In the past 3 years, there have not been many varieties of "gravity" books, but almost all of them are excellent, and each one has distinct characteristics. For the "Gravity" team, "the most proud thing is not to publish a very best-selling social science work, but to successfully publish some ideological but not very easy to read social science works." "This slightly wayward publishing brand, in Guangdong, far from the rich place of publishing resources, although at a relatively slow pace in the industry - more than 3 years to make 19 varieties, but it has achieved a brand impression deeply rooted in readers and the book industry."
Why "gravity"?
The "Gravity" book series was formed at the end of 2018, and was prepared under the strong support and specific guidance of the leaders of Guangdong People's Publishing House, with the intention of fully exploring how to make a social science product line with national influence in local publishing groups.
Although Guangdong, which is at the forefront of reform and opening up, is far from the national publishing center and far from the rich place of publishing resources. In this situation, we have also been thinking about it, hoping to seek a breakthrough in the market for social science books. Compared with the author's resources, marketing means, and distribution power, compared with the domestic first-line social science publishing platform, the gap objectively exists, and the content itself has become our most core reliance at this time.
The Fall of France
Julian Jackson by Wei Benchao, translated
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2022-2
The world is so big, there are always many good books that have not been paid attention to, so that readers can get more diversified perspectives to understand society and self. So we dig around for high-quality content, and the core works of famous artists at home and abroad, and the cutting-edge works of emerging authors, have become the objects of dabbling. Although there are many bittersweet and bittersweet in the meantime, we have found a lot of high-quality works, and the dream of cultivating and operating a publishing brand with unique personality and ideological value in the local area seems to be slowly becoming within reach.
At the beginning of the establishment of "Gravity", the theme orientation and connotation of this brand, we have our own considerations: the renewal and development of human civilization is a very complex process, human bones are the pursuit of upward growth, but the real world has a variety of forces to pull us down. Between the upward and the downward, human beings experience painful struggles and inner tribulations before they give birth to the fruits of civilization. Our products hope to show the complexity and multi-faceted nature of the repeated tug-of-war between the upward and downward development of civilization in the process of civilization development, multi-dimensional, three-dimensional presentation of the traction to promote the development of civilization, we hope that readers can still enter the daily life with an optimistic and solid attitude after recognizing the difficulties and complexities of the development of human society, and create a pleasant microclimate that can be effectively connected with people and people, people and surroundings with their own small strength.
Erased History: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal
[Panama] Marisa Lasso by Hu Xilin translation
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2021-10
This brand has been established for four years, and there are not many books produced, but each book has its own distinctive characteristics, and the brand value and text content priority strategy we have established have been better implemented in the process of topic selection planning, editing and production, and finally production.
The first work of "Gravity", "New Dark Age", was selected as the recommended book of the 15th Wenjin Awards of the National Library of China; the second work ,"Cry without Tears" won the "Best Social Science Book Award" issued by the 2019 Joint Book List of Dangdang.com and Humanities and Social Sciences; "Sympathy Without a Place" published in 2020 was also listed on the annual lists of Douban, Beijing News, Sanlian Life Weekly and other media; "Chernobyl: A Tragic History" with its outstanding historical narrative of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. With both historical depth and excellent readability, it has been recognized by the market; "Erased History: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal" published at the end of 2021 was selected into the Guangming Daily Guangming Book List, and the team organized and hosted a symposium on the publication of the book this year, with the participation of the author, the ambassadors of China and Panama and relevant scholars in the field of Central American studies, and the publication of the book and the holding of the event were affirmed by the embassies of China and Pakistan. In terms of social benefits, the book series was rated as the annual publishing brand of the Beijing News in 2021; in terms of market performance, the average print volume of a single variety of books is about 12,000 copies. For a nascent brand, we consider ourselves qualified.
Reject grand narratives and stay exactly at a distance from the market
A publishing brand is able to survive in a fierce market, and values and personality are the lowest determinants. We have always deliberately rejected some popular "big books" that are keen on grand narratives, and we certainly hope to be recognized by the market, but we also do not want to be so constrained and coerced by the market that we fall into the quagmire of blindly chasing the market; we want to maintain a suitable distance from the market, both to maintain the value characteristics of the brand and to ensure that the team can operate economically.
So far, how to do a good job in the publication and dissemination of hard-core social science books, how to adhere to and advocate their own publishing values, how to achieve a balance between social and economic benefits, on these issues, we have gradually found our own rhythm, making us more convinced of the underlying logic of the team's publishing concept: caring about the situation, fate and choice of people behind history and society, and presenting and transmitting the rationality and temperature of the text through publication.
The New Dark Ages: The End of Technology and the Future
James Bradell by Song Ping, Translated by Liang Yu
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2019-6
If so far, the team has slowly found its own direction and rhythm in the brand building of the product line, we think that the main thing is that the team has been trying to do the following points.
