Hannah Eason
Durham, NC (USA)
Role(s):
Founder/Owner/Principal
Sirius Mercury Publishing
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Startup
Location:
Durham
Industry:
Media
Year Founded:
2014
Number Employees:
1-10 people
Business Stage:
Growth (not profitable)
Entity Type:
Sole Proprietorship
Description:
Sirius Mercury Publishing is an independent publishing company dedicated to entertaining, literary novels-of-ideas. The approach is to publish, package, and market "books proud to be books"--those novels that embrace the structural techniques and literary devices that dedicated bookworms relish while keeping entertainment a priority. These are also novels that gracefully weave in an integrated network of ideas, proudly claiming novels' historical place as bastions of abstract thought.
As the editor of Sirius Mercury, I have vast publishing experience that includes copyediting and content editing contracts with major national publishing houses along with work in literary critique--I have worked for Publishers Weekly for more than two years, prior to which I worked for Kirkus Indie. I have interviewed authors including ESPN's Matthew Berry, Elena Gorokhova (A Mountain of Crumbs), Heidi W. Durrow (The Girl Who Fell From the Sky), and Amy Greene (Bloodroot), among many others. I have an extensive network of publishing contacts, including acquisitions editors and editors-in-chief of long-established publishing houses; top literary agents; and well-regarded voices in literary criticism.
One of the major mistakes I see in publishing is the effort to make novels more social media friendly. It seems this is largely done out of the effort to keep publishing relevant, and efforts to do so have included stabs at “microliterature,” book games and contests through social media, incorporating hashtags and multiple other such references in everything from marketing material to book titles. While I have seen some of these tactics amount to increased “buzz,” I’ve as often seen it generate very little effective buzz at the same time that it alienates those already-dedicated readers who don’t hesitate to spend luxuriously on their reading habit but also don’t like to see literature, in essence, “dumbed down.”
It is my perspective that the most effective way to approach publishing is by doubling down on the luxurious appeal of literature. Conglomerate publishers often cast an extremely wide and extremely shallow net at the expense of having a quality level that readers can rely on. While many of us knew with the books we read in high school and college—our English-class books—that we could trust them to warrant deep readings and rereadings, there are few publishing houses today—even among the so-called literary divisions of the majors and the small independent publishers—that guarantee their books will all be layered, brilliantly executed novels that incorporate those devices that true bookworms delight in. While such readers may not account for the vast majority of the population, they are out there; I’m in contact with hordes of them; and I know that they don’t mind spending on a quality book.
It is also, and in a similar vein, my view that books cannot be treated as other commodities in terms of price competition. Naturally, there is such a thing as prohibitive pricing, and the price does need to strike would-be consumers as falling within a reasonable scale for the product. I know of few readers, though, who refuse to buy a book they are already interested in—either because of the premise or the author’s name—if that book falls on the high end of the scale. And while that is an “I’ve rarely seen” quality, I have never seen someone shopping in a bricks-and-mortar or online bookstore select a book based exclusively on its low price. Mass relatability and low pricing may work for plenty of products, but it makes for a terribly ineffective approach to literature.
A final pillar of my view, from experience, on what works involves the packaging. From the website to the book cover to the publicity material, the packaging needs to accurately and with a great deal of excitement reflect the literary nature of the product. I think this is achieved not so much by mounting a hashtag-loaded social media campaign, giving away lots of copies on GoodReads, offering free copies to every blogger with a book site, etc., as by selecting those specific ways in which serious, literature-loving readers get their recommendations. By focusing on those venues, publishers are able to truly create an EVENT regarding each book. The balance to strike here is one of fostering the excitement of a movie premiere but in ways that are specific and appropriate to publishing itself.