Publisher Lou Aronica is on a blog tour this month and has kindly stopped by my blog and granted me an interview! Lou has a new publishing house, The Story Plant. Read on for the interview.
Bookworm: Welcome Lou and thank you for taking the time to grant me an interview. Please tell us a bit about yourself and what you do.
Lou Aronica:
Thanks. I’ve been in the book business for twenty-nine years now. I spent the first twenty of these at publishing houses as a publisher and editor, most recently as Publisher of Avon Books. For the past nine years, I’ve been a writer (two novels and eight works of nonfiction, including the upcoming book The Element, a major book about human capacity that I wrote with Sir Ken Robinson) and an editor. As much as I love writing, I missed publishing. I’ve finally found a way to do both.
Bookworm: You have a new publishing house. Tell us about The Story Plant and how it came to be.
Lou Aronica: The Story Plant rose from a sense that literary manager Peter Miller and I shared that the market was missing a house dedicated to developing novelists. Publishers are very skittish about publishing fiction now – and with good reason; most new fiction sells very badly – and they tend to lack the commitment to a writer necessary to develop an audience for that writer. I have a great deal of experience at author development and it is the thing I love most about that side of the business. Peter knows a great deal about managing careers because he’s been doing that for his clients for decades. We felt that we could come to the industry with a fresh approach and that this patient/ambitious approach could ultimately bring a number of successful novelists to the world. At the core of our program is a real commitment to our writers. We only plan to publish twelve new books a year, so we’re being ultra-selective. However, when we decide to publish a writer, we do so with a careful and comprehensive plan to how we can bring that writer to a wide audience over a number of books.
Bookworm: Right now you only publish fiction at The Story Plant. Will you be opening up to nonfiction authors in the future?
Lou Aronica: We do intend to publish nonfiction at some point. As with the novels, though, the story will be very important. It certainly isn’t in our plans right now to publish how-to and self-help books, unless one of our fiction writers has a book like this that seems irresistible.
Bookworm: Please tell us about the two books that are coming out with your new publishing house.
Lou Aronica: Our first two books have just hit stores. American Quest by Sienna Skyy is a contemporary fantasy with a big love story at the center of it. It’s about two people who share a rare, world-changing love, the demon who tries to subvert it, and the quest one of the lovers must go on to save the other and the world. You can find out more about it – and see the music video and Flash video we created for it and read the two original short stories the author wrote for it – at www.americanquestbook.com. Capitol Reflections by Jonathan Javitt is a medical thriller about an FDA scientist whose best friend dies mysteriously and who embarks on an incredibly dangerous mission to find out why it happened. You can read more about the novel and about its theme of genetically modified foods (something Dr. Javitt knows a great deal about) at www.capitolreflections.com.
Bookworm: What advice can you give aspiring authors who are trying to get published?
Lou Aronica: Write the novel that truly inspires you and pay absolutely no attention to trends. Once you’ve finished the best version of your novel, you can then think about how it fits into the marketplace. Doing so, of course, means you might discover that there’s no viable market for your work. However, you’ll have a passionate novel that might change the market. If you focus on trends, the odds are extremely good that you’ll write something derivative and flat.
Bookworm: What has been the biggest change in the publishing industry since you began your career?
Lou Aronica: There have been a number of huge changes, but I think the biggest change is the nature of the bookselling landscape. Online bookstores didn’t exist, of course, when I started. Nor did wholesale clubs, which can sell huge quantities of a select number of books. For that matter, chain superstores didn’t exist, either (am I sounding like an old codger? I’m really not that old!) Back then, independent bookstores were still strong, mall bookstores had a dominant position in the marketplace, and supermarkets sold far more books than they sell now.
Bookworm: How has the internet changed the publishing industry?
Lou Aronica: The internet has changed the industry completely and I think it is the industry’s best hope. The biggest challenge for publishers has always been finding a way to expose readers to your books. We never had the kinds of marketing budgets that allowed for extensive advertising and readers don’t respond well to hype anyway. Through the web, you can get material out to readers (as we are doing with American Quest and Capitol Reflections) without the hard-sell and allow them to explore the world deeply enough to decide whether they are interested or not.
Meanwhile, I think the internet is a reader’s dream. There’s so much material available, so many communities to join, so many ways to share your passion for books with others. I think we’ve only begun to see the impact the web will have on book publishing, but we already feel very good about that impact.
Bookworm: What do you enjoy reading?
Lou Aronica: The books I love to read tend to be the same as the books I love to publish: well-written fiction with fully developed characters and interesting relationships. My favorite active writer is Pat Conroy, though he doesn’t publish terribly often. I love Barbara Kingsolver as well, and I’m a huge fan of Neil Gaiman, Dennis Lehane, and Nelson DeMille. I also love “big idea” nonfiction like The World is Flat, The Tipping Point, and Freakonomics.
When I’m not reading books, I’m reading every food and cooking magazine I can get my hands on. At some point, The Story Plant will have to publish a novel with recipes, but I haven’t found the right one yet.
Bookworm: Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer my questions.
I really appreciate it. Best of luck.
This has been made possible through Pump Up Your Book Promotion. Special thanks to Dorothy!
