AustLit
Ali Green is CEO & Co-Founder of Pantera Press. She was 2019 Australian Business News Sydney Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Media/PR) and was named one of Australia’s 100 Most Influential Women by Westpac and the Australian Financial Review for exemplifying, through Pantera Press, the trend towards integrating business and social good. Ali is a Harvard Business School Alumna and sits on a number of industry committees and boards including Writing NSW (Director) and the Pantera Press Foundation (Director). She was also chosen as one of the top 20 young leaders in philanthropy in 2013 and again in 2015 for Philanthropy Australia’s study tours to USA, and UK/EU.
This interview between Ali and Beth Driscoll took place on 14th December, 2017.
(I: Interviewer. AG: Alison Green)
I: Could you tell me a little bit about how you got started in your career, and particularly how Pantera Press came about?
AG: My background is actually not in publishing. My background’s in business strategy; it was psychology and business strategy, actually. I was doing a thesis at the time on an industry that had a void in it, totally separate to the book publishing industry. What became very clear, as an avid reader and someone who had been working in and around literacy in the not-for-profit space in a consulting capacity, was that there really was a big void in Australia, which was amplified at the start of the global financial crisis in 2008.
Because, what happened in 2008, as with every other industry around the world, is that, whether you were already risk averse or not, people became much more risk averse, and so what that meant for publishing here, from my perception anyway, was that publishers were really tightening their belts, and only focussing on their sure bets.
If they were going to take that risk, then it was really only through the traditional channel, which was through a literary agent. But literary agents were doing basically the exact same thing.
It was this really weird space in time where it made perfect sense why people weren’t looking at new authors who didn’t have track records, but I also thought that it was a very short-sighted approach. Because it really meant that, as a long-term piece, we weren’t investing in the next generation of writers. And, while it might sound very dramatic, there was a real possibility that future generations of readers might not encounter books written by Australian authors or books of Australian content, which would be terrible.
That change in perception, or that changing landscape of publishing was the catalyst for the start of Pantera Press. So, my background was not in publishing at all, but I’d also been a huge reader. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that careers in publishing existed. When I was doing my thesis in my Master of Commerce on an industry, I naturally gravitated towards the publishing industry. Then I spent another year or so talking to everyone I could in the industry here and overseas, particularly in the States, about the publishing industry. What they were doing; why they were doing it; why they weren’t doing certain things; to get a real sense of if there was room to do something different.
I: Can you tell me a little bit more about the publishing process and business model at Pantera Press? What do you see yourself as doing that’s different to the other publishers around?
AG: I think, first and foremost, we started out being very focussed on new Australian authors. We wanted to find authors, debut authors, who we saw as having international and best-seller potential, but who were writing really wonderful stories and also had a wonderful writing style. You really do need to find the two together. It can’t just be one or the other.
That’s probably the first difference—that our real focus, our main focus, has been on that next generation of writers, whereas, if anything, it’s a side piece for other publishers.
To allow us to do that, we really had to come up with a different sort of financial model. So, what we decided with our authors is that it needed to be a long-term relationship, because for a debut author to take off, you have to start investing in brand from day one. What we’ve seen in the industry, from other publishers, is that with debut fiction, normally a publisher would invest not really much at all. We were hearing, at the time, that it was sort of like two hundred to five hundred dollars, and that would basically cover maybe some cheese and a bottle of wine at the book launch, and a publicist to write one media release about it, and that would be it.
But what we knew is that for a book to have a chance to take off, people need to hear about it. So we were investing up front both financially and strategically in marketing and publicity, with the real goal of building that author brand, but also knowing that author brand building, while it would be nice, doesn’t happen overnight, so we need to be looking at building that brand over the course of a number of books, and not just one book.
So, our approach with our authors, the financial approach, anyway, is that we have a 50/50 profit share model, and they don’t put any money into the model. They contribute their blood, sweat and tears, and their actual manuscript, and we bring to the table our expertise and the actual money and our production and all of that kind of stuff. But what it means is that we’re not paying authors royalties up front when the book is still losing money. We do pay an advance, though. We pay a small, nominal advance so that the author has sort of made money from their writing. Then, beyond that, we split profits 50/50 once that specific book has broken even. The idea really is that we’re both equally incentivised for the book to succeed, because we’re not making money if they’re not making money. We would like our authors to be able to quit their day jobs and write full time.
