Ring-a-Ding-Ding!

Jill Cohen is the publisher of Bulfinch Press, whose lead title for the fall is The Sinatra Treasures (click here to read the review).

PW: I understand that you recently returned to Warner and Bulfinch after many years away. How and why?

Jill Cohen: I started at Warner 25 years ago in special markets, then spent many years at Bantam and Random House and at Condé Nast. After 9/11, Larry Kirshbaum [chairman, Time Warner Trade Publishing] and I had lunch. Bulfinch had been in Boston for years, and the world had changed. Bookselling had changed, and the economy was in an iffy place. There was a question about the relevance of the $60–$80 illustrated luxury book. Bulfinch had been built on incredibly talented artists and photographers, and the quality had never changed. But in the past few years there had been less recognition of the changing marketplace, with fewer independents and museums not having the funding they once had. Larry thought that my experience doing high-end illustrated books that sold in high volume would be a good match.

I told Larry and Maureen [Egen, TITLE TK] my vision for Bulfinch. My feeling was that it had to be more American—60% of the books had been European, and I didn't think Americans wanted to dream about living abroad anymore. And there seemed no future in continuing to publish for the elite, books $60 and up on somewhat esoteric subjects. My feeling was that the media had changed things—people were very brand focused, very focused on authorities. So my vision was to bring authoritative voices who would promote America, and not change the quality of what we did, but make it more relevant, with books priced for today's economy, and to think about changing distribution channels.

PW: The Sinatra book seems a paradigm of the kind of title you're talking about.

JC: It was the first book I acquired at Bulfinch. Our fall '04 list is the first entirely acquired by our new team. Andy Mayer, from Becker and Mayer, wanted to show me a package he was putting together with Charles Pignone, the archivist for the Sinatra family. Andy said they had memorabilia that only the family would have. He showed me Xerox copies or the real items, and said, "We're going to re-create these, and possibly do a CD or a tape." He added that it was going to take a lot to convince the estate to do this, as it would be an expensive project, that we needed to make a really big commitment—of at least 100,000 copies. I'd just got to Bulfinch, and I didn't want to bury Bulfinch, but I figured that publication was two years away and we had time to create a really big marketing campaign. So we made a preemptive offer and put together the dream campaign.

PW: How close are you to that?

JC: Everything and more is happening. They [the estate] found a song that was never released that will be put out simultaneously with the book. When they were in the archives, going over things for the book, Frank Jr. found a tape he'd recorded of his dad for a charity, in the studio, with just a piano and Frank singing "Silent Night." A Sinatra Christmas CD with the song is coming out in October, and it has taken the promotion to another level.

PW: The production quality of the book is extraordinary. How do you keep the cost to $45?

JC: The plant cost is enormously high, which is why we had to commit to do 100,000 copies, in order to amortize several hundred thousands of dollars of reproduction costs. Virgin bought 15,000 copies for the U.K., so we only had to do 85,000 here, and we thought, well, maybe we only have to sell 60,000 or 65,000, and it will become a strong backlist title. We thought our numbers were much better at $60, but a lot of what we're doing at Bulfinch is coming down on cover price. Our sales force said that if we can get it in under $50, we can do a lot of holiday gift promotion, so we took the hit and went to $45. Then we had 100 copies of the book handmade. The happiest moment was getting a call from someone in our sales department who said, "Jill, I have a little problem. I just made our first two sales calls with the Sinatra dummy, and 75,000 are gone." I said, "Oh, my god."

I asked Pignone how he chose what to put into the book. When he was 14, he had a collection of 50,000 Sinatra items that he'd amassed. He said, "I sat down with Frank and Nancy and Tina, and we decided to select only items that would be in the family's possession." And I asked Pignone about Sinatra, what it was about him. He said, "There was a concert in Vegas near the end of his life, and there were four presidents there. There were four presidents—but only one chairman of the board."