I am a firm devotee of Mad Men. No invitation could be exciting enough to get me out of the house on a Wednesday night while the current series is showing. However, I’m ready to be tempted away from my Joan Holloway-esque dresses for the flapper style and (fake) fur wraps of the 1920s by Boardwalk Empire, the fantastic new series from Martin Scorsese and the producers of The Sopranos.

It tells the story of Nucky Thompson (based on the real-life Enoch ‘Nucky’ Johnson) and the gangsters, racketeers and corrupt politicians who kept Atlantic City wide open during Prohibition. The performances of Steve Buscemi, and British actors Kelly McDonald and Steve Graham (who plays a young Al Capone) are already receiving acclaim from US critics, but it seems that the real star of the show will turn out to be Atlantic City itself.

From humble beginnings as a small-time seaside resort, Atlantic City became America’s playground. Even the humblest labourer could afford a good time there, and people of all classes flocked to be entertained, indulge, listen to the new ‘jazz’ and, of course, drink. This fascinating and colourful history is encapsulated in a book, also called Boardwalk Empire, which provided the original inspiration for the show’s creators. Written by Atlantic City local Nelson Johnson, Ebury are publishing in the UK edition in February 2011.

The book tells the complete story of the rise and fall of this unique city, and explains just how Nucky and his cast of shady associates of Boardwalk Empire were able to take power as they did, and how their legacy affected the future of the city. The series opens on the eve of the coming into force of the Volstead Act, the eighteenth amendment that created ‘Prohibition’. This hangover (so to speak) from Victorian morality didn’t come about overnight, however. The supporters of the Act had been campaigning for years, little suspecting the massive impact it would have on the creation of organised crime, and what the huge boost they would give to the careers of people like Nucky Johnson.

I’m really enjoying working on the UK edition of this book. The history of this era is fascinating anyway, but to have the added excitement of the anticipation of the show makes the project even more fun. We’ve nearly got a UK cover finalised, and can’t wait to hear Sky’s plans of how the series will be promoted over here. So, in the post-Christmas, New Year gloom we have the shining lights of Atlantic City, circa 1920 to look forward to. And who knows, the forgiving shape of those flapper dresses may even prove a handy alternative to the New Year diet!

Liz - Editorial Assistant

‘Your job sounds really glamorous,’ is the reaction I often get when I tell people what I do. I usually deny it, and say that it’s not all launch parties and hanging out with celebrities. In fact, I have to make regular visits to Swindon (WH Smith Head Office) and Brentford (Waterstone’s Head Office), both of which are designed to keep your feet firmly planted on the ground.

But then, there is the odd occasion when you wake up and think, ‘Yeah, I’m off to do something GLAMOROUS today, and no mistake.’ This week, I had one of those days, for I was tasked with filming a video for one of our books – Gok Wan’s autobiography, to be precise. He was doing the photoshoot for the cover, and would have 20 minutes or so for filming. Cue: instant panic about what to wear; very hasty grooming routine (nails painted 10 minutes before I left the house) and a worry that I was going to throw myself at him and screech, ‘Can I be your best friend?’

I lurked about in the studio, replying to texts from colleagues asking if he’d called me ‘girlfriend’ yet, or made a grab for my ‘bangers’. ‘NO’, I texted back, ‘disappointing on both fronts so far.’ I don’t know how people cope with having their photo taken with a roomful of people looking at them, then instantly staring at the laptop where the images are appearing in rapid succession. Also, how on earth do you manage so many different expressions, when, as Gok said, ‘you’ve only got one face’? I tried doing it once for a makeover article in a magazine and hated every second. But that was before I became addicted to America’s Next Top Model. Now I reckon I could totally nail a photoshoot. I am familiar with how to appear both fierce AND edgy (sometimes at the same time) and the necessity of ‘not losing your neck’, not to mention, courtesy of the latest series, how to appear taller when you are, in fashion terms, a midget (Ie 5’4” instead of 5’11”).

But then, disaster struck. Whilst Gok was tweeting his thousands of followers, asking whether he should get naked for his covershoot, the photographer suddenly had an idea. ‘I think we should do a group shot!’ he boomed (the mighty Trevor Leighton is a big man, and booming was his default setting). I assumed he meant that his selection of attractive assistants would be called upon. But no, apparently he meant Team Gok. Ebury Team Gok. The team in question (Toby the jacket designer, editors Liz and Charlotte and yours truly) immediately started acting like terrified publishing types, backing away from the camera and squeaking, ‘No! No!’ The photographer, however, was insistent.

