MARKETING: EMILY COOK

Emily Cook was named one of Publishers Weekly “Top 40 Under 40.” She combines a passion for indie press publishing and literary fiction with innovative strategy, on a book-by-book basis. She has most recently teamed up with Richard Nash to launch Cursor, a marketing service offering a curated list of international publishers to readers in the United States.

On Cursor’s website, it creates two groups: “Publishers” and “Those Who Don’t {Yet} Know They’re Publishers,” how widely or specifically do you define the term “publisher,” both personally and as a company?

In terms of the publishers we work with—all international, all distributing here in the U.S.—we are basically their umbrella U.S. publishing office. So all things publicity, marketing—also list building, trade shows, the Brooklyn Book Fair, etc.

How do you select the international publishers you work with? Is there any guiding philosophy?

We want to make sure they all fit together, puzzle pieces of a whole—and that we are passionate about and in love with their books. Really, in some ways it is no different from building a list by season, or building a lit mag’s next issue: hard to define, but you have to know when all the bits (or, all the publishers) will compliment each other, bounce off of each other—even help each other. All this, without competing. I’d say the thing I am personally the most cautious about is not having literary fiction that competes per season, as it’s definitely hard to get attention for fine literary fiction for American writers, let alone international ones.