Newspaper turns book publisher

The Sunday Herald, a Scottish newspaper, has done something very interesting. It has leveraged its brand and turned into a book publisher.

Allmediascotland, a portal tracking Scottish media, reports.

The Sunday Herald has not only made a foray into book publishing, its debut title is proving a sales success. Earlier this month, the newspaper's name was lent to the publication of a book on the conflict in Iraq, 'The War on Truth', by its investigations editor, Neil Mackay. A second Sunday Herald book - 'Intifada - The Long Day Of Rage', by the paper's foreign editor, David Pratt - was published last week. Two more titles are in the pipeline: one, 'Collateral Damage', on the impact of war on civilians; the other, 'Good Bad Guys', about dictators "we have loved".

While the newspaper is lending its name to the publishing venture, it is doing none of the publishing itself. That is being undertaken by independent publishing company, Books Noir Ltd, run by Bob Smith. Says Smith: "Early sales statistics for Neil's book, so far are very impressive. I'd say his book has been one of the best sellers in Scottish book stores this last fortnight. The figures for David's book have yet to come in, it having been published a week later, but I expect his book to be performing just as well." Smith splits time between working for Edinburgh publisher, Birlinn Ltd, which specialises in publishing books on Scottish interest, and Books Noir Ltd, publisher of Sunday Herald Books.

In terms of the arrangement Books Noir has with the Sunday Herald, the paper incurs no cost at all, aside from helping with website development; instead, Books Noir Ltd pays a licence fee to use the Sunday Herald brand."

It was Smith who took the idea to the Sunday Herald - that it should lend its name to "a publishing house specialising in topics of international news interests which directly affect UK citizens".

This is something every newspaper having a large audience and a good brand ought to consider seriously. The newspaper can publish books under its brand, while outsourcing the actual work (of publishing including editing, printing and distribution) to a professional publishing house, if it is unable to deal with the editing and printing of books. The newspaper can take on the responsibility of marketing the books to its audience through its newspaper and drive traffic to bookstores as well as sell direct through a mail-order or phone-order model. Excerpts from the books could also be serialised in the newspaper to enable potential buyers to sample the book before purchase.

This could be an excellent opportunity for Indian newspapers, especially Indian language newspapers, to diversify away from being just a provider of news/gossip/views to becoming a knowledge provider, publishing non-fiction. Newspapers, with their constraints of space, cannot be the medium to take knowledge to the masses. Books on the other hand have been the source of knowledge over centuries and are perfect to take up a topic or issue, start from the basics and delve into it in depth.

If a newspaper in India could sell about 10,000 copies of every new non-fiction title published under its brand, it would count as a major publishing success. Given that books typically sell only 2,000 to 3,000 copies on average in India, unless they're best sellers, in which case they might sell upwards of 10,000 copies, for a newspaper to sell 10,000 copies for most titles published under its brand name would be great.

The Hindu has tried its hand at it by publishing collections of articles on various topics published in the daily newspaper over the years. Some of the titles published by The Hindu include, The Hindu Speaks on Management - Volume I and Volume II, The Hindu Speaks on Education, The Hindu Speaks on Music and Mahatma Gandhi: The Last 200 Days .

But these are just collections of disparate articles. There is scope to do far better. For someone like The Hindu, who also have excellent printing infrastructure and can probably use their current editorial infrastructure or expand it a bit, they may only need to be tie-up with a book distributor.

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