2023-07-18 18:47:47
Time.news – It’s not for everyone to win the Bancarella Award twice in a row. The Nord publishing house succeeded in 2022 with ‘L’inverno dei Leoni’ by Stefania Auci and this year with ‘La portalettere’ by Francesca Giannone.
But they are not the first successes ringed by the publisher, small only in appearance, which has a long and very different history from the one we have come to know. To find out, we interviewed the managing director of the Gems group – of which Nord is a part – Marco Tarò. Who also reveals his recipe for the perfect bestseller.
First, let’s dispel a myth: Nord is not a small publishing house because it is part of a large group that has an important editorial weight. Tell us the story
The story of Nord begins many years ago when it was founded by Gianfranco Viviani. a great fan of science fiction, in fact, Nord was perhaps the first publishing house in Italy to deal first with science fiction and then with fantasy. Over the years it has published the world’s most important science fiction authors, including Frank Herbert, author of the Dune saga and many others. After that, around the 2000s, science fiction as a literary genre went into crisis, because there were no more authors who wrote classic science fiction books: they had turned a bit towards cyberpunk and other extreme forms of science fiction and the public slowly he detached. Viviani decided to sell and Longanesi decided to invest in this publishing house. We immediately realized that the publishing house’s catalog was struggling and was not sufficient to guarantee an economic balance and therefore we entrusted it to Cristina Prasso who at the time worked for Longanesi and from there the story of the new North began, publishing an excellent narrative which could not be ascribed to a precise genre, but which had nuances that also came from other genres. And from there we started
Then there was the Schatzing case…
We came across a German author who was really making a splash in Germany, he had already sold half a million copies with a very full-bodied thriller, we are talking about almost 800 pages, all set at sea and in which adventure, a little science fiction and especially science. It was a huge success: more than 100,000 copies
What happened to science fiction?
I think that the crisis of science fiction is due to the fact that since the 90s reality has often surpassed fantasy. Those of a certain age who watched Star Trek, for example, remember these amazing objects that were used to communicate, a little box that is nothing more than a smartphone like the ones we use now. Things that we have in our hands today and use every day. It’s hard to come up with something new to what has already been written. Even robots have now entered our daily lives, so they are less fascinating.
Then came a special case: an American author of almost no success at home who was instead a huge success in Italy
Glenn Cooper, who had written this extraordinary book where thriller, science fiction was mixed there too, which was ‘The Library of the Dead’. A book snubbed by American readers because the publisher had the wrong title and placed it in an area where it didn’t work. In Italy it was a success with half a million copies, riding the trend of that moment which was that of the somewhat esoteric thriller launched by Dan Brown with the ‘Da Vinci Code’. Then we brought The Witcher saga to Italy which then became a phenomenon, recently relaunched by the Netflix TV series.
Let’s talk about fashions: everything in consumption is fashion, even reading is consumption and therefore reading is also fashion. We in the classically understood fashion are used to the fact that there are a couple of stylists or even one who gets the trend right and then all the others follow him. In publishing, however, the impression is that the process is somewhat reversed, that is, it is the public who dictates fashion and the publisher, sometimes even a little laboriously, sometimes making mistakes or arriving a little late. How does it work?
It is partly true that fashions are generated by readers, but in my opinion, those who finally start new trends are the authors who write the books they have in mind. We publishers decide to publish it not because that genre works at that moment, but because we believe it is a good book and that it can have a good audience and therefore a trend can arise rather than a fad. And word of mouth is what then amplifies book sales. But there is a fundamental link between the publisher and the readers who are booksellers, especially independent booksellers, people who read many books, who know your tastes and who can direct you towards similar books. And that is in my opinion the fundamental link.
And here we take a small time leap and practically arrive at our years. I have the impression that with ‘The Lions of Sicily’ you have found a narrative not only that is aimed above all at a female audience and that tells stories of love, stories of female redemption, stories of emancipation. How do we define this editorial line?
Great stories that on the one hand have an excellent writing quality, so they are not novels that have passed the commercial term, but are well written books with a great writing quality, settings that on the one hand tell stories of families, but also a little the history of our country. Reading them one has the feeling of learning something, of reviewing the history of Italy.
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