PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
So many books, so little time. Authors will never be discouraged from writing 800-page doorstops that describe, say, every footnote in the Treaty of Versailles. But lately, book publishers are exhibiting a greater awareness of the market for shorter -- and less pricey -- works. Results have included Penguin Putnam's Penguin Lives series of terse biographies and the genre some call "microhistories," which include the likes of Dava Sobel's Longitude and Ross King's Brunelleschi's Dome.
Then, there's the Modern Library Chronicles series, which now numbers a dozen titles with 20 more in the pipeline. Books such as historian Ian Buruma's Inventing Japan, 1853-1964 (see BW, 2/10/03, "Why Japan Can't Get Its Groove Back"), or John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (see BW, 3/24/03, "An Ode to 'the Money-Spinner'") are attempts by established writers to tackle important topics -- all in under 200 pages and selling for under $20.
BusinessWeek Books Editor Hardy Green recently talked to Modern Library Publishing Director David Ebershoff about the genesis of the series and how it's faring commercially. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:
Q: How did the Classics series come into being?
A: Modern Library, the acorn from which its parent Random House grew, has been around since 1917 and has long been known as a publisher of classics. In September, 2000, our British partner Weidenfeld & Nicolson came to us with the idea of publishing a number of short, useful, but delightful works on important topics, by writers of authority. People seem to find books expensive these days, so we decided that price would be important, too.
Q: What has been your most successful title?
A: Karen Armstrong's Islam: A Short History. Obviously, the book benefited enormously from timing, with thousands of people reading it after September 11, 2001. We've now sold more than 200,000 copies -- a large number for a hardcover book.
Q: What are some other titles that have been well-received?
A: There's The American Revolution: A History by legendary historian Gordon S. Wood, and The Renaissance: A Short History by Paul Johnson. The reader can tell that with books such as these, he can get a good understanding of the material without a huge investment of time. Richard Pipes' Communism has also been very successful for us.
Q: It seems like all of the books are about history.
A: Yes -- all are history. Among the forthcoming books will be ones that are organized differently, though -- on conceptual lines rather than [historical event or epoch]. We'll have one on the development of the novel, another on the history of mathematics via the great mathematicians, and one on the emergence of the concept of freedom.
Q: Describe how you operate.
A: We think about topics that might work and about who would be good to write on a subject. People also send us e-mails suggesting books. We might go to an author and explain the series, then perhaps propose an idea or ask them if they have an idea. The Company, for instance, was more the authors' idea than ours.
If there's an existing short book on a topic, we may decide to avoid that subject. American slavery is one topic that seems well covered. Also, certain subjects may be too big for our format, and certain authors may tell us that they don't feel comfortable writing so briefly.
Q: Do you have a target audience?
A: As we anticipated from the beginning, lots of the Chronicles are used in classrooms. But they work for general readers, too. People just experience a need to read something serious in a brief format. And that isn't just a temporary phenomenon: These are books that we expect to be around for a long time.
Edited by Patricia O'Connell
Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.
Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed.
Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video.
To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here.
Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
