In any event, this is to wish all my friends, colleagues, and competitors in the book and journal trade the very best for 2022 as we navigate a rapidly changing world with products, both print and digital, that educate, entertain, and inform and very rarely do evil.

MY BACK PAGES: An undeniably personal history of publis…

And my hair length is reverting to a previous version (see the shot below), albeit in a different color and thickness. I’m deeply grateful for the 50 years I’ve enjoyed in a great global industry and look forward to a few more yet. I look forward to receiving some royalty income, some rights income, many speaking events—some overseas, all expenses paid, I hope—some brickbats, some sarcasm, and plenty of relief that my worst fears have not been realized. It seemed to me that general publishers spent too much on relationships with booksellers and not enough on promoting books to the end-user through media and social media exposure.The handsome hardbacks he holds up at various points cover a gamut of subjects, including the Second World War, the real-life experiences of a cardiothoracic surgeon, an investigation into the alleged dark side of MCC, and a memoir of a chaotic former Etonian that has been optioned for TV. Charkin’s boss at Reed, Ian Irvine raved about how the profits of consumer book publishing added up to “the square root of bugger all”, but never questioned the extraordinary extravagance of Reed at the holding company level.

Richard Charkin: Notes From a Small London Publisher Richard Charkin: Notes From a Small London Publisher

Fortuitous events (generated by effort) are what make the difference, but the bulk of publicity effort achieves very little. Although he was a prince of publishing, he doesn’t dwell on the British obsession with class, although he registers latent anti-semitism among colleagues.As of late, he resides as Bloomsbury China’s President, as well as the non-executive director of Liverpool University Press and the Institute of Physics Publishing. Charkin’s time as both head of reference and managing director at Oxford University Press was incredibly influential to the evolution of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Richard Charkin with Tom Campbell. 2023. My Back Pages—An

I should think there will be a host of people who know you through the sector of publishing that they are in but will be interested in your experience of all the other sectors that they don’t know about. In the 80s or 90s it was interesting that there was a significant growth in what might be described as literary fiction from the usual bunch of men and some women. The only editorial rule I set was not to publish any fiction (which usually requires either a large and experienced publisher or an author self-publishing) but I broke that rule when I could not resist The Accidental Collector by Guy Kennaway, who has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2021.Richard Charkin’s personal history illuminates the changes in publishing and mixes in some vital themes, such as the role of women and structural developments in how the trade operates.

My back pages - Marble Hill Publishers

Thus my largest expenditure per title is on publicity and we’ve had some great coverage thanks to Ruth Killick’s imagination and diligence at her publicity firm. In a sense, it seemed to me that many brilliant books are scuppered by their length, density, and lack of an engaging narrative. A typical trade book publishing house will make a large amount of money on their bestsellers, and lose a lot of money on the rest. Paul Hamlyn, the chair of Reed Consumer Books and a philanthropist known for a “broad mind”, reviewed the page proofs.m. ET (2233 GMT) update shows the United Kingdom as fourth in the world for COVID-19 caseloads behind the United States, Brazil, and Russia. It is more than a memoir but a genuine history of publishing, of interest to anyone in the industry and furthermore anyone interested in publishing, especially authors and would-be authors. It had been caught between the rising costs, flattening sales, and the sense among staff that their department could afford to lose money because of the mythical profitability of some other department.