In 2008, Judy Piatkis walked into Daunt Books in London.
She picked up a book from the display table.
Financial markets were melting down the world over, and she couldn't help smiling.
She smiled not because of the financial tumult, but because the year before, she had commissioned
the very book that she held in her hand, The Great Crash.
That book demonstrated for her both her own and her company's hard work over the last
28 years, and her good fortune.
Even more than the book, seeing it reminded her that she had sold her company at just
the right time.
Hello listeners, my name is Will Jokey, and welcome to I'll Probably Delete This, the
show where we tell the story of people who bet their livelihoods on telling great stories
and publishing books.
Today we cover the journey of a woman who bootstrapped her way into creating two successful
London publishing companies.
We will use as our guide Judy Piatkis' 2021 memoir called Ahead of Her Time.
Let's start with the book blurb.
Judy Piatkis launched Piatkis Books at a time when women were not expected to be entrepreneurs.
With no university degree, professional qualifications, or financial backing, she taught herself how
to be a publisher while also looking after her young family that included a child with
severe cerebral palsy.
This is the story of how Judy and her team built Piatkis from a startup operating out
of her spare room into a self-help empire.
She founded Piatkis Books when she was in her twenties and grew the company to become
an internationally recognized brand before selling it in 2007, just before the global
financial crisis.
So that was from the blurb on the back of the book.
Join me now as we hear how she went from teenage typist and failed literary agent to then build
one company focused on selling backlist titles to libraries and then another, a publishing
house that she put her name on.
Piatkis Books did it all from building an international brand to publishing perennial
bestseller Nora Roberts.
For our story, we are very much going to focus on how Judy got started in her career and
kind of the early days of her founding a publishing house.
We'll talk about some of her successes and struggles after that, but I really want to
focus on the early years and her start because oftentimes we see people and we think of them
as a finished product or they've always been this way and that's never the case.
They always started somewhere.
They always had struggles.
Judy Piatkis is certainly no different.
Let's start just really briefly then with school.
If you've studied entrepreneurs, you've probably seen that many successful founders struggle
in school or are uninterested.
They are ambitious and want to get inventing or building or earning or exploring.
They are driven to do things in the world.
Judy had some of that.
When she was young, she was identified as smart enough to skip a grade and got a scholarship
to a private school, but she didn't do enough in high school in her A levels to attend university,
partly because she was too interested in partying to get good grades.
She also later credits skipping a grade with part of the reason that she never particularly
excelled at math.
She never really filled in all of the deficit that she missed when she skipped a year of
math.
Instead of university, she started working.
More through happenstance, she started working as a typist for a publishing house and probably
not a particularly good typist either.
In those first few years out of school, she cycled through a number of entry-level jobs
in publishing.
At 21, she worked in publicity at publishing house Robert Hale and got to wine and dine
literary editors.
From the editor's perspective, presumably talking to an energetic young woman over lunch
was an upgrade on what they had been doing before.
To earn more money, she also offered to read manuscripts at night and on weekends, but
she found that her tastes in books were more commercial than kind of the highbrow literary
fiction that Robert Hale was publishing.
While there, she also opened a literary agency on the side, but when a book editor reached
out inquiring what clients she had, she and her partner agreed that they didn't have enough
experience to actually make a go of it.
That sort of the gig was up and they ended up shutting down this agency before it had
done any real business.
After that, she realized it was time for her to get more experience and so she moved and
continued cycling through different jobs in publishing.
One of her next jobs was this time at a literary agency.
While at the agency, a brand new book publisher reached out to ask the agency if it had any
out of print titles that this new publishing company could re-release.
Piatkus raised her hand.
She volunteered to go through the back catalog to identify possible books.
She identified several in the agency's back catalog that might be appealing to the publishing
company to print.
The company did take a number of them from that list and re-release them.
What this did is it grew revenue for the agency, grew profits, and also brought more revenue
and more money to the authors that were selected.
Another thing she did is she reached out to a newspaper advice columnist.
One of the things I learned in reading the book is that in British phrasing, they talk
about advice columnists as agony ants.
