On a recent afternoon, I met up for coffee with The Folio Society CEO Joanna Reynolds and Publishing Director Tom Walker. The duo was on a quick trip to the U.S., a market that now accounts for more than half of the U.K. publisher’s business.
It wasn’t always that way.
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When the London-based Folio Society began in 1947, it was a subscription service with very particular old-school rules – you could only become a member in September, for instance – that produced handsome editions of books for an older, largely male readership that was not growing.
But a lot has changed since then.
After losing money for a decade and nearly running out of cash, the company enlisted Reynolds as a consultant a decade ago, and she was quickly put in charge.
“We needed to change the business completely,” says Reynolds, who added a digital team for social media and marketing and shifted the focus to more modern titles.
Joanna Reynolds is the CEO of The Folio Society. (Photo credit Dunja Opalko / Courtesy of The Folio Society)While the company still publishes editions of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens, these authors are now joined by modern classics by Haruki Murakami, Octavia Butler, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Baldwin, Tove Jansson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and George R.R. Martin.
And Folio Society has produced editions of recent works, such as Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti Trilogy.
“Everything changed,” says Reynolds, adding that its largest group of readers is much younger now, 25-to-34-year-olds, and includes far more women. And as noted above, many more Americans are buying their books. “We made a conscious decision five or six years ago to focus on the U.S.”
How has that worked for them?
“Five years ago, we went into profit, and we’ve been in profit ever since,” she says, and The Folio Society has become an employee-owned trust. “We all own it equally.”
Publishing Director Walker, who’s been with The Folio Society for two decades, speaks enthusiastically about all of it: the books they choose, the years-in-the-making limited editions and the titles they are pursuing. (And as someone who clearly loves books, he had questions of his own about authors or books I’d been reading or the resurgent interest in letterpress printing.)
“We found a way to make a really astonishing range of books,” he says, citing the shift from Victorian-era material and out-of-copyright novels to things like “Dune,” “Game of Thrones,” and “American Psycho.” “We publish around 40 to 50 books a year, and within that is a massive range.”
Wait, Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” is a Folio Society book, I ask.
“We launched ‘American Psycho’ this morning, and it sold out in hours,” says Walker of the limited edition, which goes for an eye-popping $640. “There is just a different level of excitement when you’re creating something tangible, something tactile. ‘American Psycho’ has got all these different textures and different compartments of the box, and the actual paper is beautiful and so is its binding.
“It’s a handmade object, and it feels beautiful,” says Walker. “I think people crave that when they spend all day looking at a screen.”
Tom Walker is the Publishing Director of The Folio Society. (Photo credit Dunja Opalko / Courtesy of The Folio Society)The books, which include the kinds of elements he mentions, such as original art, special bindings, and slipcases, cost much more than the average hardcover, starting around $70 to $80 and rising from there; the limited editions, which have even more features and art, go for much more. That’s one of the reasons The Folio Society books are no longer found in stores, but on their website.
“We only sell now direct to consumers. We have no retail presence at all,” says Reynolds, who adds that this has an added benefit: “It means we know who’s buying our books.”
(I have. A few years ago, I bought a Tolkien title as a Christmas gift for a young person, and it was a big hit.)
Reynolds offers an example of why this business model is so attractive to them.
“We asked our American customers, ‘What do you think is the greatest American novel?’ And they said, ‘Moby-Dick.’ So we’re publishing a limited edition of ‘Moby-Dick’ in the summer,” she says. “We can ask our customers, they tell us, and we can do it. Most publishers don’t know who the end user is. We absolutely do.”
Noting the range of titles and authors, Walker says what unites these disparate books is their quality.
Take nonfiction, for instance, he says.
“‘Band of Brothers,’ or going all the way back to Herodotus – military history to nature writing to Joan Didion. There are some amazing nonfiction books in this,” says Walker.
“Readers are readers,” he adds, “If you like Jane Austen, you’ll like ‘Band of Brothers,’ because they’re just great books, and that is what Folio is able to offer … Our customers trust us.”
“There’s no one else really like Folio, and it’s a really exciting space. We’re sort of a best-kept secret amongst our customers,” he says.
And while they know some people buy the books as collectors, they say they set their sights on pleasing readers and fans by giving them something special.
“We know if somebody loves a book, they want the most exciting copy of that book,” says Reynolds.
“That’s what actually motivates us – when you see someone actually get a lot of joy and excitement around what we’ve done with their favorite book,” says Walker. “It’s about the actual people who love books.”
For more information, check out The Folio Society website.
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