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"The biggest challenge is to find exciting, fresh, well-written content"Michelle McGrane in conversation with Michelle Matthews, publishing manager of Oshun Books At the beginning of this year Michelle was selected by the British Council
as a finalist for the 2006 International Young Publisher of the Year Award.
The award is a collaboration between the British Council and the London Book
Fair. It was launched in 2004 to honour the entrepreneurial and leadership ability
in a young person aged between 25 and 35 working in the publishing industry
in his or her own country. In February she flew to the United Kingdom to join
nine other nominees competing for the prize at the London Book Fair. Michelle, what does your position as Publishing Manager involve? I publish about 18 books a year, and receive about 30 manuscripts a month, so I do a lot of rejecting too, unfortunately. But for the 18 books I do publish I do a bit of everything - sourcing, commissioning, sorting out contract queries, monitoring manuscript development, overseeing the production team, briefing the cover designer … sometimes I even write the blurb! Oshun is a small but dynamic team and we spend a lot of time bouncing ideas and solutions around. Once the book is published, I assist marketing, monitor sales and continue author support. I promote my books wherever I go, including international book fairs. What important skills does a publisher need to have? An important skill would be speed-reading! But I think most of all, a publisher needs to have a personality that includes empathy, confidence, the ability to keep a lot of ideas germinating and the tenacity to follow through on those ideas. What are the most exciting aspects of your job? It's challenging, because there is always more you can do. If I'm not helping to perfect a page design, I'm trying to sell international rights, or pitching in on a marketing campaign for an author, or visiting a bookstore manager to convince her to stock more of a title. I think the most exciting things about my job are the variety and the wonderful authors I work with. And the challenges …? The biggest challenge is to find exciting, fresh, well-written content, particularly non-fiction. What advice do you have for writers regarding the submission of manuscripts to publishers?
How critical are presentation and cover design in marketing a book? What does Oshun focus on in terms of cover design? Presentation is very important. If you walk into a bookshop you're going to be confronted with thousands of small rectangular objects all demanding your attention. If you haven't been marketed into submission - and in South Africa we don't have the kinds of advertising budgets that allow us to make a cover or title an instinctive choice for a bookbuyer - then you're going to pick up these small objects depending on how appealing they look to you. There are certain visual signals that will tell the bookbuyer "You're looking at a chick lit / thriller / memoir." At Oshun we try to incorporate these "signals" (pink foiling with quirky type, for example) and then amplify or spin them to make the cover as striking as possible. So hopefully the bookbuyer is thinking, "I want a chick lit … and that book is really standing out. It might be The One." Killer blurb copy usually seals the deal. In the publishing world, what constitutes a bestseller? How many copies of a book need to be sold for it to be deemed a bestseller? This is a bit of a piece-of-string question, but generally in South Africa, a local fiction title that sells over 5 000 copies has done very well. It's about twice that for non-fiction. A hit is a local book that has sold over 20 000 copies. What essential qualities have made Oshun titles bestsellers? What does best for us is a strong story that people relate to, with a forthright author telling it in an honest voice. Sam Cowen and Melinda Ferguson have both been bestsellers for us. Unusual memoirs by women such as Emmaleen Kriel and Zuretha Roos have also done well. Finding a niche where women feel that they don't have relevant information and publishing into it - like we did with Life Talk for a Daughter - has also worked. The imprint publishes memoirs, life guides, short stories, poetry, plays, and novels. Have you deliberately set out to ensure that variety is a characteristic of Oshun's list? We publish into a few distinct categories - memoir, fiction and life guides being the main areas (although within themselves these are quite wide). But I have allowed myself an "Other" category and this is where I publish "voices" such as Nadia Davids and Lebo Mashile. This is because I feel that I can't be a publisher of women writers in South Africa, yet not have them on my list, even though their forms - plays and poetry respectively - are not "popular". Yet they are that good that someone like Lebo can sell 1 500 copies of a poetry book (even the people at Faber and Faber were impressed) and Nadia sell 350 copies of her play in six weeks into a trade market. As part of the IYPY award you were asked to bring five