以会见从支付版税到负责营销的所有人。
Quadrille主要出版烹饪类图书，比如，戈登•拉姆齐(Gordon Ramsay)的《世界厨房》(World Kitchen)。该出版商也通过创新创造出了一个利基市场，40%的销售额来自于海外。
Quadrille 董事总经理艾莉森•凯西(Alison Cathie)讲述了公司如何开展内部竞赛，鼓励员工设计一本新学生烹饪书的事例。该书最后定名为《从意大利通心粉到松饼》(From Pasta to Pancakes)，以连环画的形式呈现750个烹饪步骤。凯西表示，Quadrille的成功一定程度上得益于“非常迅速地决策……（以及尽量减少）繁 琐的程序。”
Folio是历史更为悠久、地位更加显赫的小型出版商之 一。自1947年创立以来，一直出版经典著作与小众著作的精装本——装帧精美，但也让读者支付得起。每出版一本狄更斯(Dickens)或奥斯汀 (Austen)的作品，也会相应地出版普卢塔克(Plutarch)的作品，或威廉•特雷弗(William Trevor)的短篇小说。该公司最近出版的图书包括，沃德豪斯(P.G. Wodehouse)的短篇小说《吉夫斯》(Jeeves)，以及艾伦•穆尔黑德(Alan Moorehead)的《沙漠战争三部曲》(The Desert War Trilogy)。
该出版商拥有11.5万名会员，目前正在制作数百本书籍，这的确让法国大型出版商阿歇特(Hachette)负责人去年的预测落空：即精装书会被电子书消灭。
它 的运营模式不像典型的读书俱乐部：会员承诺每年购买四本全价书（通常每本售价20到40英镑），作为回报，他们会得到几本免费图书，比如，比阿特丽克斯• 波特(Beatrix Potter)全集，或四本伊丽莎白•大卫(Elizabeth David)烹饪书。该公司从不主动寄书给会员。
加夫龙勋爵承认，Folio的运营模式更像“公众机构，而不是企业”，但这意味着他们非常关注客户服务与会员所受的待遇。你无法想象其他总裁会像加夫龙那样，把客户形容为“乖宝贝”。
生产成本相当高，因为这些书可能在一个地方排版，在另一个地方印刷，然后再到另一个地方装订，横跨欧洲大陆许多地区。加夫龙表示：“我们在成本上毫 不吝啬——我们印刷的字体很大，编辑标准很高，并且有出色的美编师。”但质量是赚得回头客的主要原因，近来的设计大奖与出口情况证明了这一点。
加 夫龙勋爵甚至承认，Folio可以提高书的价格——“如果我们的经营宗旨是追求利润，我们将肯定比现在更赚钱。”他没有从这家出版商赚取一分钱：他不拿工 资、不接受分红、买书自己掏钱，还买下了Folio位于伦敦的总部，以便让公司不用支付租金。但他确信，Folio的现金流为正，而且他坚持认为，如果 Folio被纳入一家大型出版社，将会是不同的情况。至少，Folio会不那么有特色——比如，它曾经雇了一辆货车，将数百本（乃至数千本）书运给法国南 部地区的一位富人。
他表示：“我们所想要的是，我们的会员有机会，广泛涉猎各类书籍。”Folio出版的图书，从波伊提乌 (Boethius)到维塔•萨克维尔-维斯特(Vita Sackville-West)，再到沃尔特•惠特曼(Walt Whitman)以及理查德•道金斯(Richard Dawkins)。“我们的模式是，我们的会员发现东西。他们需要均衡的饮食。”
本文作者为Folio Society会员
译者/何黎
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