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Last update - 18:51 09/06/2008 Questions & Answers A Conversation with Ilai Melzer By David B. Green Tags: ilai melzer, publishing  As Hebrew Book Week gets underway, the managing director of a family-owned publishing house talks about why small can be good, and about Harry P., and explains why it sometimes seems that the people who make and sell books care only about best-sellers (hint: because it's true) May 28-June 7 marks Hebrew Book Week, an annual spring event when the country's publishers set up stands at outdoor markets across Israel, and most offer significant discounts on their titles. It's an event that's taken place every year since 1961, undeterred even by wars. The nature of book publishing in Israel, however, has changed significantly during that period. To get a sense of the meaning of those changes, Haaretz spoke with Ilai Melzer, the managing director of Sifrei Aliyat Hagag (Books in the Attic), the small Tel Aviv publisher founded two decades ago, and still headed, by his father, Yehuda Melzer. Books in the Attic hit the jackpot when Yehuda Melzer bought the Hebrew rights in 1999 to publish all seven planned volumes of a little-known British series about a boy magician named Harry Potter. Despite that success, the company, which mainly brings out translations, including popular-science titles and and new versions of classical texts, has remained small, bringing out no more than 20 titles a year. These, it distributes via a partnership with the far larger Yedioth Ahronoth Books. Haaretz spoke with Ilai Melzer, who is 38, by phone. ........ Q: What made you decide to go into business with your father? A:Although his professional training was in philosophy, as long as I can remember, my father was involved in books. His father too was a translator and a poet, and he made his living as an editor, so it's something of a family tradition. I was always accompanying my dad to printers and to binders, and of course to Hebrew Book Week. When I finished the army, I went to New York for two years, where I worked as a mover. When I came back I worked at a multimedia firm, and I worked in TV, at the Sports Channel. But I was always helping out my father, on a freelance basis. He would urge me to come work with him fulltime, and I always said, we'll see. One of the things that finally made me join was the fact that it was our thing -- "cosa nostra" -- and that we didn't have bosses other than ourselves. And it was more interesting than TV. Q:Most of the books you publish are translations of foreign titles. Why don't you publish more original material? A:The big money battles between publishers are over original manuscripts. The numbers can get quite high, and a lot of prestige is at stake too. At the same time, the search for the next great Hebrew writer can be Sisyphean. Of course, we have published original material. We published Haim Sabato [the rabbi and yeshiva head whose books "Adjusting Sights" and "The Dawning of the Day" have been best-sellers], and we also published the novel "The Mountain," by Avner Gluecklich, about the battle for Mt. Hermon during the 1973 war. That book really shook people up, and we're proud to have brought it out. Also, until a half year ago, it was just the two of us, not even a secretary. Now my uncle Muli [Melzer, until recently a co-owner of the travel publishing firm Mapa] has joined us, as has the editor Hanan Elstein. Writers need a lot of attention, and that's something we don't have to deal with when, for example, we publish editions of classical literature. My father likes to say he doesn't have to worry about Plato's mom calling to ask why she can't find her son's book at the Ra'anana mall. Q:But how satisfying is it to bring out translations of books originally published elsewhere? A:It's a real challenge. Take our translation of Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost," which we just published. Mendelsohn's writing is remarkable -- it's the book's greatest strength. To translate that and have it come out reading almost as wonderful as the original is very hard work. The author plays a lot with people's mistakes, in Yiddish and Polish, and different kinds of English. We were lucky to find Aviad Stier to translate it, but it was still a lot of work. We also issue many books on popular science, for example "Fermat's Last Theorem," by Simon Singh, and you have to make sure all the examples read right in Hebrew. At one point, Singh talks about the topology of a donut, and our translator wanted to render it in Hebrew as "sufganiyah" -- which misses the whole point, since Israeli jelly donuts don't have a hole in the center. You can't make mistakes like that. Books can rise and fall on the quality of the translation. Q:But your company also publishes classics. What's the economic logic behind that? A:If by classics, you mean the philosophy texts -- that's my father's background, and that's his dream, and in a sense, his Zionism. There are texts that have not been translated or were translated maybe 40 years ago, whereas in other countries, it's normal to see new renderings of different classics every few years. These books do sell slowly, but can provide steady income, from university reading lists, for example. Modern classics, like "The Master and Margarita," are something else. That was a big success, and it reached the best-seller list. Q:Tell me how it was