Books
Growth with Green
31.07.08 Hannah Davies
Since joining Ebury this January, editorial director Gillian Green’s first seven months have gone in a flash. She is brimming with excitement about how her new list is taking shape, and about her recent signing of glamorous burlesque dancer Immodesty Blaize—the UK’s answer to Dita Von Teese.
Green acquired two novels from Blaize, who she describes as a “21st-century Jackie Collins”, after seeing off stiff competition from a host of other publishers. The first book, Tease, follows the life of showgirl Tiger Starr and is being published in hardback next June. Apparently, everyone in the office has fallen in love with Blaize. “Editorial meetings with the author are becoming increasingly difficult to manage, as excitable staff keep hijacking them,” Green says with a chuckle.
Although Green launched her editorial career at Harlequin Mills & Boon, her list will not be dominated by bonkbusters. Aiming for 10 titles in 2009 and 20 in 2010, she is looking to build on her initial base of commercial fiction for women with crime and thrillers, accessible literary
fiction and commercial historical fiction.
The goal is to be as diverse as Ebury’s non-fiction publishing: “I want to do something different with the list and what I always admired about Ebury, before I even came for an interview, is how different it is in its non-fiction. It has been at the forefront of a lot of genres including erotic memoirs and the boy’s comic market. If I can bring some of that originality to the fiction list it will be a fresh approach.”
Green attributes her own broad reading tastes to her childhood. Her carpenter father—an avid reader himself—encouraged her to read anything and everything. She spent much of her youth devouring all the books she shouldn’t have read—including her first Jackie Collins aged 11. Her enthusiasm for books took her to Kent University to read English and American literature. During a creative writing module the editor in her was born as she much preferred picking apart other people’s work to having her own criticised.
She had a five-year stint at Mills & Boon, which saw her progressing rapidly from editorial assistant to being appointed commissioning editor aged 23. Despite leaving the company for Piatkus in 1998, the training has stayed with her: “While editing Tease, I’ve had to rein in my inner Mills & Boon editor who is shocked when the main character has slept with two people already and neither of them is the man she ends up with.”
Green was reaching her tenth year at Piatkus, with Nora Roberts her big success, when Ebury came calling. “The opportunity as a commercial fiction editor to start your own list doesn’t often come along,” she says. “I’d have been mad to turn it down.”
Part of the reason she decided to move to Ebury was because the larger publishers offer greater opportunity to compete in the increasingly crowded commercial fiction market. She says, “Ebury is a great home because it has that independent feel, but has the Random House Group muscle behind it.”
However, after many years at an independent, Green has had to make some adjustments: “At an independent you take on a lot of work that is not directly under your remit. When I got to Ebury I was trying to do all the bound-proof copy for my books and a colleague in marketing piped up and said, ‘actually, that is my job’. I’m experiencing the joy of having departments.”
She believes the expansion into fiction is a sensible move for Ebury. With a pool of non-fiction authors, particularly its celebrity personalities including Julian Clary, Ebury needed to provide a place if they wanted to move into fiction—rather than lose them to another publisher. In fact, since Green’s arrival, Danny Wallace—one of Ebury’s non-fiction successes—will be following Clary with his first novel due in 2010.
Green hopes to use Ebury’s expertise in developing author brands, such as Delia Smith, for her fiction authors. One such candidate for big-brand status is Charles Martin, whose first UK novel, Where the River Ends, was published by Ebury last week. Green, who bought three new novels from the author and two of his US backlist, thinks the first, a “fabulous weepy love story” will be a big hit and is something the market has been missing.
Combining serious work such as Martin’s with broadly commercial books such as Blaize’s is exactly the balance Green is trying to achieve in her quest to make Ebury’s fiction list unique.
“It shows how far we are pushing the list—both literary and commercial. Our main criterion is quality,” Green says. “As we are heading into a market of economic recession there is room to do both: the reading group aspirational literary fiction and the escapist uplifting commercial fiction.”
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