She reached out to an agony ant about whether she was interested in writing a book.
She commissioned her, she signed her to the agency.
Both of those things, kind of looking through the back catalog and reaching out and proactively
finding an author, brought in new revenue to the agency and earned her a raise.
Now Judy is 24 years old, it is 1974, and she and a partner, Edwin Buchhalter, co-found
a new publishing house, Severn House.
By this time, Judy had been working in publishing for five years.
Her partner was the son of a London bookseller, so he had exposure to the business.
That wasn't true for her, she was the daughter of a homemaker, her father was a businessman
doing building construction, he was in the building trade.
She and Edwin then start a new business, Severn House.
They agreed to put forward £5,000 in capital and that each of them would bring half, so
each had to come up with £2,500.
She was pretty frugal and could come up with £2,000 on her own, but she had to borrow
£500 from her parents to cover her half.
And the two of them, Edward and Judy, split the business ownership 50-50.
The business of Severn House was to start in a niche, and their niche was to sell to
libraries.
Specifically to start, they wanted to find out-of-print books from popular authors who
were popular now, but maybe their early books hadn't been.
And often this would be early career overlooked books that people may be interested in now
that the author was popular.
The other niche was, or the other thing they were looking for, is books that had previously
sold well and been popular, but were now out of print.
There are a couple things to know from this, is their niche is very narrow.
They're selling to libraries, so they're selling hardback books.
And notably, Severn didn't have to provide the books and didn't provide the books directly
to the library, because each library often had its own requirements related to covers
and to binding.
So Severn House went through middlemen wholesalers, and the wholesalers were Severn's customers.
One of the things the model reminds me of is a little bit like Ingram's book depository
business.
The libraries were steady customers, the wholesalers ordered early, they were dependable, they
paid on time.
Similar to what Ingram had in the book depository business when it started.
And obviously there was also public money involved, so for Ingram it was school systems,
for here it's libraries.
To keep expenses down, the two of them were the company's only employees, and they both
worked from their homes.
So no corporate offices, no employees.
The model proved successful.
They published a couple of books every month, libraries grew to trust them and liked the
books that they offered.
The company grew, as they grew they added office space and employees.
But as they grew after a couple years, and now they're working in the same space, there
was increasing tension between Judy and her co-founder.
And Judy found that the work and the environment had become less fun.
Finally, Judy approaches Buckhalter and tells him, it's time for you to buy me out.
It's 1978, and Edwin Buckhalter agreed to buy Judy's half of the business.
They have an outside party, value the firm, and they settle on £50,000 to be paid over
the course of 24 months.
To receive £50,000 after four years of founding and running the company was a really fantastic
return on her initial investment of £2,500 just the four years before.
She increased her investment 20x.
But much of her profit was eaten up in taxes, particularly at the time in the late 70s.
Even after taxes though, she now had money and some time to think and decide what she
wanted to do next.
As a condition of the sale of her ownership in Severn House, she was free to start a new
publishing house as long as she didn't try to take any of the authors that Severn had.
She couldn't try to poach anybody from their roster.
In 1978, after some thought and some time off, and time with her family and her kids,
Judy was in her late 20s, but now had 10 years of experience in publishing.
And so she started a new company, and she names it this time, she names it after herself,
Piatkas Books.
She started it again in the same niche, selling backlist books to libraries.
Then she's running the same playbook.
She worked out of her home, she kept costs low, initially she took no salary, and was
very slow to hire.
Her goal was to publish four books each month.
She started in the same niche, but over time she expanded.
She expanded beyond that initial niche, and little by little, built Piatkas Books into
a full service publishing house.
Part of what we'll cover is sort of the story of how step by step she gets there.
And the first expansion comes pretty early.
Her first expansion in the niche was, there was a new wave that she found for the publishing
company to ride, and that wave was mass market paperbacks.
If you know the history of publishing in the 70s and the 80s, many genre publishers think
mystery or science fiction or romance publishers were publishing straight to paperback without
first publishing a hardback book.
Traditionally, there would be a hardback first, and then maybe a paperback would follow.