I: When you say that you’re interested in long term relationships with your authors, does that mean you tend to sign contracts for greater numbers of books?
AG: We say that we sign authors, not books. We basically have what I would call a gentleman’s agreement, where we say, ‘for as long as it’s working, we will continue to publish books together’. For us, that really means that when we’re looking for authors up front, we’re not looking for one-hit wonders.
I: I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair this year and I saw the Pantera Press stand. I was going to ask you how that trip went for you?
AG: Frankfurt is important, probably more in terms of relationship maintenance than anything else. It’s an opportunity for our rights manager, Katie, to meet new publishers, agents, scouts, et cetera, who are on the scene, but more so to check in with the agents, scouts and publishers that we have ongoing relationships with, for a raft of our different titles. Just to have that face-to-face time. Actually, we are talking to them on an ongoing basis during the entire year, so when we have something that we think would appeal to them, we send it to them straight away.
I: What do you think makes a great crime novel, specifically? Or what are you looking for in the crime novels you publish?
AG: I think it goes across all stories, to be honest. Our number one criteria is that it is an engaging plot. It needs a story that is interesting—something that is driven by characters. You need strong characters who aren’t just tools to propel you forward, but actually are what move the plot forward. It needs to be a storyline, particularly for crime, where you are surprised: there are twists and turns, things you didn’t see coming, but what has been written in there is actually enough to give you the hints where, on later reflection, you could have worked it out yourself, but you didn’t.
The second piece, our number two criteria, is that it’s well written. You can have a fantastic story that is not well written and sometimes that can still fly, but for us, it’s crucial that you have both pieces, because we’re really trying to find the next generation of Australian writers.
I: Do you have any thoughts on how gender operates in the world of Australian crime fiction? In terms of who’s writing it and publishing it, and also how it works on the page?
AG: Yes and no. I think there’s a lot of conversation around this. The Stella Prize, generally, has spoken about how many women are writing books versus men, and how many are winning prizes. I know there have been a lot of conversations in crime fiction around similar things.
In our own experience, we have slightly more women than men writing crime fiction for us, but it’s pretty on par. Our women crime writers are the ones who have won awards. We’re very excited by that. I think that the Sisters in Crime program itself is an incredibly engaged community, and they have been very supportive of our crime writers, and I think once you’re in, you’re in, and you’re welcomed into that family. That has played a big part into the brand development and successes of those crime authors, for sure.
I: Do you think there’s anything distinctive about Australian crime fiction, and how connected do you think it is to international trends and markets?
AG: From our perspective, our focus has always been finding Australian authors, but not necessarily authors that were writing Australian content.
Sulari Gentill, who’s written the Rowland Sinclair series, has Australian characters, who are all from Australia, but her series does travel around the world. The first book is set in New South Wales […]. Her second book is set on a cruise liner en route to the US. The third book is set back in New South Wales. The fourth book is set in Germany. So, her characters are all very Australian, and so that real Australian piece travelled with the book, but the actual setting of the book does change, depending what trouble they’re getting themselves into.
What we’re looking for is a great story that does have international appeal. An Australian setting, we’re finding, does have international appeal. We thought that with Sulari’s series we would have a lot of interest in the UK for the series because of the writing style, and while we did, we had even more interest in the US, which was sort of unexpected, but was fantastic.
I think Australian stories with Australian characters do absolutely have a place in the international field, and crime writers, or crime readers, love interesting crime stories.
I: When you publish books, do you have a sense of publishing for an Australian audience, or do you aim for an international audience?
AG: We aim for a broad audience, so it really does depend on the book. For crime, we would be looking for a book that we thought had wide appeal. And that wide appeal, particularly because of our reading preferences in Australia, often does pair up to at least the US and the UK and other English-speaking markets. Then we work out what are the translation markets that it might work in as well.
I: Could you describe your first encounter with Sulari? How did you meet her and her book?
