In Depth
This sporting life
06.12.07 Alison Flood
Headline editorial director David Wilson is a man with a smile on his face. Having worked flat out for the past few months to ensure his three big Christmas sports memoirs—Bobby Charlton, Lawrence Dallaglio (who was phoning in chapters from the Rugby World Cup) and Jackie Stewart—were out on time, he's now taking it (slightly) easy and watching the sales stack up.
It's a far cry from last year, when Wilson saw his much-touted Ashley Cole and Rio Ferdinand autobiographies flounder into oblivion. "I took it quite badly," he says. "I think there was a backlash—the press was getting fed up with young footballers publishing books, plus England was out of the World Cup—it all came together."
He's still adamant the books were better than they were given credit for, but is sanguine about the slating they received. "I put a lot into them—they were good books, which didn't sell. It's just a learning curve." And Charlton's 115,696 sales to date, Dallaglio's 39,412 and Stewart's 47,917 mean the "big year" he knew he needed has finally materialised.
It's not the first time Wilson has overcome a downturn in his fortunes. In 2000, the affable Scot gave up a career publishing business books at Wiley to throw in his lot with start-up business publisher Texere. "If it had taken off we'd all have been billionaires," he says wryly. "But needless to say, it didn't. The dotcom bubble had just burst, and in hindsight we should have spotted the decline in the business books market."
Texere "never really recovered" from an overprinting of its first list, and was sold to Thomson in August 2003 after nine "horrible" months, when any profits were used to pay staff (Wilson took no salary).
A couple of months after selling up—"basically I was just recovering, it was amazing how much it took out of me"—Wilson got a call from Headline's Val Hudson asking if he was interested in joining Headline as sports publisher. "It was the dream job," he says—and although at first he had jitters about his lack of trade publishing experience, he wasn't going to turn it down.
Wilson believes his background starting out at legal publisher CCH and editing translations of European court cases ("I had to tidy up the language but not change the sense of it") honed his editing skills. "I'm a very hands-on editor—probably too hands-on. I don't just give my books to copy-editors. Editing is about thinking about every element of the book. Non-fiction should be as entertaining as a novel, with a real narrative arc."
Earlier this year Wilson launched a range of "sports misery" books, stories of men "for whom sport did become a matter of life and death". They haven't done as well as hoped (he's a "wee bit disappointed") but Headline will continue to push them hard; Wilson is clear that "you can't build a list entirely on big names, there's got to be something else. I firmly believe that if the story is good enough it will sell."
His business publishing experience has led to him running Headline's new global business imprint Business Plus. "I genuinely think this will be huge for us," he says. "We don't want to be academic publishers—I've been there, done that, seen the pitfalls and the fantastic revenue potential, but it's not for us." Instead, Business Plus will put Headline's trade strengths behind books "at the softer end" of the business books market.
Wilson is on the look out for wider non-fiction: he's acquired a "no holds-barred" autobiography by former deputy p.m. John Prescott (Prezza: Pulling No Punches) and is keen to dabble in music and celebrity.
"Of course I'll continue to look for sports writing but you've got to be realistic—it can be very hard to sell. And what I actually enjoy doing is producing a book that I'm proud of, that people want to read." With no set target of books to acquire he will "hold [his nerve]" until the right thing comes along. "You can't make rash decisions," he adds. "They cost more money in the end."
RSS
Subscriber Content