books from South Africa with you, books yet to be published in the UK. The Saffron Pear Tree and other kitchen memories by Zuretha Roos was finally chosen for your book pitch. How was this book selected? It was a very difficult decision, because Oshun has published many wonderful and worthy books. The first criterion in choosing the five was whether I actually held international rights in a particular title (this excluded one or two books that I really liked). Then I decided on which books would best show off the South African publishing industry and Oshun's range. In the end I decided to present Zuretha's book because I thought that it had international appeal - the cookery memoir genre is huge in the UK. And it was indeed the book that people showed the most interest in, even if they weren't in the presentation. They also perked up at Close the Door Softly Behind You … (Emmaleen had been Sir Alex Heath's housekeeper), Sarajevo Roses, Life Talk for a Daughter, Gloria's Guide to Fabulousness and Smacked. But selling international rights is a gruelling endeavour, and I haven't finalised any deals yet. The other nine nominees were from a wide range of countries: Argentina, Columbia, Jordan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Mexico, Oman, Slovenia and Thailand. Were you able to spend time sharing information, exchanging ideas and developing an understanding of publishing in different countries? We talked about the weather a lot, and about what was traditional food in our countries. On one memorable night we exchanged national folk songs. I think the best thing we shared was our enthusiasm - we all have different challenges (Lithuania doesn't even have bookstores!), but we were all really excited about finding ways to overcome them, and this was an opportunity to gather new ideas and contacts. I think that one of the most important differences between South Africa and the other developing countries is that we don't do a lot of publishing in our indigenous languages - one of the reasons being that there's not the linguistic diaspora that Spanish or Arabic has. Still, it struck me especially since I was in the UK, because we are very dependent on their publishing industry. 94 percent of the books sold in our bookshops are in English and the vast majority of those come from the UK and USA. That kind of volume of imports in our bookstores does make it difficult to develop our own literary culture, which many of the countries in South America, for example, have done so successfully. What about famous writers … did you meet famous writers, make new contacts, have interesting encounters? I missed David Hasselhoff by a few hours … Seriously, I was kicking myself. I didn't check out Margaret Atwood's electronic autograph pen - a weird gimmick - but spent that timeslot in a seminar about what the book industry can learn from what happened with digitisation in the music industry, which was far more useful and illuminating. The judging panel for the IYPY award included Gautam Malkani, whose novel Londonstani was recently published to huge acclaim. He secured a six-figure deal from Fourth Estate in a bidding war at the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair, but according to one of the other judges, was a little intimidated by us (!) Will Oshun be participating in the Cape Town Book Fair in June this year? Absolutely! Struik has one of the biggest stands at the Fair and authors such as Lebo Mashile, Melinda Ferguson, Lauren Beukes, Dion Chang and Margie Orford will be doing events on it. Please come and visit! What can the reading public look forward to this year from Oshun Books? Can you name some of the titles you're especially excited about? In August we're releasing So Close - this is a memoir by Tertia Albertyn about her four-year struggle with infertility. She's hilarious and irrepressible, and her heart-wrenching journey has a happy ending. Tertia's award-winning blog is here. In September you can look forward to Robyn Goss's And So Say All of Us … I was reading Marion Keyes's The Other Side of the Story when Robyn's manuscript came in and I can seriously say there is no comparison. Robyn is funnier, sharper and sweeter. In a recent New York Times article Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding said she was really interested in seeing great chick lit from Africa. This is it! Our big Christmas title is Natalie du Toit's autobiography, Tumble Turn. It's a truly inspiring story about overcoming adversity and what you can achieve when you don't lose sight of your goals. You cannot go wrong with this as a gift to anyone!
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Michelle
Matthews graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1999. She has written
for various publications, including Shape, FHM and Men's
Health, and worked as an editor, sub-editor and arts reporter at the Mail
& Guardian, CityLife and Big Media. She was the managing
editor of SL Magazine before being recruited by Struik Publishers in
2004 to develop their new women's imprint, Oshun Books.
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