Go Green

Despite today's lackluster economy, six-year old Greenleaf Book Group in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, which offers distribution, marketing, and production services exclusively for small and micro presses, is having one of its best years ever. "The company grows every single quarter, particularly since the marketing program started in 2002," executive v-p Meg La Borde told PW. "It's kind of a joke in our company: if this is a bad economy, we're excited about the turnaround. We wondered why so many distribution companies went under. We thought let's splash it with water and do something different."

From the start, Greenleaf has made nonexclusive arrangements with its clients and allowed them to stay as long, or as little, as they want. "If they want us to sell Ingram and they want to sell Amazon, that's fine," explained La Borde, "Everything can be done a la carte." In addition, the company does not do a print catalogue. Instead, Greenleaf offers targeted marketing, for which customers pay a sliding fee based on the services they select, which range from designing, printing and mailing sell sheets to bookstores and submitting them to corporate buyers to creating posters and ads and follow-up rep calls. Greenleaf's sales force relies strictly on telephone sales.

Greenleaf is unusual in other respects. It grew out of the success of founder Clinton Greenleaf III's self-published book, Attention to Detail: A Gentleman's Guide to Appearance and Conduct, which sold out its first two printings before being purchased by Adams Media. He has gone on to write several more books in the series for Adams, including most recently A Gentleman's Guide to Etiquette. After other self publishers approached Greenleaf for advice on getting started, he founded Greenleaf Book Group in 1997.

Still relatively small compared with powerhouses in the small-press field like Biblio, Greenleaf represents 150 presses. "Our clients have two goals," says La Borde, "either to be acquired by a major publisher or to be in a second or third printing." Some that look to be well on their way, include P.H.J. Plass's The Honest Thief: Uncommon Sense to Succeed in Business and Life, which has been written up in the Wall Street Journal; Bert Katz's And When I Dream: Faces in San Francisco (Daybue Pub.), a Benjamin Franklin nominee for interior design with three or more colors; and Sandra Philipson's children's book series from Chagrin River Publishing, illustrated by Robert Takatch, about two Springer Spaniels, Max and Annie. The pairs' adventures are being filmed for the movie Miracle Dogs, starring Stacy Keach and Rue McClanahan, to premier on Animal Planet.