PUBLISHING HOUSE.
REYKJAVIK, ICELAND; OSLO, NORWAY; ESPERGÆRDE, DENMARK.
What could an Icelandic book publisher and a fictional farmer possibly have in common, apart from fiction that is? For those of you not acquainted with Iceland’s most famous fictional character ‘Bjartur of Summerhouses’ the question might be irrelevant. Yet the book publishing company Bjartur not only takes its name from the main character of Independent People by Halldor Laxness but also its philosophy: “not owing anything to anyone.”
This means that the publishing house has never taken out a bank loan, even if their bank managers have found this strange:
The bank manager came up to me when I was in the bank one time, asked if I didn’t have a book publishing company, and asked if I didn’t need a loan? Don’t you want a loan? Why don’t you? You never take out any loans here? I told them thanks but no thanks, I know I’m a rather bad bank customer, says Snæbjörn.
In spite of the philosophy of not owing anything to anyone, Snæbjörn claims that it is almost impossible to start a book publishing company without capital to take you through the first two or three years. Yet when he himself started the company alongside his literature studies he had no external financing. He got the capital needed for publishing through doing other jobs alongside the company; claiming that his needs where meagre as he was used to a student life style.
Although he claims he never made a business plan and would not even know what one looked like, Snæbjörn outlines the plan for the business when it started:
We wanted to start small, the idea was to start off with two books, then four the next year and eight the year after that. To grow little by little and that has just about worked out.
In the beginning the company mostly published translations of books that were successful in the country of origin. It then slowly started publishing Icelandic literature, and is now one of the biggest publishers of Icelandic literature in Iceland.
The continuous growth of Bjartur in Iceland was further facilitated by acquiring the rights to Harry Potter: a windfall for any publisher.
It is usually the case that only a few titles pay for the whole lot. Maybe 70% of the titles never work, financially, but 30% do and make up for it.
One of the successes in Iceland is a concept called Neon, a line of translations of interesting foreign literature. As this worked well in the small market in Iceland, the idea was to bring this concept to a bigger market.
The Danish market is 20 times bigger than the Icelandic, so one should be able to sell at least 10 times the amount sold in Iceland. It would at least be nice to try. Then of course it turns out that the sales of translated books in Denmark is just about the same as it is in Iceland. Maybe slightly greater in Denmark. But in turn, if you get an international bestseller the difference is huge. Then we would be selling hundreds of thousands in Denmark, while a bestseller in Iceland sells only 12,000.
In this respect Dan Brown’s books have proved to be important for the company and even if the strategy of the early years was to grow the number of titles published every year the emphasis has shifted and is now more on having a selection of interesting literature mixed with crime novels.
All in all, the original strategy of the company is still in play: To grow, stay independent, not owe anything to anyone, publish good literature. In fact, Snæbjörn thinks of book publishing as an art form, and to make the business side a bit livelier the line between fact and fiction is not always very clear. This is true for the story about how the rights to Dan Brown’s work were acquired. The official version includes a swimming pool in Slovenia and meeting the author; the truth involves seeing the title, liking it and negotiations through a literary agent in the USA. Fiction or fact, the company has taken a long-term commitment and lots of successive small steps.
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This is the fifh part of Volante’s series Creative Business. The series is a complete version of the book ”Creative Business: 10 lessons to help you build a business your way” (Volante, 2010). The book is available for purchase in an ebook version on Amazon or Lulu (Kindle, ePub or PDF), a paperback version distributed directly from the publisher and soon also a print-on-demand version distributed globally.