you happened to publish Harry Potter. A Oh, it's already become a legend. People don't remember this, but the book was not an instant success when it came out in the United Kingdom. Only when it was published in the U.S., by which time the second volume was out in England, did it begin to take off. Around that time, my father read an item about the series in the professional journal Bookseller, and he decided to buy the Hebrew rights to the entire anticipated seven-book series. Then, a decade ago, the advance was not very high -- we paid about $1,000 for the rights to the first volume. Of course, the advance is always on account of royalties. Today, however, with auctions, Hebrew rights can go as high as $40,000 or $60,000. We try to avoid them. I think the highest advance we have paid for any book is about $8,000. Q:What does it mean to be in partnership with a big company like Yedioth Ahronoth? A: We have a clear division of responsibility. Aliyat Hagag chooses the titles, and we do the negotiations and the purchase of rights. We are responsible for editorial production but at the physical production level, the two companies work together, and we split all production and marketing costs -- and revenues -- 50:50. Yedioth has much more experience than we do. If we bring out two books a month, they bring out something like 20-30 a month. For us, the most important aspect of working with Yedioth is this: If you have a book that has the potential to become a best-seller, they have the ability to push it. Eyal Dadosh, their sales manager, has good instincts. The moment he had sensed that Haim Sabato could succeed, for example, he went everywhere to sell it -- for example, he placed ads in dozens of the newsletters that are distributed in synagogues around the country each Shabbat. And it worked. It's not just a matter of publicity. The real question is, can we back up a book with the proper distribution? Are there sales people around the country, who are bugging stores, and getting the best spots on the shelves? It's an entire campaign. This can work only if the book shows signs of life. Dov Eichenwald, from Yedioth, once said to me that he sees his job as "strengthening the strong." If a title is weak, there's not much to be done. It's not our job to educate the market. We use our instincts and when it's a strong book, we push it very hard. Q:But what does the philosophy of "strengthening the strong" mean for good books that don't have the potential to be best-sellers? A: You are right that we're always looking for the next best-seller. A big country like the U.S. has niche markets. There, you can bring out what you want, and you know that there will be an audience for it. Here, we don't have that sort of margin. So, everyone's looking for trends. Stores have eliminated shelf space, and they only push what's on sale. And what's on sale is what's new and hot. This is bad, commercially and culturally. As recently as a decade ago, publishers' bread-and-butter was the backlist. Now, the stores just aren't stocking titles from our backlists. If a soldier goes into a store in Be'er Sheva, he won't be able to find "Crime and Punishment." In France, and other countries as well, there's a law that prohibits discounts on books during the first two years they are in print. The idea is that new books will naturally get shelf space, and don't need help. Q:But aren't there books that slowly build up readerships, that the public becomes interested in as a result of an unusually positive review, for example? A: I'm afraid I don't see a critic in Israel who has such standing that he can change the fate of a book. Maybe Ariana Melamed [who reviews for the Ynet Web site]. But it's not like in Germany, where a critic like Marcel Reich-Ranicki can singlehandedly make a book by Zeruya Shalev into a best-seller, nor do we have an equivalent to Oprah. Here, you can have books praised in all three big papers and still fail. When I read a review of a book, I may find it interesting, but the question I'm asking is: Can I get take a blurb for an ad from it? Q:And what's the role of Hebrew Book Week? A: It's still pretty important, even if its commercial importance has declined. Up until five to 10 years ago, discounts were pretty minimal, and so this was the one time you could buy books at discount. Today it's crazy all year with discounts. Four books for 100 shekels, and all kinds of other deals. But it's still an opportunity to see a wide selection of books in one place. I still personally show up to sell books at Book Week. And I buy them too. It's a beautiful tradition. Some 5,000 new books are published here each year, and stores don't have room to display them all. Q:Would you like to see a fourth generation of Melzers enter publishing? A: I'll be satisfied if my kids are happy in their lives. Q:Let me put it this way, then: Do you think there will be publisher called Books in the Attic a few decades down the line? A: There's just no way of knowing. Buying a publishing company is not like buying another kind of company. If you buy us, and we're no longer part of the firm, all you're buying is our backlist. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Convicts 4 kneidlach Demand for kosher cuisine swells ranks of Jewish prison chaplains in U.S. All the way to hell Rosner's blog: It's Obama's good intentions that pro-Israel activists fear.

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