Unlocking Hot Key Books

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Formerly Publishing Director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books, Sarah Odedina is the founder of a new children’s publisher, Hot Key Books. Graham Marks interviewed Sarah for Books for Keeps.

I first met Sarah Odedina, MD of the four-month-old Hot Key Books, in November 1997; she’d taken up the reins of Bloomsbury’s children’s imprint some ten months previously and had recently ushered Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, bought by her predecessor Barry Cunningham, onto the market. Exciting times. Fifteen years later she’s swapped W1 for EC1 and, rather than take over what someone else started, she’s begun this venture with a blank sheet of paper – which can symbolise, depending on how you look at it, blind panic or total opportunity. For Sarah it’s very much the latter, and once again, exciting times.

The smell of fresh-cut, newly-laid pine flooring in the bright, modern West of Old St/North of Barbican offices only adds to the just-out-of-the-box feeling that Hot Key has: anything could happen here, you can’t help thinking, and I wonder what will?

After the arrival of coffee and green tea, and a short to-and-fro about the iPod moment books are experiencing right now, I start by asking Sarah if she still agrees with what she told me in our first interview, that coming from a rights’ background (she worked as an adult Rights Manager at Penguin and was the Orchard/Watts Rights Director for five years) makes you far more critical when commissioning a book.

“I still believe that completely,” she replies. “I’m very, very conscious when commissioning a book that I want to have an audience in mind for it – who’s going to read this? Like then, I also still believe that you can’t take your eye off the end-user. But the great thing about now, as opposed to 1997, is that we can actually communicate with the end-user, whereas back then we had to rely on booksellers, or librarians, to get to them, two groups who as we know are now struggling. Even five years ago we couldn’t do what we can do now in terms of communicating with the community of readers.”

This ability to talk to the reader, to bring them closer to the book and the author behind it, has changed since the days, not so long ago, when a school visit, and subsequent picture in the local paper, was the apotheosis of PR. Along the way much has altered, with technology playing an ever more important role, and it’s interesting to note that in 2001, when Sarah published Celia Rees’s Witch Child, it became the first children’s book to have a dedicated website. “It was wonderful,” she says, energised by the memory, “such a lovely website but completely static – when I think what we could do for that book now, it’d be all bells and whistles by comparison. And in ten years time, if we have another conversation like this, no doubt we’ll be saying ‘now look what we can do – have a virtual Celia Rees in the room with you!’.”

Four years into her time at Bloomsbury, with the Harry Potter phenomenon still in its early stages, Sarah told me that she was in the lucky position of being able to take risks with what she published; with the world quite a different place these days, was the same true for her now? “Yes,” comes the immediate response, “at Hot Key Books I’m certain that we can take risks. We’ve got a great deal of freedom in not having anything – when you’ve got nothing it’s a wonderful opportunity, you’re very liberated to create…and with the most talented group of people, all of whom have a lot of experience, we can pool all of that and put it to use in a much more boutique and bespoke environment.”

Hot Key, as it stands today, is a group of some ten people, including secretaries, in which, says Sarah, everyone plays to their strengths. “Sales and Marketing and Editorial have to be hand in hand now, because we can acquire the best books in the world, but if we don’t market those books well to the reader they’ll languish on a couple of shelves somewhere and nobody will ever know about them. We have to get the message out. In the past there were all sorts of ways to getting the message to readers – booksellers, librarians, book clubs, certain publications, none of which quite have the same weight now that they used to – or rather, the change in climate has allowed publishers to be more a part of the process of communicating with the young reader.”

The core idea in putting together the team at Hot Key was the creation of an absolutely equal division between Editorial and Sales and Marketing. She has, says Sarah, a line-up which wants to work together and shares a vision of what literature for young readers could be, and what that means for storytelling and getting the story out there.

