Many Roads
Michael O’Meara’s U.S. sales and marketing director describes the company’s strategies for the U.S. market
Michael O’Meara Books started its life as an international company. Its namesake is a Philadelphia-born Temple University grad who found his way to the U.K. courtesy of the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s. He liked it so much, he made London his home and met his wife Lesley while the pair were working in publishing. They founded MOM books in 1985 in a spare bedroom in London, concentrating on adult nonfiction.
They found a real niche in books about the royal family. Then Michael hired Andrew Morton, a young journalist, to do research on the royals, and he was approached by Princess Diana to write the truth about her dysfunctional marriage. Diana: Her True Story caused a sensation and was a bestseller. The U.S. rights were sold to Simon & Schuster, and it continues to sell to this day.
There are many ways for U.K. publishers to reach U.S. consumers, and today we use all of them—rights deals, clubs and fairs, direct-to-consumer export distribution, and third-party distribution. Despite rising print and shipping costs, we are bucking the trend and holding our ground by staying nimble and finding new ways to get our books out to market. Our trend-led titles are published quickly to meet market demand, generally on a shorter lead time than traditional trade titles. The export distribution of U.K. editions via Trafalgar Square has become ever more important as a further route into the North American market.
We were one of the first publishers to produce coloring books aimed at adults, and this continues to be a very strong line for us. The beautiful and intricate titles by Kerby Rosanes have been bestsellers, and our commitment to quality and discovering new illustrators has set us apart, enabling us to build publishing strands with U.S. houses.
Straightforward licensing was always the classic way to do this and highly successful, but over the years, differences in publishing schedules in the U.S. and U.K., coupled with the need to be simultaneous, mean we must plan an extra year into the process on titles we believe will work well in the U.S. This is not just a matter of changing Mum to Mom and taking the u out of colour. Despite us all speaking the same language, there are big differences in words, perspective, visual styles (covers and titles are often different), humor, and culture. With the U.S. publisher, we create Americanized proprietary editions for retail, book clubs, book fairs, subscription boxes, and catalogues, amending the text, often repositioning the cover elements, and sometimes changing the design entirely.
We carry out specific U.S. publicity activities and marketing campaigns to support our publishing program in the U.S., and always consider our U.S. audience to ensure that our distributed titles travel. This is particularly important for Buster Books, our children’s list: maths (not a typo!) typically doesn’t work for obvious reasons, weights and measures must be avoided, and correct spelling is important for early learning. Juvenile history can be a particularly tricky topic: local biases, cultural sensitivity and appropriation, and curricula have to be handled very carefully.
We also have very strong sales through gift and specialist accounts, which seem to appreciate the diversity and relevance of our nonfiction list. To enable this, we search out U.S.-based on authors and illustrators, or those with U.S. platforms. 3D Street Art, out this month, is written by Florida-based Erni Vales, one of the earliest founders of this movement. And while the book covers artists from around the world, the launch took place at the Museum of Graffiti in Miami, rather than in London.
The success Michael O’Meara has had in its near40-year span has allowed us to spread our wings. As one of the few truly independent publishers remaining, we not only pride ourselves on our ability to publish a diverse program, which remains current and topical, but also on our ability to reach readers all around the world. Naturally the U.S. is our most important market outside of the U.K., and we continue to work closely with all our publishing partners.
We launched Footnote Press last year in partnership with Bonnier Books UK, as a disruptive new publisher for our challenging times. The word disruptive gets bandied about a lot these days, so I wish there was a better alternative. But how else do you describe a scrappy, independently run startup backed by a publishing heavyweight, whose mission is to drive narrative change by using new digital strategies to mainstream marginalized perspectives?
We spotlight other ways of thinking, being, and organizing, by shifting our publishing focus onto the margins, or footnotes (yes, thus the name Footnote). But as a publisher we are in no way niche or “other.” We intend for our books to resonate across a breadth of perspectives in order to build an engaged international community of readers, supporters, and changemakers.
As ever in publishing, our authors are at the heart of everything we do. We are rapidly building a list of strong, gamechanging voices that tap into universal themes and global conversations. Our books challenge received wisdoms and unveil illuminating visions of the future, engaging head-on with some of the key issues of our times: migration, race and decolonization, climate crisis, the refugee crisis, social justice and systemic inequality, gender and sexualities, war and conflict, disability awareness, and more. And that’s all just in the course of our first year of publishing.
I’ve been engaged in radical publishing for 15-plus years, long before the rise of the socially and politically conscious consumer made it a more commercially viable choice. My cofounder, Footnote’s marketing director, is video games and e-sports industry pioneer Sujoy Roy. That sector has consistently been seeing some of the highest user engagement and conversion rates online. We felt that many of the digital marketing tools and techniques from the games industry could be successfully deployed into book publishing, to reach the broadest possible audiences.
The readers we are targeting won’t always have the same means of discoverability as the traditional bookstore buyer, so there is also a strong influencerdriven aspect to what we do.
We’re excited by the opportunities to engage further with U.S. audiences and authors. Yours is of course a country with huge diversity of voice and experience, from “your huddled masses” to the great melting pot, and our titles speak to current conversations—conversations that are fiercely debated, often driven and reflected outward, by leading U.S. thinkers.
Our first book, Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, saw Columbia University professor Helen Benedict team up with Syrian refugee Eyad Awwadawnan to publish in time for World Refugee Day. For Black History Month and beyond, we released Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Between Starshine and Clay.
We’re making inroads here already. Our latest releases are distributed by Simon & Schuster, and we have been sharing books with the major U.S. publishers, as well as leading independents like Norton, Soft Skull, and Graywolf. We are also the proud U.K. publisher of Ponyboy, Eliot Duncan’s visceral debut following a transmasculine narrator wrestling with gender identity and drug use, recently longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction.
This year also saw us launch the inaugural Footnote x Counterpoints Writing Prize for writers from refugee or migrant backgrounds, in partnership with the charity Counterpoints Arts. The prize, which includes a publication agreement, is for narrative nonfiction centered around themes of displacement, identity, or resistance.
As with Footnote Press itself, we hope that the prize will enable us to keep combating a culture of division and exclusion using the power of storytelling, and in the future we’d love to roll this out in the U.S., as well as expanding our presence here more generally. Some early successes in this market have already empowered us to make bolder commissioning choices, and we’re confident that U.S. readers can expect to see the protest-artinspired Footnote logo cropping up more and more on bookshelves in the coming years.