TALK TIME:Ivan O'Brien, Managing director of the O'Brien Press
What do you look for when publishing a book?
If you read one page and want to read the next – that’s usually a good hint. If you read two pages and you want to read the next 10, you’re on to a good thing. The next step is to be able to match a book to a specific market. This week we had to turn down a book that was very well written, but there just wasn’t a market for it. We knew we wouldn’t be able to sell enough copies to justify publishing. It’s rare, though, that this would happen.
Do authors resent being shunted in a certain direction?
Less than you would think. Obviously, fiction writers tend to be very precious. The novel is their baby. With non-fiction writers, though, if you say, “look, this is very good, but if you write in a slightly different way, more people will read it”, they’re usually amenable to that. We’re not always right, of course. There’ll always be those classic mistakes, like the record boss who turned down the Beatles. Nothing I want to go public on, but there have certainly been books we could have fought harder for or been more imaginative with.
I recently had an hour to kill in a major book store and could find nothing but self-help and celebrity biographies. Do people still read literature?
Of course. But the industry is changing. Conglomerates are on the march, taking bigger and bigger gambles all the time. Their approach is: “Okay, who’s the biggest celebrity on TV who hasn’t had a book yet? We’ll give that person half a million and put something out.”
It makes sense for the retailer to pile those books high, rather than a minority interest title that might sit there for months before anyone buys it. But if book lovers can’t find decent books instore, it drives that business online.
What about ebooks?
I was queuing for a blood test in the hospital the other day and the woman next to me was reading a book on her Kindle. It was the first time I'd seen that in Ireland. We put our first book – An Irish Voice, by Niall O'Dowd – on Kindle this week. And over the next few months, I intend to make our entire backlist available in the widest array of ebook formats possible. If we don't learn how to make money in the electronic space, we won't be around in five years.
You also created your first iPhone app for St Patrick’s Day – the iPaddy
That's right. The app market is a young market. It's an international market. And, crucially, people are willing to spend money on something that will entertain them. We already had the content. The Feckin' Book of Irish Slang That's Great Craic for Cute Hoors and Bowsies by Colin Murphy and Donal O'Dea had sold 50,000 copies in Ireland and another 100,000 copies in the US, albeit in a slightly different form. So we thought, well, this is a sitter.
Finally, is there a book that hasn’t been written that you’d love to publish?
Libel laws prevent my publishing a lot of books I’d like to. There are people we’ve asked to write books that we’re still waiting on. There are also hundreds of topics for which we’ve never found the right author. We’d have loved to have done Eugene Lambert’s autobiography, for example. But that’s not going to happen now, which is a shame.
