Two years after taking the helm at Yale University Press, director John Donatich, former v-p, publisher of Basic Books, is navigating the press through a choppy market using lessons learned from years working in trade book publishing. He's breaking down the YUP list into distinct lines that function much like imprints.
"When I first got to Yale," Donatich told PW, "It was almost like five little publishers in one: academic—our core—art, trade books, language and reference." Soon, he found, "not only was this a way to understand the press, but a way to run it." Each book's marketing is determined by which of the five areas it is slotted into. This approach enables the press to give more individual attention to each of the 320 books it publishes annually, as well as the 4,000 titles on its active backlist. Sixty-five percent of Yale's list is developed in New Haven; the other 35% comes from its London office.
The imprint concept is paying off. For the fiscal year ended June 30, the press had a "record-breaking year," said Donatich, "revenue grew 18%." Books like its most recent New York Timesbestsellers, Edmund S. Morgan's Benjamin Franklin and Gore Vidal's Fathers of the Republic: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the Invention of a Nation, sold in the high five figures.
In addition, the press won a record number of awards, including a Bancroft Prize for George M. Marsden's Jonathan Edwards: A Life (also an NBCCA finalist). Anne Wiles Tucker, Dana Friis-Hansen, Kanekyo Ryuichi and Takeba Joe's The History of Japanese Photography was a finalist for the Independent Publisher Book Awards and won an AAUP Award for design.
The new "imprint sensibility," as Donatich calls it, is reflected in the fall 2004 trade catalogue. The new catalogue gave Yale a chance to break out its art list—and those of distribution clients such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, London's National Gallery and the Jewish Museum—by reproducing covers in four-color for the first time.
Donatich also noted that the trade "imprint," the press's third-largest publishing area after academic and art titles, is inaugurating a new program on economics, law and business in fall 2005. Among the authors who have already been signed are John Bogle, founder and former chair of Vanguard Group's mutual funds group, who is working on a book on the reasons behind the recent corporate scandals. The list also includes Robert Price, former head of Control Data, and sociologist and novelist Richard Sennett, who is affiliated with the London School of Economics.
Donatich anticipates that the reorganization of Yale, begun when he came on board in January 2003, will be finished shortly. Once that is completed, he plans to begin actively acquiring, as he did at Basic. "These will be books that have my stamp," he said.