We started off in a weird kind of pile up, all leaning on poor Toby. Unlikely career highlight: finding myself being leaned on by Gok Wan. Blimey! Then came the moment of truth – we were somehow persuaded into recreating a famous Richard Avedon fashion photo. None of us dared ask if we were supposed to be smiling or not, so the resulting pic shows some of us smiling gaily, some of us looking a bit confused and some of us looking stiff, awkward, as though they have lockjaw and with an alarming case of previously undiagnosed neck fat (me.)

With the video filmed, our celeb was off to another photo shoot, whilst we were heading back to the office, muttering, ‘God, I don’t know how he does it, that was really difficult’ and deciding once and for all - being a model? Officially harder than it looks.

You’ll see the results of the shoot and the video when Gok’s book comes out in September. At the moment it’s under very fashionable wraps, as he finishes off writing it. And yes, he is writing it himself, which he said is a real challenge, as he’s having to deal with some very emotional aspects of his childhood and his past, as well as all the fun stuff we know and love him for. I can’t wait to read it and see more of ‘Aunty Gok’ in action when he’s out and about to promote it – it’s going to be, as the he’d say, beyond fabulous!

Alex - Marketing Manager

Photo © Trevor Leighton

Ebury opened its arms to the huggable Justin Lee Collins yesterday. He took time out from learning to ballroom dance, high dive and Mexican wrestle for TV to come and chat about his hilarious coming-of-age memoir Good Times! which we publish this Autumn. Our deeply serious and highly professional brainstorm included such weighty discussion points as hugging and ‘how about a karaoke night!’

Justin then regaled us with stories of how be got to where he is now. By accident. How he went from the M&S years where he was told to ‘walk faster’ by his boss. Bad times. To street jamming in spandex and wrestling in lycra and manhandling Alan Carr on national TV on a weekly basis. Rock on!

Justin then met the whole Ebury team over drinks where there was a bit of singing, a few spontaneous hugs, and chats all round before Justin had to head off to ITV for the press launch of his new chat show The Justin Lee Collins Show.

As he left the building our flustered MD was overheard saying ‘I’d only just come into the room when, before I knew it, I was being given a big beardy kiss!’

Rowan - Editor

In my second year of university, I moved in with an ardent Eastenders fan. Although, of course, I had heard of the show previous to this, no one had ever taken the time to fully lay out the story for me. Who is whose brother, who tried to kill who, who was sleeping with whose wife, etc. Without understanding the intricacies and subtle plot details (“Oh, but you see, three years ago, he was shagging her” or “She doesn’t know it, but actually, that’s her mum”), you lose a lot of what is great about Eastenders.

Now, for the first time, we are publishing an absolutely BRILLIANT book which I could not be more excited about. The Eastenders Annual. As the book’s publication date is imminent, I thought I’d share some of the cheap, hilarious and scandalous titbits to (ahem) challenge your mind.

- We chart the resident Walford psychos in ‘Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know’ – the Top Trumps of murderers, adulterers and scheming low-lifes, complete with ‘Loon Rating’, ‘Victim Quota’ and ‘Comeuppance’. What was Dr May’s ‘Maddest Moment’? That would be the time she lured a pregnant Dawn to an empty house, drugged and handcuffed Ms Swann to the bed before attempting to perform a caesarean section on her, of course.

- There’s a good old-fashioned love photo story acting out the Romeo and Juliet-style elegance of Stacey and Bradley’s relationship. Watch and learn as the story develops through subtle variations of Bradley’s always-red face.

- Anonymous characters write to resident agony aunt Pat Butcher with hilarious conundrums: ‘First of all my husband had an affair with his son’s girlfriend - a girl half his age and, to be frank, a bit of a scrubber. Then I found myself having a fling with her brother who turned out to be a total psycho although on the plus side he knew how to press all the right buttons in the bedroom department. I suppose I realised he wasn’t right for me when we ended up attempting to bury my husband alive one night in the woods together…’

- Find out who your perfect Eastenders date is with our probing psychological quiz.

- Meet the Tearaway Teens of the Walford Brat Pack - Violent! Abi Branning may appear sweet and sugary, but she attempted to maim her main rival for the role of Mary in the Christmas nativity play. - Bad tap dancer! Ben Mitchell, Walford’s very own Billy Elliott would be rather practising his hot shoe shuffle at Wayne De Paul’s School Of Dancing than roughing up old ladies like his classmate, Jay. - Internet fraudster! Darren Miller’s online moneymaking scams are legendary (who can forget desperaterussianhouswives.com)

And when all’s said and done, you can rely on the EastEnders Annual for pearls of wisdom – indispensable and inspiring life quotes such as:

• ‘I give the orders around here, not that great big lump of lard.’

