BOOKS: Liberties Press's string of successful books proves small publishers can make a big splash. Paul O'Doherty meets its founders.
Peter O'Connell, sales and marketing director of Liberties Press, has one of those good-natured billboard-high, skipping rope smiles (our photographer must have got him on an off-day). He's the one more likely to tell you everything. His partner, editorial director Sean O'Keeffe, is a little more cagey, reading over each query in his mind, with a proofreader's diligence.
"I'd love to do a book on Brian Kerr," O'Connell blurts out. O'Keeffe smiles a that's-not-what-we-said-we'd-say glance. "Can I say that? Can I go on the record with that?" "That's fine," replies O'Keeffe, and they both laugh.
Their backgrounds are similar. They have always been interested in books; both studied history at university; both have teaching qualifications; and both always wanted to own their own businesses. They met through O'Keeffe's wife, Bridget Egan.
O'Connell had spent three years in Paris, teaching English, and a year-and-a-half in Chicago, working mainly as a musician. He still gigs occasionally around Dublin with The Judes, also called the Saint Judes, "because we're hopeless". When he returned to Ireland in 1994, he taught English and helped set up a new school project, neither of which totally satisfied his ambitions. He went to World Cup games in Japan and Korea in 2002, promising that on his return, he was going to do something different with his life.
O'Keeffe found his Damascus a little closer to home. Born in Carshalton in England, on the border between south London and Surrey, he went to university in Durham and Swansea, and spent time as an archivist with a merchant bank in the City, before he arrived in Dublin. His first job as a bike courier gave him a decent knowledge of the city's layout, but little else. A position as an abstract writer with HW Wilson, the American reference publishing company, followed. After a few years, he moved to Mercier Press's Dublin office. "I was there for about four years. It was a small office, so you'd get stuck with pretty much everything."
When the Dublin office closed, O'Connell and he were close to starting their own company. Thus Liberties Press was launched in March of last year. O'Connell had lived in the Liberties for six years, and they both liked the idea of incorporating the area into the name of the publishing house. "I feel very fortunate to live here. There is a sense of community here still," O'Connell says.
In July of last year, Liberties Press published its first book, Con Houlihan's More than a Game, a selection of Houlihan's sporting articles from his time with the Irish Press group, Magill and the Sunday World. O'Keeffe got to know Houlihan when he was editing his book, In So Many Words, for Mercier Press. "We trawled the National Library looking at his old articles on microfilm - a huge number of articles." The book is now in its third run. Next came Prof Risteárd Mulcahy's Improving with Age: What Exercise Can Do For You, a health and exercise autobiography.
Last month, Liberties Press published its third book, Éamonn Ó Catháin's Around Ireland with a Pan, featuring a county-by-county gastronomic adventure, in which the television chef and former restaurateur offers insights into modern Irish cooking. O'Keeffe came up with the title. "I'd heard that with cookery books, having Ireland in the title was one of the key selling points."
O'Connell never stops mentioning people who have helped them: "As new kids on the block, we've been given a lot of good advice. The bigger chains have taken our books, and taken them in quantity, and got behind them."
With three books already on the shelves, they have a number of on-going projects, some they'd prefer to keep to themselves. Others, O'Keeffe is happy to push. "We're publishing a book next month, on the 25th anniversary of the Pope's visit to Ireland, called Three Days in September. We've approached a wide number of people for their recollections of the visit - Maeve Binchy, Garret Fitzgerald, David Norris, Nell McCafferty, Mary O'Rourke, Tim Pat Coogan, the pilot and the flower girl, a real mix. The author royalties are going to the Simon Community."
And O'Connell never misses the opportunity for a marketing coup. "The smoking ban was introduced on the day of Risteárd's launch - a coincidence. Now we're doing this book on the papal visit and there's talk of the Pope coming back."
Early next year they hope to publish Witnesses, by Annie Ryan, based on the witness statements that were taken by the Government in the late 1940s on events surrounding the Easter Rising. O'Connell describes it as "the voices of the second line of the Rising. It's not Connolly, it's not Pearse, but it's the likes of Connolly's brother or daughter, or the guys who walked from Kildare into the GPO ... This book is, as far as we know, the first one based on these witness statements."
Although it's August, Liberties Press is already conscious of the Christmas market. "Roughly half of all books sold are sold in the six weeks up to Christmas, and immediately after," says O'Keeffe.
So, what's the next big thing? They both agree it'll be nothing like the last big thing, and that gives the small independent publisher as much chance of publishing a best-seller as the bigger houses. O'Keeffe mentions Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves as an example. "And the other one is Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize a couple of years ago - that was by Canongate Press in Edinburgh. It's not as small a company as us, but it's a small press, and it printed a million copies on foot of winning the Booker Prize. So that sort of thing can happen." u
Three Days in September will be published late next month. For more, see www.libertiespress.com