Would it be true to say that there were going to be directions she could go in at Hot Key that she wouldn’t have been able to do at Bloomsbury, because we all now know that imprint so well, not to mention what we expect from it? “We haven’t got a reputation here, we are in the process of building one,” Sarah replies. “When you don’t have one to protect or live by, you can be different. People are excited and have a lot of expectations of what we will do here, for a lot of reasons, including the people - like Kate Manning, the Sales and Marketing Director [ex-HarperCollins]. She is wonderful, and if she’s advocating a book, they’re very excited to see what that book is. We have a lot of freedom, no one knows what we’re going to do, and there’s a big surprise factor which, when you’re established, you can’t have.”

In this PR and marketing-led age, image is essential, and so is having an identifiable USP. The new imprint has a logo and a strap line – Unlock the power of stories – but what is it that’s going to make Hot Key unique in the marketplace? “The headline is fiction for children between nine and 19; each book will have a mark of excellence in its area – excellent literary fiction with a really unique voice, or excellent accessible humour, and so on.

“And I don’t want to think that we could copy anyone else; there’ll be no looking at what’s doing well, saying ‘let’s do something similar’ and buying a package. The list will be absolutely author-driven; this list is about authors’ voices, not about us sitting around thinking of concepts that we go and get people to create for us.”

Sarah also feels that the hand-in-glove relationship between Editorial and Sales and Marketing is also unique, and that the company’s will and ability to, as she puts is, “constantly communicate out” what they’re doing through blogging, Twitter and e-media is a big, important differentiator.

We will all be able to see, and read, what she’s talking about come late July, early August when the first books are published. SJ Kincaid’s Insignia, the first part of an 11+ virtual reality sci-fi trilogy brought in from the US, and Sarah Mussi’s YA love-story-with-a-difference Angel Dust are the imprint’s launch titles; they are followed a month later by FR Hitchcock’s 9+ debut novel Shrunk and Sally Gardner’s Maggot Moon – which will have a high-profile print and digital launch and a consumer campaign. In the latter half of the year comes A World Between Us, an historical novel set in 1930s Spain by Lydia Syson, Constable & Toop, a ghost story by Gareth P Jones, Alex Shearer’s Cloud Hunters and Jepp, Who Defied Stars by Katherine Marsh. Every one a lead title, each occupying its own space, says Sarah, which is something you can only do with a launch list.

The press release informs us that Hot Key ‘plans to publish between thirty to fifty books a year’, which, at the lowest figure is about half the number of books Sarah quoted me as a ballpark Bloomsbury annual target a decade ago. Was this, then, a real sign of the economic times, or is it now about quality not quantity? “If you can make the money on quality then that would be lovely, but we have budgets like everyone, so we have to be flexible; although three to four books a month is right for a team this size, because everybody can dedicate themselves to their book for the month.

“It would be perfect if we managed to achieve the kind of turnover we need on that number of books…and I think, cross fingers, with a little bit of guesswork, a lot of good luck and some applied science we can do it. Thirty to fifty books is a good number, it means that everything gets remembered and nothing gets lost, as it would in the massive rush to publish 100-150 titles a year. And that’s not a very big list for the larger houses.”

This might seem an odd question to ask someone in the midst of creating a launch list and totally focussed on what’s new and what’s next, but how did she feel about backlists? “Backlist is heaven,” she says, “particularly in children’s books as they do backlist in a way that perhaps adult books don’t; I’m really looking forward to having one. In the mean time it’s amazing to be able to just concentrate on the frontlist and not to have to worry about managing, re-jacketing and re-promoting a backlist. But in five to ten years time it’ll be tremendous when a lot of our business is underpinned by strong backlist sales, and I very much hope that we’re buying the kind of books that will backlist.” Are the retail trade as enthusiastic about them as she is? “Yes, I think they are!” comes the passionate response. “People like backlist, consumers like backlist – they may not think ‘I like backlist’ but they like to know they can still buy say a copy of Holes; the people who read that book for the first time twelve years ago could be buying it for someone else now, and these books are still relevant.”

