Quadrille Publishing, founded in 1994 in the U.K. and acquired by Australia-based Hardie Grant Publishing Group in 2013, is expanding into North America with Chronicle Books serving as its distributor. Chronicle will sell approximately 20 Quadrille titles each season, starting with the current fall list.
Quadrille publishes illustrated cookbooks, lifestyle titles, and stationary featuring celebrity chefs and brands such as Vogue; since its founding it has sold 40 million books worldwide. Recent successes include Salad Love and the bestseller The Little Book of Mindfulness, which has already sold more than 350,000 copies worldwide outside of North America.
Margaux Durigon, international sales director at Quadrille, said that moving into North America was “always in the works, because it’s one of the key strategic points in the world English-language markets. It was always on the back of our minds, because it’s such an interesting, dynamic market.” To grow its book and stationary lines in the States, Quadrille has a dedicated U.S. publicist. “We are making sure every single title and author has the most coverage possible,” Durigon said. Recent tours included Michelin-starred chef Michel Roux, author of The Essence of French Cooking, who held a number of dinner events on the East Coast, and William Banks-Blaney, author of Iconic Dresses, who had a book party at the Jonathan Adler boutique in New York in October.
Durigon said Quadrille chose Chronicle to be its North American distributor because of the “natural synergy” between the two lists. Tyrrell Maloney, v-p, sales and marketing, at Chronicle Books, agreed. “We’ve long admired Quadrille and even have partnered with them in the past.” Though Quadrille had sold rights to some of its titles to American houses, the agreement with Chronicle lets Quadrille brand itself as a publisher for the U.S. market, Maloney said. “We’re really working closely with them not just on selling their books but on finding the right titles to bring onto their list to get them established as a publisher.”
Noting that the market for high-quality illustrated books, especially gift books, is “exceptionally strong,” Maloney said that for Chronicle the partnership with Quadrille “will help strengthen what is already for us a really critical part of our publishing strategy. We now are able to offer an even broader range of titles in this area. For us it’s about reach and collaboration in categories that were already extremely well established, in order to build a bigger merchandising presence in existing retailers and also identify new retailers in which to sell books.”
Though Quadrille has long-established U.K. authors who have a platform in the U.S., Durigon said they are seeking opportunities to work with American authors. “That’s something we will be aiming for with the future lists.”