█ Clarify and adhere to the value orientation of the product line, adhere to the cultural taste, and take into account the economic benefits
Under the current situation of increasingly fierce competition in book sales, most people believe that the sales of social science books are small, the base of the target reader group is limited, and it is difficult to ensure considerable economic benefits. Although compared with the children's section, the social science book audience is indeed relatively narrow, but in recent years, driven by emerging book brands, through the establishment of brands, polishing texts, improving the reading experience of paper books, refined marketing, etc., the social science book product market has gradually warmed up, and more and more thoughtful and text-friendly books are loved by readers.
The "Gravity" book series focuses on topics such as world history, Chinese history and other humanities and social science public issues, which are not easy to change from time to time and place, forming a product matrix with accurate positioning, clear structure, complementary support and collaborative operations. For example, "The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940", "The Blood Fortress: The Siege of Przemehill and the Arrival of the European Catastrophe", "The Land of Tears: The Cruel History of Colonization, Trade and African Globalization", "Little Mandate of Heaven: Ancestral Shrines and Ming Dynasty Politics", "Song Taizong" and other products are the embodiment of this concept. Social science books have their own unique significance and value, do not move with the trend, and always have their own core market and core readership. Doing social science publishing, paying too much attention to short-term economic gains and chasing hot spots, is likely to gain more than it is worth the loss; insisting on their own publishing value judgments, willing to give up some short-term interests, and insisting on being a long-termist, accumulating steps can often lead to thousands of miles. As long as there is sufficient depth of content as a support, do a good job of marketing communication and reader reach, readers can often read and new, and naturally can maintain long-term sales in the market.
The Little Mandate of Heaven: Ancestral Shrines and the Politics of the Ming Dynasty
[Beauty] Shi Shanshan by Shao Changcai translated
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2022-2
For the "Gravity" team, the most proud thing is not to publish a very best-selling social science work (of course, if the "Gravity" book can be sold, we are very welcome), but to successfully publish some ideological but not very easy to read social science works.
For example, Ant Society: A Fascinating History is by far the team's longest-spent social science book edited but with a less clear market outlook. The book blends biological, political, sociological, and literary perspectives, and involves an extremely wide range of intellectual theories, from a single individual to a whole society, from monarchy to democratic society, from Hobbes's Leviathan-style all-powerful state to the totalitarian utopia in Brave New World, to atomized, networked postmodern society. The difficulty of the manuscript not only caused headaches for the first review editor, but also the re-examination, final review and proofreading teachers also called for help, and they all said that they would never want to see the manuscript again. However, it is gratifying that the book has been published quietly for less than a year, and has been quietly printed in 11,000 copies, and has been shortlisted (accompanied) by the annual book selection with public influence, including Shenzhen Reading Month, New Weekly Blade Book Award, and Beijing News Book Review Weekly.
Ant Society: A Fascinating History
[de] Nils Weber by Wang Lei, translated
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2021-7
This book, undisputed within the team, is considered the most pioneering, the most difficult, and the most testing hard-core social science book that readers can read and patience. In the early days of the team's inception, I have been discussing with my colleagues that if I can sell the original, academic, literary, and popular social science books such as "Chernobyl: A Tragic History", which is good, it is a skill, but it can edit, publish, and disseminate the social science niche books that are not easy to read like "Ant Society" and "Sympathy Nowhere" but can indeed provide us with a more diversified perspective on the world, which can highlight the publishing philosophy and publishing temperament of an editorial team. How to do a good job in the popularization of niche social science books, although we are still feeling the stones to cross the river, but at least we have taken the first step, touched the first small stone, and will not fall into the river and drown.
█ Balance the academic and popular nature of the text, and seek the same frequency resonance with the social psychology of the times
One of the keys to building a good social science book product line is to balance between academic and popular. In terms of the balance between academic and popular, the "Universal Gravity" book series focuses on cutting into social science issues from the perspective of history, culture and thought, seeking resonance between the text and the current social psychology, trying its best to arouse the psychological resonance of readers and ensure the long-term influence of books. In the process of building the social science product line, we have always strived to break the self-closure and self-circulation of the academic nature of the text, while ensuring the academic content and content quality of the text, as far as possible to move closer to the readability; with the text that is easier to impress the reader, open up the market, consolidate the brand foundation, gradually expand the scope and diversity of the topic, and gradually improve the frontier and ideological and cultural content of the fields and themes of the book series.
Chernobyl: A Tragic History
[Beauty] Shahili Purokki by Song Hong, translated by Cui Rui
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2020-7
Taking the "Gravity" book series "Chernobyl: A Tragic History" as an example, the book was selected into the Shanghai Revitalization of Chinese Reading Activities "Centennial Style" Yue Reading List, selected as douban 2020 annual book (history and culture), PageOne Bookstore 2020 annual book, the cumulative print volume of 80,000 copies, not surprisingly, will be the "universal gravity" of the first social science book to achieve "100,000 +", but also the first book in the publishing industry and readers to really begin to understand the "universal gravity", to achieve double effect.