And they were skipping the hardback and trying to hit a different price point and appeal
to different readers.
And these paperbacks were called mass market paperbacks.
Piatkas contacted those publishers and offered to publish their books in hardback for libraries.
This would open up a new market for these genre publishers.
Very early, she was able to get a number of bestselling American authors, including V.C.
Andrews and the perennial bestseller, even now, Danielle Steele.
Notably in the contracts, Piatkas got the right to sell books not just to libraries,
but also to book clubs.
So that's sort of the one piece of initial expansion.
A big benefit of this niche of publishing, kind of publishing the hardback version of
a popular mass market paperback, is that Piatkas Books didn't need to do any marketing of the
books it published.
Instead, they could just ride on the coattails of the marketing and promotion that the genre
publishers were already doing for the paperbacks.
Libraries and book clubs knew about the books and were happy to order them in hardback from
Piatkas because they knew that their customers or their patrons would be interested.
Book clubs became a valuable tool for her publishing house, even though selling to them
meant selling at a big discount.
The benefit was that selling to book clubs meant that Piatkas could do larger initial
print runs.
Larger print runs meant lower cost to print, meant better unit economics, and hopefully
a better margin.
And this is something that comes up in the Harvard Business Review case study that we
talked about in the James Patterson episode.
And running this playbook, sort of starting with this model, shows early signs of success.
In its first full year, so kind of 1980, Piatkas Books brought in 180,000 pounds in revenue
and was able to turn a profit.
As the company grew, she continued to be very frugal.
So instead of office space, with each new hire, she added a new desk to her house.
Everybody worked out of her house or they worked remotely.
It's kind of notable to me that in the early 1980s, she was essentially doing telework
without email or teleconferencing.
Eventually she started to run out of space.
I think at last count she had six desks crammed into a room in her house.
Within five years of launching, Piatkas had revenue of one million pounds.
Six years after launching, she bought a townhouse to serve as the office building for the company.
Owning three floors on Windmill Street in London, very near the British Museum.
It gave the company 2,800 square feet and she paid 118,000 pounds for the building.
They were at that time still publishing four novels each month.
Before we wrap, I want to cover a few more things about Piatkas Books expanding their
various niches.
So we talked about book clubs already.
Their next big venture was they tackled original nonfiction and then from there they moved
to originating original fiction in the UK market.
They also expanded to other English language markets covering Ireland, New Zealand, Australia
and South Africa.
And each time they made an expansion, they tried to use the experience in a related line
of publishing to help them as they moved into a new one.
In terms of nonfiction, they published a lot of cookbooks.
Notable maybe to American audiences is they published a number of cookbooks by Mary Berry
who you might know from the Great British Bake Off.
They did lots of cookbooks.
They began to specialize in down market fiction targeted at women.
Women's lit, sometimes it was called chick lit that actually became a term of art in
publishing.
They did a number of books on kind of Jewish heritage books and then as I already said
cookbooks.
They also began to expand into self-help and new age books, which from the biography or
the memoir Judy found particularly interesting and timely and compelling.
I did check her Twitter recently and that's much of what she was posting about as sort
of books related to kind of astrology and other things like that.
I did want to include a really interesting story or one that I found interesting.
Is that they wanted to move, so initially their focus had been hardback books and particularly
hardback books being sold to libraries.
And they were in their effort to expand to be kind of a full service publishing house.
They wanted to expand from hardback to paperback.
They wanted to be a fiction paperback publisher.
And what they did is they developed a cover design for the various books and they wanted
it to be eye catching.
Their cover had yellow and pink stripes.
And Judy thought rightly that the most important piece of marketing is the cover.
And so they wanted a cover that would really get people's attention.
A number of stores who they had partnered with ordered the paperbacks and the initial
response from the stores was really positive.
But the books didn't sell.
The bookstores had ordered the paperbacks because they liked the company and wanted
to be supportive.
And one of Judy's takeaways is that they could have saved themselves from the costly
mistake that it was.
And it was costly because most of the paperback books that they had ordered ended up being
returned to them because people weren't interested in buying them.
