December Brown Bag Lunch Wrap-up

DECEMBER: Living Legend: Esther Margolis
Mainstream Independence
Thursday, December 14th

In true publishing fashion, the YPG saved the best for last. At December’s Brown Bag Lunch, Esther Margolis, a bona fide publishing legend, dropped by and spoke about her rise through the ranks of Bantam and founding her own independent house.

Margolis is the president and majority owner of the Newmarket Publishing and Communications Company. Newmarket Press is one of the few mainstream, trade publishing houses in New York City which is independently owned. Founded in 1982, Newmarket has published 250 books, and with its staff of twelve fulltime employees publishes thirty new titles annually, in such categories as entertainment, reference, health, and parenting.

Originally from Detroit, Margolis began her publishing career as a secretary at Dell and a year later, in 1963, joined in Bantam’s promotion department. At the time, Bantam was the sixth of seven major paperback publishers, with an income of approximately five million dollars a year and a direct sales staff of three. While there, she became Bantam’s first publicity director, eventually rising to the position of a senior vice president and becoming Bantam’s first division head for marketing, publicity, and communications worldwide. During this time, Bantam went from sixth among paperback publishers to first.

When Margolis started out, there were far more publishing houses and fewer media conglomerates than there are now. Since hardcover and paperback houses weren’t under the same ownership, there was plenty of wheeling and dealing among them, but the movement of properties wasn’t always intuitive. Bantam, for instance, wouldn’t just buy paperback rights from hardcover publishers, but it would selectively acquire world rights for books and then sell them off to a hardcover publisher. These sales of rights created book-by-book partnerships between Bantam and the houses that planned to publish the property in different formats, bringing the staffs of multiple houses together to strategize about how they wanted to package, market, and sell the book. Margolis often found herself in meetings with companies such as Random House one day, and a company such as Simon and & Schuster the next. These meetings gave her extraordinary opportunities to learn from not only the people of her own house, but also leaders throughout the industry.

This education proved to be invaluable when, after 17 years with Bantam, Margolis struck out on out her own and—as fate would have it—weathered a number of industry-wide changes that could have easily sunk a fledging house. She was savvy enough to base much of her thinking in terms of publicity, subsidiary rights, special sales, and lots of backlist. This was the type of model she had seen work at Bantam, and while the integration of a number of houses under fewer and fewer conglomerates diminished the selling of reprint rights for her (because, among other factors, there were fewer places to buy and sell), backlist stayed strong. Buying properties that could be developed into dependable brands became a rule of thumb for Newmarket. Parenting books fit this model perfectly, and Newmarket struck publishing gold with What’s Happening to My Body?, a series that she launched in 1984 and that has sold more than 2 million books.

Being a small company definitely has it advantages. Soon after 9/11, Newmarket published Condi, the first Condoleezza Rice biography, years before the competition was able to jump on board; and less than three days after Margolis heard about Su Doku, she closed a deal to get the puzzle books into the US market. Being smaller also has its drawbacks. Without a lot of capital or infrastructure, a smaller house may have trouble gaining presence in the market. But Margolis found an interesting fix for this, with the help of Hollywood. Newmarket publishes a number of entertainment books in conjunction with major Hollywood studios, such as Columbia Pictures and Universal. Newmarket’s first success was with Gandhi, and they’re about to publish companion to Dreamgirls, a film featuring Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, and Beyonce Knowles; Stranger than Fiction; Little Children; and Little Miss Sunshine. You’ve probably heard of them, but that’s exactly the point. By publishing illustrated books, screenplays, and movie ties-ins, Newmarket is able to feed off of and add to the larger marketing campaigns that accompany the films without taking on the same multimillion dollar risks. It’s the best of both worlds.

As for the future, Margolis thinks that the biggest challenge facing the publishing industry will be the complications that come along with vertical integration, particularly in regards to management. While the media conglomerates likely won’t come crashing down, she thinks that there is and will continue to be plenty of room for smaller and relatively flatter companies. She may be a little biased, but the sustained success of Newmarket Press is plenty of proof.