After a year of internal growth and acquisitions, Doug Seibold, publisher of the Chicago independent Agate Publishing, is revamping the house. The reorganization follows Agate's acquisition of indie food and lifestyle publisher Surrey Books; the launch of ProBooks, an online textbook publisher; and a change in distribution from Consortium to PGW.
Beginning in 2007, Agate will be organized into three imprints: Agate Surrey, focused on food and lifestyle; Agate B2, a new line of business-information related titles; and Agate Bolden Books, focused on African-American fiction and nonfiction and named after the New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden.
"I'm trying to find new opportunities for a house of our scale, keep Agate growing and show the marketplace a coherent program focused on niche markets," explained Seibold, who said he's modeled Agate after the Chicago house Sourcebooks. Seibold plans to publish 20 books in 2007, spread across the three imprints, and expects to publish 25 to 30 books in 2008.
Since he began Agate in 2003, Seibold has always looked for new ventures. He started ProBooks, a customized digital textbook service that has produced 14 textbooks, mostly for online universities. Seibold said he is now talking with "traditional universities, and we expect significant growth in ProBooks in the next year."
On the traditional book front, Seibold reported that his big book has been Freshwater Road, a debut novel by Denise Nicholas that won a Hurston/Wright literary award and has sold 12,000 copies. Paperback rights have been sold to Pocket Books and it's been optioned for a film. The June acquisition of Surrey Books brought Agate an active backlist of about 40 titles, including the 1001 Recipes series, a cookbook line featuring titles on low-fat, vegetarian and other health-oriented cooking that Seibold said has sold "hundreds of thousands of copies." He plans to update the series, add titles aimed at African-American health and nutrition issues and "make it more contemporary."
The switch of distribution to PGW had nothing to do with the recent sale of Consortium, Seibold said, but reflected the long distribution history PGW had with Surrey. "I liked the PGW team," Seibold added.
The Agate B2 imprint will focus on business information. In April, Agate B2 will release Brownie Points: Seven Steps to Success for Women Entrepreneurs from One Who Made It by Aundrea Lacy, who is featured on the November cover of Black Enterprise magazine. Later in the year, B2 will publish The Chicago School, an intellectual history of the economics philosophy from the 1940s to the present, a book that Seibold said "was in the works before Milton Friedman's recent death."
As for Bolden Books, Seibold said, "We try to focus on African-American life as central to American culture, rather than some kind of fringe phenomenon." Agate has always focused on African-American readers, said Seibold, who is not black, because "it's a market where an indie house has an advantage. Mainstream media have not always been attentive to black readers." He explained that the black-oriented reading community is "a less fragmented" market than Asian-Americans or Hispanic-Americans. "African-Americans have a strong idea of who they are. It's a more coherent market—even a white guy like me can see that," said Seibold. "There's an old and established black media that can really help a small publisher reach readers. There's a national network of black bookstores and a real sense of community identity."
In January, Agate will launch a new Web site organized around the new imprints, and the new year will also bring Agate's first print catalogue. "We've never had enough books before to justify a print catalogue," Seibold said.
