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At every book festival and book fair we take part in, as well as during the recording of our radio and television shows, readers and authors usually ask us a question, ‘How did you come up with the idea of focusing on emerging authors?’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t know…’ we would like to reply, after all, it seems like only yesterday when we took our first steps in this sector, but then we realise that almost twenty years have passed since our Group was founded. And so we realise that the right thing to do is to tell our story again, and tell it well.
Let’s start by saying that our Group was born in Italy in 2002, from the successful experience of the artistic-literary magazine Il Filo.
So far, so good; let’s just add that together with the birth of the publishing house – which would later become a publishing group, and eventually an international publishing group – our projects dedicated to emerging authors were launched.
From the very beginning, one of the objectives of our publishing house was to represent an ideal bridge between the official literature – which was a prerogative only of the most famous writers- and the hidden literature of the tens of thousands of manuscripts in search of publication that crowded the editorial offices of the main Italian publishing houses (without any chance of being read.)
Yes, because everything that may seem obvious nowadays – going into a bookshop and buying a book by an emerging author, seeing it reviewed in national newspapers or on national TV, or awarded by the jury of a prestigious literary prize – was not predictable at all back in the day.
If today books by emerging authors are recognised as having the same editorial dignity as other products on the market, much is due to the results achieved over the years by our initiatives. And, if you have a few minutes to read the next few lines, we will explain why.
To get a precise idea of the context in which it all started, we must try to rewind the tape and go back exactly to 2002, only then will we be able to understand the impact that this project has had on the Italian publishing system.
Twenty years ago or so, there were already many publishing houses that dealt with emerging authors, but their books could not count on any publishing outlet, why?
Simply because there was no possibility for authors still unknown to the general public to occupy part of the space reserved for already well-known authors. Distribution, for instance, was considered a too selective channel from the point of view of numbers to embrace titles with uncertain prospects in terms of sales.
It is clear that in order to sell books, someone has to talk about them first… and, as we know, in those days, newspapers and TV dealt with everything but literary debuts.
On the other hand, however, our small but fierce literary magazine was taking its first steps with some success, and we could see that, contrary to what we had always been told, the columns featuring the writings of emerging authors were the most popular among readers.
How did we know that? Well, readers themselves wrote to us to congratulate us, so much so that the eight pages we dedicated to new authors became twenty-four in just under a year. Exactly half of the magazine Il Filo proposed new authors.
We thus began to believe more and more firmly that the authors we were discovering would be able to have their say in the publishing world, and we decided to bet on them.
We started with literary festivals, where it would be possible to present our authors not only to the public but also to professionals. Things went so well that, after a year travelling around Italy, we managed to organise our own literary festival. It turned out to be a success. On a March afternoon, at a beautiful art academy in the Trieste district of Rome, hundreds of people gathered together to attend a literary event dedicated to emerging literature. Nothing similar had ever happened before. The online word of mouth attracted girls and boys, women and men from all over Italy, united by their passion for books.
The copies of our magazine that we brought for the occasion were immediately sold out, the authors we had chosen conquered the audience, the newspapers began to talk about them. Something new was finally going on…
But not even in our wildest expectations we could ever have imagined that, over the years, our small company would become one of the most solid groups on the international publishing scene, with offices in the main European capitals. Nor could we have known that our catalogue would represent the full expression of the ideas we started from, hosting the great names of world literature and the best emerging European writers.
Our books now travel the world and that ideal bridge between official and hidden literature – which we mentioned above – has finally been built. And every year it is ready to welcome new stories, new suggestions, and daydreams, enshrined in the lines of the pages of each of our books.