Friday, August 7, 2009

Meet the Press (Quartet Press, That Is): Don Linn

Written by Kat Meyer

In part three of our four-part series, “Meet the Press” we proudly introduce you to Don Linn. Esteemed Renaissance dude, bon vivant, and as you will see – a man of few words.

(FYI: we are 3/4 of the way through the series. Regular programming will soon return to the Quartet Press blog.)

1. What were you doing before you became 1/4 of Quartet Press?

DL: I’ve had a long and varied career—hardly the carefully-planned career path that high school guidance counselors laid out for me in 1971 as I headed off to Vanderbilt University. I majored in Economics but spent an inordinate amount of time hanging around the English department, one of the greenhouses of so-called “Southern literature.” While I wound up continuing my business education with an MBA from Harvard, reading has continued to be the great joy in my life (along with my family and certain fried foods).

Upon receiving the MBA, I entered the world of finance as an investment banker, working for twelve years at two major Wall Street firms. I learned (a) how to get things done and (b) what it’s like when your compensation is based entirely on your performance. It instills a certain discipline.

The birth of my two children and the grueling travel schedule of investment banking led me to rethink my priorities and my (then) wife and I made the decision to slow the pace. We moved to a small town in Mississippi where I took on the role of managing partner for her family’s businesses, which included large cotton, catfish, soybean, rice, corn and wheat farms, a catfish processing and marketing plant, a cotton gin, a feed mill, a small bank, a chain of assisted living facilities and some other odds and ends. Yes, that was a change, and you can read more than you probably care to know about it in chapter 19 of Po Bronson’s 2002 book What Should I Do with My Life?. Suffice it to say, my business skills and my ability to adapt to different situations were honed during those fourteen years.

In mid-2001, I faced another “What Should I Do?” moment due to some changes in my personal life. As if by magic, the above-mentioned Po Bronson reappeared, calling to say he was on the board of a book distribution company (Consortium) in St. Paul, Minnesota, that was for sale, and he thought I should buy it. I went to look and thought it was an opportunity to work with some really cool and important independent publishers (City Lights, Akashic, Copper Canyon and New Society, to name only a few), turn it around and make some money. So I bought it, had some success and ended up selling it to Perseus Book Group in 2006.

After knocking around for a few months, I accepted an offer to become senior vice president and publisher at The Taunton Press, a top-quality publisher of hands-on and how-to books, magazines and Web sites. It was a great experience to work with an incredibly talented and generous group of people at Taunton, and we were fortunate enough to produce New York Times bestsellers, James Beard and IACP award winners and category leaders in our target markets.

But I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and I’ve been fascinated with this transitional phase of reading, writing and publishing for some time. So when Kassia, Kat, Kirk and I finally came up with the idea to put Quartet together, it seemed the time was right to make the move.

2. What’s up with romance? Is getting into what seems to be a pretty crowded market really a good idea? Why? Where’d the idea come from? Where is it going?

DL: I’m reminded of Willie Sutton’s famous response when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.”

I mean that more in the broad sense than strictly the romance genre’s recent sales growth, which itself has been astounding—even in the face of a bad economy. I also consider romance readers and publishers as being on the leading edge of the (non-academic and professional) adoption curve of reading digital books. Since we’re in this as a primary business proposition (rather than as a vanity publisher or an experiment in digital publishing), we chose to start with a genre that has a large and growing audience. While a case might be made that the market is crowded, we expect the quality of our titles, the Quartet discovery-shopping-purchase experience and the fact that we’re offering our books DRM free will make us stand out from the pack.

As for where it’s going, we think the romance genre offers plenty of room to operate in existing and emerging sub-genres, but we also think there are opportunities in other categories, such as mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, and even literary fiction. Anywhere there’s a dedicated, hard-core community of readers is fair game as far as I’m concerned. We also think, because we’re building such a robust back-end system, there are opportunities for us to provide certain services for other independent publishers who’d rather not reinvent the wheel themselves.

3. Where did you find these people you are working with? Sure they’re a good-looking group, but why them?

DL: I first met Kassia (virtually) in 2003 or 2004 because I was a fan of Booksquare.com and commented occasionally on her blog. I thought she was smart and funny, and when she mentioned in one post that she was planning to go to an O’Reilly “Tools of Change” conference in San Jose, I asked her if we could meet for a drink and conversation. She, her husband Kirk and I had a long wandering conversation filled with laughs. My assessment that they were both very smart proved true. We maintained our friendship and sort of danced around the possibility of working on something together. We reconnected at South by Southwest in February and really began to flesh out what that something might be.

As we were kicking around the idea (and realizing we needed a marketing maven as part of the team), we (independently) kept seeing Kat Meyer popping up just about everywhere and determined she would be the perfect fit for what we had in mind. The four of us, after some awkward phone calls, finally met in person at BEA and hammered out the basics of our company and its future.

Why them? They’re all smart and funny. They take the business (but not themselves) seriously. They want to be successful—and not just in some vague publishing sense. Also, they agreed with me that Quartet’s bylaws must include a “no stupid meetings” clause.

4. What’s your role at QP?

DL: As we’re running as fast as we can toward launch, all of us are doing a bit of everything. We like that because it keeps us evenly spread as well as makes sure more than one of us is looking at the various pieces of the puzzle so we don’t overlook anything critical.

That said, if I were to characterize my role, it would be focused on finance, administration and general management, which are the skill sets from my background. But I’m curious (some say nosy) enough that I expect to have a hand in most everything as we ramp up and grow.

5. What’s your favorite thing about starting a brand spanking new company?

DL: There are a lot of things to love about a start-up … the excitement, the camaraderie, the sense of building (rather than just managing) something, but my favorite thing about this particular venture is that we’re not bound by any of the old publishing infrastructure, systems or (not least!) thinking.

We literally were able to begin with a clean sheet of paper and write down what we wanted in systems, in marketing, in content and workflow management and most importantly in the reader and author experience. We really believe we’re at the tipping point for digital publishing, and we have the ability to create and push limits for readers, authors and communities.

6. What is the weirdest reason you’ve purchased a book?

DL: I don’t know how weird it is, but it’s unusual. I have a great love of independent bookstores and their proprietors. When I lived in Mississippi, our closest indie was McCormick’s, in Greenville, MS.

I trusted Hugh McCormick’s taste so much that I had a standing order for him to send me whatever came in that he was excited about for two years. He had about a 95% ‘hit rate” on his choices for me. And this was before I ever thought I’d be in the book business.