Emily Cook on the Art of Getting Books into Bookstores

There are more than 200,000 books being published each year. For host Mitchell Kaplan, “One of the questions that I’m asked more than anything else as a bookseller is: how do you find out about all the books that you carry in your stores?” This week on The Literary Life, his guest is publishing industry expert, Emily Cook, co-founder of Cursor Marketing Services, who along with partner Richard Nash, represent “several small presses that have a very big impact.” Hear how books are selected, how they get to the bookstores, and to you, the reader.

From the episode:

Mitchell Kaplan: You’ve brought books to people’s attention that normally would be not ignored but just might fall through the cracks.

Emily Cook: Right, you always run that risk with indie presses. Even within the list of an indie publisher. I think the greatest thing about the presses that I work for is that we aren’t always focused on having a lead title. You can easily get lost. If you’re a writer and you worked so hard on your book, you feel that every writer deserves a real chance for their book. What we specialize in doing is trying to find the right river for each book to flow through. It might not be a publicity river; it might be a bookseller.

Kaplan: What’s a typical day like? You go through the list and figure out a strategy for each book?

Cook: Mm hmm.

Kaplan: So you actually work as their marketing, promotions, and sales departments here in the United States?

Cook: We do all of it. … We’re always reading a few seasons ahead, and with Scribe especially we work with them to shape the list for the U.S. market. We work wth all our publishers to do that in some ways, but with Scribe we’re really focusing on their translations or female writers. For a while, we had “No white men allowed” rule, but one did slip in this spring season. [laughs] Especially when you think about what it’s like to publish with, say, Penguin Random House, as a woman writer you could be relegated to what they call the mid-list, which can be a career killer. Scribe stands by debut female authors, mid-career and late-career.

For instance, one example is we have a book, and I had the only copy of it in North America. Henry Rosenbloom, the publisher in Australia, brought me an advance reading copy from Melbourne to Winter Institute in Albuquerque, and I read it on the plane to the American Library Association show in Seattle. I loved it, and I handed it to my old editor at Booklist, and three weeks later she said she assigned it for a review and it got a star.