Her takeaway is that they could have saved themselves much of the headache and the loss
simply by asking the store representatives what they thought of the covers before they
ended up printing them and shipping them.
So early on, early feedback would have helped and likely save them from the very costly
failure that they had.
In terms of books, one of the notable authors that Piatkus publishes is Nora Roberts and
her pseudonym JD Robb.
And Nora Roberts is a perennial bestseller.
In some ways she mirrors kind of James Patterson in just the number of books that she gets
out every year.
And they're almost always guaranteed to be on the bestsellers list.
Nora Roberts' agent had reached out because Nora Roberts had been unhappy with her sales
in the United Kingdom and kind of English-speaking countries outside of the U.S.
And by this point in the 2000s, they did a lot to market the books.
They did advertisements on the subway station on the Tube.
They did ads in women's magazines.
They made a deal with the Evening Standard newspaper to provide 20,000 copies of JD Robb
books to hand out to London commuters.
So really a full court press.
And over time, they're able to increase sales from where they had been and increase her
notoriety within the market.
They're able to reach number one, I think, in New Zealand, in Australia, in South Africa,
but they were never quite able to do it in the United Kingdom.
One of the reasons to spend a little bit of time mentioning Nora Roberts and JD Robb is
they became a very significant part of the Piatkas business.
In a given year, anywhere between one and two million pounds of revenue was from JD
Robb.
So that's between 10 and 20 percent of the total revenue for the company is coming from
one author and her books.
And that did create risk for the company, because if Roberts ever terminated her relationship
and moved those books, or at least future books, to a new publisher, they'd have to
find a way to replace that revenue.
In the early 2000s, Judy did sit down and think about, what do I want to be doing with
the company and with my future?
And realized that in 10 years, she didn't want to be doing this anymore.
She had been working in publishing, running a company on her own, without a whole lot
of training or guidance, and was ready to move on to other things.
But in order to sell, she really wanted to push the company to be in a good place.
So make sure all the books were in order, make sure that they were sort of doing all
they could to make the company as successful as profitable before they go to a sale.
And so she set the target at 10 million pounds in revenue for the year.
And that's what they wanted to shoot for.
She had a five-year plan to get there and created a board of directors to help advise
and really worked on pushing the company to hit that target.
She in fact was able to do it, sort of to the surprise of some of the people she worked
with and maybe even her own, but set that really aggressive target and was able to hit it.
And then she hires an outside firm to help advise on the sale and create a package to
pitch to larger publishing companies.
And one of the things that's going on, particularly in the 80s and the 90s, but continuing into
the 2000s, is significant consolidation in the publishing industry.
Now there are sort of five major publishing companies, and she was going to pitch to sell.
And publishing companies wanted to conglomerate and thought that there were real economies
of scale in getting more publishers under one roof.
So she's able to successfully do that.
And it times it very well, as I alluded to in the cold open, is she is able to sell in
kind of mid to late 2007, right before Northern Rock collapses.
And there are lines of people queuing up to get their deposits out of the bank in the
United Kingdom before really the financial system seems like it's melting down.
She was able to sell and sell out and really to her benefit.
And her timing was excellent, which I alluded to in that snippet about the book, The Great
Crash.
Our bibliography for this one obviously is the book that we've been talking about.
So that book is The Memoir Ahead of Her Time by Judy Pietkus.
It was published in 2021 by Watkins Publishing.
Note, I focused on the business and professional side of her story and really only touched
on sort of the early parts of most of that.
But many of her efforts in the book talk about her balancing family and a demanding professional
career.
And that part may be more compelling to a lot of readers.
She had a daughter with severe cerebral palsy and two other kids.
She worked from home with a live in nanny and set up a company with telework in a world
before email and long before video conferencing.
She went through a divorce, found a husband, and she also talks a decent bit about kind
of the wisdom or appeal she found in many of the books she was publishing, sort of these
new age type books.
Join me next time for another episode of I'll Probably Delete This, where we'll explore
more stories of authors, storytellers, great books, and publishing.
Happy reading.
Thanks, everybody.