AG: She was one of our first authors. I think she was the second author that we signed. She was in that first lot of authors that submitted to us when we opened our doors as a book publishing company. She had finished her book, not long before we had opened, and she had just come across us.
We read her submission; she just put it through our normal submissions process, and we read it—we loved it. We stalked her on the internet and discovered that she had written another story that was completely different to this series. She had submitted A Few Right Thinking Men to us, which was her first Rowland Sinclair book. But she’d also written a story called Chasing Odysseus, which was based on Greek classics, and it had won an award, like an unpublished award.
We organised to meet with her and we chatted to her, and we told her how excited we were about the book, and her as an author, and it being an ongoing series. We spoke about our vision for her series, and thought that we were all very much on the same page.
We had this great first meeting, which was wonderful. We asked her to go away and think about it, because we actually have in our contracts a ‘nice guy’ policy. That’s literally what it’s called in our contract, where because we are all about relationships and these long-term relationships, it’s really important that authors think that we’re nice, and we think that they’re nice, and we have this very friendly relationship together. Because otherwise it won’t work.
She came back to us a short while later and said, ‘Just letting you know, one of the major publishers has also contacted me and is interested in my books.’ We went, ‘Oh no, we’ve lost her.’ Then she said, ‘I’ve turned them down and I’ve signed the contract, and it’s on its way back to you.’
The reason that had happened, partially, was because obviously that personal connection that we had, but partially, she said, it was really driven by our vision for her series. With the Rowland Sinclair series, the other publisher that she’d heard from, and she’d since heard from other publishers who had spoken to her about it, all of them had said, ‘The relationship between Rowly and Edna, the two characters, when are they going to get together? We think it should happen in the first book.’
And she very quickly realised that our vision for her series was that it was going to be this long series. We were absolutely on the same page, whereas everyone else was not willing to take the risk. They were saying, ‘Let’s wrap up the love story in case this doesn’t work, so that at least it’s a complete book.’ She learnt very quickly that it’s important to find the right home, with the right publisher, for the right book, and in this one instance, we were the right home for her.
I: In terms of Sulari’s career, do you think there have been any specific marketing strategies or industry moments that have helped her career develop?
AG: I think it’s a combination of a lot of things. I genuinely think just our continued investment into her is what has grown her. There was a rule of thumb we heard when we first started that we said was ridiculous, but has proven to be true to an extent, which is that an author really needs to publish a certain amount of books. Some people said it was four. Some people said it was six. Some people said it was ten. But an author really needs to publish a certain amount of books before they can crack it and people pay attention to them.
The problem is that most publishers will not continue to invest in an author that isn’t making money. They’re not going to publish the second book if the first book was not financially successful. I think that’s a tricky one, because it really does seem that there is that piece of critical mass where you have to have written enough for bookstores to take the risk on you—to say ‘Ah, this author is sticking around. We can take the risk on them. We can give them more visibility.’
That’s what it takes for international people that we’re selling rights to say okay, we’ve seen that the series is selling well domestically, so now we can take a risk on it. But obviously, a series is always more risky than one book, because you’re committing to a lot more.
Also, we did a big rebrand of her Rowland Sinclair books very recently. We recovered them completely with a very different look and feel, more like 1930s and earlier. Vintage travel posters were the inspiration for them. That rejacketing has made a real difference. I think it’s not even a personal preference, but I think that factors into it, where these covers appeal to different people. It’s also that it looks very different from how it looked before, so it’s been an opportunity to re-ignite booksellers and existing fans, but also to bring in new fans again. I think that that has played a big piece.
I: Did you see a bit of a sales jump, then, following the rejacketing?
AG: Absolutely. A big sales jump. Across the whole set. And then every book we’ve brought out since, we see a jump in the new book and a jump in the first book, because you’re clearly exciting new fans who are then starting the series from book one, even though they can all be read as stand alone.
This interview was undertaken as part of the Genre Worlds project. Genre Worlds is an ARC-funded research project undertaken by Professor Kim Wilkins, Professor David Carter, Associate Professor Beth Driscoll, and Professor Lisa Fletcher.
For more information on the project, go to the home page.