Business Week recently interviewed Jonathan Karp about his move from Random House to Time Warner, where he’s heading up a new imprint called “Warner Twelve.” The imprint’s name derives from its publishing strategy: “I think that by promising authors and their literary agents that we will publish nothing other than their books for a full month,” Karp explains, “we’re saying we believe in you and we will do everything we can to make people pay attention to you.”
I noticed right off the bat that while Karp says he’ll edit each book personally, putting him “close enough to the content and spirit of the book that I’ll be able to communicate what’s special about it to audiences with the help of the marketing machines at the Time Warner Book Group,” the interview doesn’t mention a specific “marketing machine” for Twelve. Will the new imprint have a dedicated publicist, or will its books be handed off to already-swamped staffers at Warner Books or Little, Brown? (Full disclosure: Bulfinch Press, the art-book division of TWBG, is publishing my first book in November, and my publicist is doing a swell job so far–hi, Claire!)
Fred Ramey, co-publisher of Unbridled Books, has a different reaction. He points out that despite the article’s hype about what an innovative approach Karp’s taking with Twelve, the strategy is pretty much what Putnam had in mind when it bought out Ramey’s last imprint, Blue Hen: “an attempt to move old-fashioned publishing values back into an industry that had become–and still is–dominated by its media connections rather than by the quality of work it handles.” Twelve’s business plan, he explains, is pretty much how any small literary press already works.
You’re a publishing insider: what do you think?