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Precision pays

01.09.08 Benedicte Page

When Arrow publishing director Kate Elton goes on holiday, she takes a separate suitcase specifically for the books she plans to read while she's away. There is one for each day, and she has a strict regime: thriller, alternating with non-thriller. And Elton sets herself targets. "I realise I am exactly the same on holiday as I am at home: 'I'm behind! Must read 200 pages by 6 p.m.'," she confesses. "It's obsessive. Luckily my two-year-old likes the beach."

Both her passion for reading and what she calls her "OCD tendency" for precise planning stand Elton in good stead in her role as a paperback publisher.

After a steady rise at Century—her first buy was Clare Chambers' Romantic Novelists' Association award-winning Learning to Swim and she went on to bring in authors such as Karin Slaughter, Rowan Coleman and Fiona Neill—she took on her role at Arrow four years ago on the understanding that she would combine the job of reinventing books for their paperback life with continuing to commission her own titles.

"What's nice about the job I do is that I have all the fun and bigger picture strategy of being a paperback publisher while maintaining commissioning and editing," she says. "Nothing compares to the buzz of reading a submission and working with an author you believe in to make their novel as good as it can be. But the two roles are both creative in different ways."

This year Arrow has a frontlist of 135, more than 30 of them originals, as well as 85 backlist titles; Arrow has been active with its backlist repackages, most recently for P G Wodehouse. Elton is also preparing to launch a literary paperback list in early 2009, Windmill, publishing 20 new titles in its first year including Patricia Wood's Lottery and Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away World.

In a competitive market, Elton says absolutely nothing is taken for granted for any book. "Even if you think, 'That's a dead cert', you must cross the 't's and dot the 'i's, on big brand names as much as on the little-known writers. The most important thing is to be growing your superleads. Eight years ago we had Grisham, Reichs, Rendell and Ryan. Now we also have Slaughter, Price, Flynn, Patterson and Robert Harris, who is virtually a book a year. The core enables us to expand in other directions and publish books that feel riskier."

Small, focused teams work on each of the big brand names separately, and are also growing different areas of the list. Four years ago, for example, Arrow set to work to build its strength in the saga market: "We had a regular saga focus meeting each month, and focused on a small number of authors, each with a different strategy. We've seen phenomenal change: Katie Flynn is now the market leader, and Dilly Court sells 80,000 copies although she's only been going two years. It was about having a clear sense of which authors had the most potential to grow fast, and which customers to talk to when—a precise strategy and regular double-checking."     

Elton describes Windmill as "the new plank in a strategy several years in the making." CHA had long wanted to expand its literary publishing, but it was only after a refocus at Hutchinson and Wm Heinemann, and after CHA became independent of CCV last year, that Windmill became a fully practicable option. Enthusing the trade about the books through the liberal use of proofs and early copies is key: "The biggest challenge is that the [literary] hardback market is quite tough. It's not like the thriller market where you get enough copies into the supermarkets to come out with 20,000 copies. In the literary market, it's more about getting people to read."

There are no plans at present to introduce a mass market imprint like HarperCollins' Avon to CHA, however. Elton says: "We won't rule it out, but at this point we have decided against it. If we publish another list where we don't have a long-term strategy for the authors, what is the impact on building Arrow brands? It's too much of a clash."

Benedicte Page Arrow Kate Elton trade profile

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