The Daily Beast and Perseus Book Group Launch Book Imprint
Posted on September 28, 2009
Tina Brown thinks book publishing needs to speed up. Towards that end she has formed a joint venture between The Daily Beast and Perseus Books Group. The joint venture has launched a new imprint called Beast Books which will publish titles by Daily Beast writers. To speed things up the books will first be released as ebooks, then as paperbacks on a fast timetable.
On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.Tina's plan is really attempting to turn writers into journalists, who generally have no problem churning out copy on a deadline. But novelists and nonfiction authors generally work on a much slower timetable. It's an interesting experiment which is good for readers and stressful for writers.In an interview in her office at The Daily Beast, which is owned by Barry Diller's InterActive Corporation, Ms. Brown said she believed books often missed opportunities to attract readers because the titles took too long to come to market. "There is a real window of interest when people want to know something," Ms. Brown said. "And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle."
Ms. Brown said that Beast Books would select authors from The Daily Beast's cadre of writers, most of whom are paid freelancers, to write books with quick turnarounds. She said she planned to publish three to five books in the first year.