Shortly after we won the rights with a reasonable upfront payment, the book won one of the most prestigious non-fiction writing awards in the English-speaking world in the United Kingdom, the Bailey Gifford Award, then the Pushkin Book Award, and then the 2019 HBO short drama "Chernobyl" that exploded the topic in China, greatly increasing the popularity of this topic in China. Looking back now, with these traffic foreshadowing, it seems natural that Chernobyl: A Tragic History will perform better in the market.
However, when the team first decided to make this choice, they did not think too much about these traffic logics, and of course, there could not have been a prescient prediction that the book could win so many awards or that HBO's short drama would be a huge success. At that time, the main consideration was that the textual characteristics presented in this book were what we imagined the "gravitational force" of the topic should look like, the text achieved an appropriate balance in terms of originality, scholarship, literature and popularity, and more importantly, from the text, we could observe and sniff the position and fate of people in the huge disaster torrent, and we could feel the temperature of the author's care and thinking about human values. This is also the basic criterion for us to measure the "gravity" topic, and it is the value judgment we adhere to.
█ Find the entry point and accumulate the starting potential energy of the social science product line
How to gather high-quality social science topic resources in a relatively short period of time to start the construction of product lines, the "Gravity" team has done a lot of exploration. Due to its location in the local area, far from the highland of cultural and publishing resources, the team faces various constraints in organizing high-end social science topic selection resources. After many experiments, the team chose to start with the imported version of the social science book, and quickly gathered the social science topics with solid texts, distinctive characteristics and sufficient marketing points.
For original social science topics, local publishing houses may objectively have two major difficulties, one is that there are difficulties in obtaining publishing clues and contacting high-end author resources in the first time, and the other is that they lack model projects that can fully prove that they have market-oriented trading capabilities. These two issues are mutually causal. Then, in the case that the local publishing platform has a relatively weak communication power of the book brand and cannot get the core topics of the domestic first-class authors, it is obviously difficult to build a large-scale social science book product line from zero to one. Compared with the domestic high-end original social science works, the import of copyright books from the international market relies relatively little on the brand of the publishing house, and on the basis of extensive mining of selected topics, full investigation of the market, and careful evaluation of texts, in terms of copyright reserves, the gap between local publishing houses and the Central Publishing House is not an insurmountable gap.
The Land of Tears: A Brutal History of Colonization, Trade, and Globalization in Africa
[American] Robert Harms by Feng Xiaoyuan translated
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2022-3
Based on the above considerations, the "Gravity" book series will take the imported version of social science books as a stepping stone for brand communication, establish a good brand image with high-quality imported works, exercise the team, and feed back the original with market-tested works and gather high-quality original resources. After the brand communication of the book series has a certain potential energy, the focus is on the original market.
With the demonstration effect of the published books of "gravity", the team began to contact young scholars in the field of humanities and social sciences in scientific research institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Capital Normal University, Fudan University, Sun Yat-sen University, Jinan University and other universities, especially young scholars from universities in South China, and made a relatively obvious breakthrough in the composition of original social science books. In fact, copyright books and original books are not two categories of either-or, but two types that complement each other and promote each other, so as to achieve the two-wheel drive of feeding originality with copyright books and promoting copyright books with originality.
There are not many marketing moves, but never salted fish!
In the matter of publishing, we are still elementary school students. The publication of each book will leave some regrets, such as the timing of publication is not right, such as the cover does not show the content well, such as the marketing story is not well told, and ultimately failed to attract more readers, and failed to live up to the wonderful content. Readers of Gravity (yes, we have a little bit of popularity) said of us: The book is very good, and the marketing is almost bad. Indeed, in terms of promotion strength and promotion means, we do not have many moves. The book is not bad, so in the early stage of listing, it can always get the support of Douban and some mainstream media, and after these three axes, it is a bit stretched. We are also actively trying some new means, such as cooperation with Douyin masters, video promotion, broadening the channels of direct contact with readers, throwing editors into major reading groups, telling readers books, and communicating with readers. In short, active trial and error, never salted fish.
Song Taizong: The Emperor in the Shadows
Zhang Qifan
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2022-3
In this all-media era, various means of promotion are emerging in an endless stream, and our coping strategy is very simple: more good books. In 2022, with the continuous improvement of team building, the publishing volume of "Universal Gravity" will be significantly improved, and more products will meet with readers every year. In addition, we have also begun to plan to expand product categories, in addition to excellent world history and overseas sinology works, in the fields of cultural history, sociology, anthropology and other fields to do more attempts, open up small subdivisions, enrich the brand connotation. There are many varieties, but the standard of publication remains the same: pay attention to the living conditions of contemporary people, and look for words and ideas that resonate with the same frequency as the times.