• ‘Last week you needed stabilisers - this week you’re like a dog on heat.’

and

• ‘No-one calls my daughter stupid except me - alright!’

This is not a stuffy, classic tie-in. Get your chocolates, get your mates round, have a good old cockney giggle - very fun to publish and definitely one to get excited about!

Some of my favourite spreads and my favourite page below… (more…)

I am often asked what my favourite part of the publishing process is. Is it finalizing a deal? Seeing a cover design for the first time? Holding the finished book in my hand? Or am I in it just for the fabulous pay?

I enjoy all of these aspects of my job – especially the fabulous pay – but nothing comes close to the feeling I get when editing a manuscript. I always feel privileged to be the first pair of eyes to see an author’s work and the dialogue I enter with an author about structure, substance and tone is a process I hold dear.

It’s also one that can be fraught with difficulties. The author has worked very hard to write the book you’re editing, and there is a lot of energy and emotion invested in it. The last thing you want to do is charge in with a red pen and no decorum. I generally follow four basic rules when doing my favourite part of the job:

(more…)

The London bookfair is one of the essential events on the annual publishing calendar and this week publishers and agents from all over the world gathered at Earls Court which now feels like the rightful home of the fair – once, hideously, we all went to Excel at Docklands which was a disaster - to talk about books and even buy and sell. Once upon a time deals were struck right there at the table, sometimes impressive ones, but these days that’s less common and there wasn’t a lot of buzz about ‘big books’ at London this year. Plenty of chat about ‘soft years’, the recession that’s here or the one that’s about to arrive and what’s ‘tough’ as well as reports of falling co-edition sales.

Nevertheless, it was lively. Downstairs among the big publishers’ stands where power people meet and greet the aisles filled up with editors rushing to meetings and International were doing their stuff selling books for export.

Upstairs, in the international rights centre where rights folk and agents congregate, we sat all day at our tables with back to back half-hour appointments with publishers from all over the world. Mostly they make it, sometimes they get lost and either don’t come at all or turn up hours later looking bewildered or worn out or both. We talk the books up, make notes from which we will compile reports back at the office and eventually send out parcels of books with high hopes. On the subject of lost publishers, spare a thought for the American editor who went for a drink at the end of the day, then got caught up in the melee of fans arriving for the Chelsea game, couldn’t get a taxi and couldn’t work out how to get anywhere from Earls Court (and who could blame her?) and ended up in Willesden Junction instead of Notting Hill. She missed her dinner….

A book fair is also a place where you will pay £4.00 for a small packet of crisps and a cup to coffee and spend a lot of time in the queue for the loo. An ever present ingredient is gossip, who’s here and who isn’t and why and what’s going on at that company and why did that person leave and where are they going? Last but not least, ever optimistic would be authors trail around in hope of finding a publisher or an agent – ‘Oh yes, you should send that to …. Jake, Ken, Judith, Carey, Hannah, Andrew or Clare (fill in the blank). No, I’m afraid they’re not here today but you can contact them by email.’ You can only hope that some day their dreams might come true.

Rae - Rights Director 

When I was a small child, regularly getting things on my report cards like, ‘Alexandra needs to get her nose out of books and socialise more’, (because if I did ever talk to anyone, then it was probably about the Famous Five, or some of my other literary chums), who’d have thought that one day I’d be able to say, ‘Yeah, I worked on the campaign for the fastest-selling non-fiction book since records began’?

Yup, that’s right, I’ve been working on Delia Smith’s How To Cheat At Cooking, which has even managed to keep Jordan/Katie Price and her third autobiography off the top spot. (I love having Delia and Jordan as the nation’s favourite warring women of words – it pretty much sums up Britain today – sensible vs celebrity, useful vs ‘what does she do?’ Although Germaine Greer’s probably spinning in her grey jersey dress at the mere idea that modern womanhood can be categorised so cleanly, Random House is darn chuffed with the pair of ’em).

More surprising than the fact I’m working on a book by someone my mum’s actually heard of (she called me to say she’d seen a piece on Delia in the Telegraph, bless her) is the fact that I’m working on non-fiction at all. I’ve been obsessed with novels ever since I learned to read. I was the original child that books built. I spent years working on them once I realised you could make a living out of books and get free ones while you were at it. Oh happy day! I invented the term ‘chick fic’ one day at work (that’s genuinely true – it still irritates me when people call it ‘chick lit’, because the point of it was that it was a play on ‘chick flicks’). I worked on everything from SF (science fiction for those not in the know) to proper literary stuff. And loved it. Facts? Facts were for Jeremy Vine and people who did maths.