As relevant as they may be, and as keen as Sarah is on them, there’s one thing backlists, by their very nature, are not and that is new and shiny. In publishing, and the retail trade, the search for the ‘new and shiny’ seems to have become a magpie-like infatuation in recent years. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, in a recent WIRED Magazine interview, warned against companies becoming ‘addicted to the shiny, because shiny doesn’t last’; what was Sarah’s opinion? “Well, if the new and the shiny is as successful as Stephanie Meyer, or Robert Muchamore, then it’s brilliant, I’ll have some of that. But how I like to think of it is that new and shiny is only a part of our list, one of the foundation blocks of our business.”

A reality of the digital world is that nothing ever stays around long enough to get tarnished. There’s always a new operating system, app, gizmo or site to upgrade to and the trickledown effect means that what was once high-end, like a smartphone, is, a couple of years later, ubiquitous. Once most kids have a smartphone, will it be the de facto way to interact digitally with them? “It’s a wonderful delivery system,” Sarah agrees, “and it’s definitely one of the ways we’ll have of getting our stories to readers. But I think that even if they have the gadgets, you still have make sure they know they can read on them – and not just do Facebook and Google maps. Kids having these phones isn’t going to guarantee sales for us, one thing doesn’t equal the other; we have to make damn sure we market to these younger readers.”

That, of course, is another story. Marketing direct to kids is an area fraught with

difficulties, as you can’t simply send e-mails to them; you have to create communities and make sure people know they’re there and choose to come to them. “The thing about books,” Sarah continues, “is that you’re more often than not preaching to the converted, which is obviously part of the problem, but it is difficult to persuade someone who doesn’t read to read a book. Whereas it might not be that difficult to persuade a biscuit eater who doesn’t normally eat a chocolate biscuit with nuts to try one, books are a big leap for people who don’t read. And just because they can on a phone doesn’t mean they will. We have to think very hard how we communicate to our audience and make sure they know books are available to them in all these different ways.”

Sarah then mentions what she calls “that lovely phrase ‘playground marketing’”, which, it is acknowledged, was the propellant that rocketed Harry Potter into his stellar orbit. It’s the industry’s grail, and as elusive an object as the legendary cup itself. Playground marketing has, in a decade, become viral marketing and gone from a local event to a global one; though at its most successful, it is still an elusive force best driven by the end-user rather than the marketeers. What was once almost a feral occurrence is now, in its e-format, an integral part of the modern marketing toolkit. “There are so many more ways of expanding the circle of readers now, we just have to make sure we do it well,” says Sarah. “I am so in the dark, as everyone is, about where we’re going to end up, but I am so not in doubt that we are still going be selling books.”

One way a book gets marked out as special, at least within the industry, is when it wins an award. How important, on a wider scale, were they? “We love winning awards, of course we do; we love winning awards for a variety of reasons: it’s a mark of the quality of the authors we’re publishing, and a confirmation that we have the respect of the people who judge the Carnegie, for example. I don’t know, in the short term, that awards make much difference to sales, but in the long term they do, they cement an author’s reputation and make booksellers more confident in supporting them. But here they’re not like in the US, where a Caldecott or a Newbery win means 100,000 copies are added to the run immediately. I wish it was like that here, but it isn’t.”

Over the time I’ve known Sarah, I’ve always recognised that one of her major passions was picture books. Can she say, hand on heart (and with a company descriptor which states unequivocally that it publishes ‘children’s fiction for 9-19’), that she’s never going to do a picture book? “No, I’m not going to say that, 9-19 is the launch list. It’s brilliant to be a part of Bonnier [the Swedish parent company] and know that we do indeed publish for children of all ages, and that’s always been a really important thing for me.

“Whether or not Hot Key starts to publish picture books is something for discussion further down the line.” And non-fiction, is that dead in the water? “It’s not dead in the water at all! I’m going to be responsible for WeldonOwen, which is moving back from Sydney to London, and I’m very excited about non-fiction, particularly well-told narrative non-fiction. Non-readers go to the internet for information, readers still go to books. And once again, it’s how we make sure they know the book exists and that there’s a choice. If fiction’s having a hard time in the trade, non-fiction has it four times worse. But all these difficulties are challenges to us, and therefore also opportunities because, if we can crack it, then we’ll be all right.”

Can’t say fairer than that.

Graham Marks is a writer and journalist.