“Biggest” News in Books: Celebrity Imprints
Questlove, musician, author, and Philadelphia legend, announced that he is dipping his toes into the world of book publishing by starting his own book imprint AUWA with publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. For the uninitiated, an imprint in publishing is like a business division. Instead of dividing business up by regionality or product line or service, in book publishing we divide business up into imprints by lists of books (okay, technically that’s product line). Book imprints develop signature styles overtime—insiders will say, “that’s a Greywolf book” or “that’s a Tyrant book”—but really it just depends on what the publisher (the head decision maker) and editors (the closer to the ground decision makers) are working on at that imprint. An imprint can set out to say “we’re an imprint that publishes nonfiction books about whales” and then end up publishing novels about witches. A fact to never forget: arguably the most prestigious publisher in the industry, one that publishes Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, also publishes Fifty Shades of Grey. Imprints also vary greatly in size and scope: some imprints put out ten new books a year and others put out hundreds. To confuse matters, sometimes imprints are under the management, like in Questlove’s case, of other imprints (don’t think about it too much). There have been many, many celebrity-run imprints over the years, ones headlined by Lena Dunham, Sarah Jessica Parker, and even Johnny Depp to name a few.
The results of celebrity imprints have always been mixed—the Johnny Depp imprint never released a single book. However, there are many reasons why some celebrity imprints do work and I’d put my money on Questlove being successful out of the gate. The marketing muscle a celebrity can bring far surpasses what most publishers can put behind their books. Questlove can get an accompanying documentary to the Sly Stone memoir (the first book his imprint announced) greenlit and made, for starters. So why is there ample room for caution with celebrity imprints, if you have a very smart, highly connected, creative person running the show?
On a micro level, celebrity books themselves demonstrate the same issues celebrity imprints face. Let’s say Billie Eilish, for example, were to write a memoir. It’s a huge bestseller, an absolute hit, and critically loved. But even in the best-case publishing scenario, is Eilish really going to divert her energy and attention from making music to write a second book? While her publisher might like her to, she’ll probably go back to her original artistic calling and make far more money by writing music and going on tour. Celebrity books are the fast-burning, bright comets of publishing. Celebrity imprints are no different--once the initial cream of ideas is gone off the top—projects like the Sly memoir the Questlove has probably wanted for years—the celebrity has to come back next year and do it all again. It’s a slog, and a slow one. Why, if you’re a famous and highly successful artist, would you forgo your original industry—whether it be music, television, commercial products—in order to spend time scouting and scouring the literary and entertainment worlds for new book ideas?
Publishing is a long-time horizon business, the magic word being: perpetuity. If hypothetically you offered me all of the economic benefits and drawbacks to every celebrity book or the exclusive rights to sell The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird forever, I’d take the latter without blinking and would probably make more money with much less of a headache. Publishing works as a business because we come back year after year to find great books and then we support the great books that do find an audience indefinitely. This grinding year-after-year, building on the year before and coming up with dozens of new authors and books to publish, is why celebrity imprints, but frankly, also any book publishing upstart, is an extremely daunting proposition. It’s easy to understand that if you are a celebrity with more than just books going on in your life you might lose steam.
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