But now I’m happily ensconced in the world of non-fiction, and I love it, mainly because you get to meet all manner of people. Just this year, I’ve met two psychics (neither of whom, disappointingly, took the opportunity to tell me they had a message from the other side for me during the meeting); Len Goodman, the lovely head judge on Strictly Come Dancing (even the male editor in the meeting went a bit wibbly); the Director of Friends of the Earth; the brand managers of Top Gear and Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles. I’ve had meetings with Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace and I’ve had a chat with Delia on the phone.

And that’s not to mention the pitches I’ve been involved with…

But I suspect I’ve reached the pinnacle of my publishing career (like talking to Delia and having a chat with the legend that is Sir David Attenborough at our conference last year wasn’t enough). Yes, I’m going to be working on former Heat editor Mark Frith’s book! I’ve been a Heat obsessive for I don’t know how long (a subscription to said mag formed the basis of my leaving present when I left a previous job; they knew nothing else would suffice) and every week I steal it from the PR department at lunchtime on Tuesday. Surely, if there were a marketing person to work on this book, I was it?

We found out a few weeks ago that we’d got it, at which point I shrieked with glee and thought, ‘in your face, poncey intellectual author who told me a while back I should “read some proper books, like War and Peace”. (I refrained from telling him I had an English degree and had spent 3 years solid reading ‘proper books’, and actually, I still do; I just hadn’t read his). I always knew that keeping abreast of Britney, Lindsay and the like would serve me well one day, and now I’ve been proved right. Ha!

Because the thing about Ebury is that our list means you do have to know about celebrities, and telly, and films, and music, and comedy, as well as history, pop science, relationships, diets, current affairs and cookery. In our acquisitions meetings, we’ll switch between the Dalai Lama and Doctor Who, then go from dieting to Darfur and end up with darts. Through working here, I know a bit about boxing, have actually played a game of darts, and am becoming conversant with all manner of footballing stars from a variety of eras. I’m not going to be a team captain on Question of Sport anytime soon, but I’ve found myself reading Observer Sport Monthly without wincing, and even actively enjoying bits of it.

So for everyone who’s yet to dip their toe into non-fiction (whether working on it, or even just reading it, as I did for years), all I can say is check out our 2008 catalogue, and get stuck in – there really is something for everyone. And because of all this new-found knowledge, you’re likely to become a much-requested pub quiz team member while you’re at it!

Alex – Marketing Manager

Katie’s earlier entry - about the trepidation one feels before starting to blog, or indeed starting to write anything that will ultimately go public - made me put myself in the shoes of ‘would-be’ authors. Working in Publicity, I don’t actually have much to do with the book when it’s in its early stages, and I mercifully don’t have the horrible task of sifting through what is generally known in publishing as the “slush pile” of pages that will, sadly, not be transformed into books this time. I also kick myself when someone who wants to submit a proposal gets put through to me and I blurt out ‘good luck!’ before transferring them - it just sounds so negative - as if they will really need luck to have their work chosen - which obviously isn’t the case (although luck always helps with everything!).

Nevertheless, when you write you make yourself vulnerable - you show up your weaknesses as well as your abilities and your dislikes as well as your likes - and this is clearly what makes a piece of writing so special. What I do have experience of in Publicity is people ringing me up wanting to contact authors, and once I’ve asked them to send me something that I can pass on, they then launch into massive detail about what their letter will consist of and ask me whether what they’ve written will be enough to make the author reply to them, and so on and so on. So everyone has a touch of the author in them it would seem. (I could also mention here that when you work in Publicity you are no stranger to calls from much more major fruitloops - having spent a good deal of my week before Christmas on the phone to someone who lives in a shack on a mountain in Ireland - I now know absolutely everything about his life.)

Contrary to popular belief, Publishing is not an English Lit lesson and, even coming from someone who did an English degree, this is a good thing. I admit that when I first started I had some romantic notions that the company would be run by those musty academic types who dress badly and who are completely computer-illiterate, and while this is surely true of some, what I’ve learned is that it is much more than an English lesson. If you are creating a book to sell, the writing is arguably most of the project, but definitely not all of it, and when you walk into a bookstore and see the colourful covers and the different formats and then walk onto the tube and see the massive poster campaigns and then pick up a newspaper and read all the glowing book reviews (we do get some), you realise what a vibrant business you’re in, and it does get quite exciting.

As I said before, I am generally blissfully unaware of what goes on in Editorial before a book is acquired, but we have such a healthy stream of announcements that go round when they are that it’s pretty clear that writing is no dying form and people are clamouring at the publishers’ gates to put their voice out there. Long may it live!

Sarah - Publicity Assistant