Happiness Means Reading a Good Book

Everybody knows it for being the publisher of Andrea Camilleri's "Montalbano" books, but Sellerio is more than that. This Palermo-based publishing house, whose catalogue contains works by masters of Italian modern literature, such as Sciascia, Bufalino, Consolo, Scerbanenco, Tabucchi, and many others, manages to hit the bestseller list every year with uncanny regularity. It keeps on putting out literary bestsellers, such as Carofiglio and Malvaldi, and has won three Campiello Prizes since 2010. In 2015, it was Sellerio author Marco Balzano who received the second most important literary award in Italy.

Since its founding, Sellerio has been strongly rooted in Sicily, but has also always been open to international literature. Among Italian publishers, it is a rarity because it has managed to combine a quality catalogue with strong sales, without making any concessions to instant books or titles by TV celebrities, in a shrinking market dominated by two or three big publishers.

This choice was made by the two founders Elvira and Enzo, parents of Antonio Sellerio, who graduated in Business Administration at Bocconi and is now running the family firm.

To what extent can a publishing house be run like any other company? In other words, how does a business degree help a publisher do his work?

Publishers tend to exaggerate the uniqueness of their work. However, it's undeniable that, particularly in a publishing house like ours, the economic objective is as important as the production and diffusion of ideas. 50% of our turnover comes from currently released titles. So we cannot afford to rest on our laurels, since unpredictability and randomness rule the world of books.

How do you build a business when market categories are fluid? More specifically, is there an indicator that gives you an idea that a book will be a market success before you publish it?

There is no recipe for publishing a successful book: you have to make a series of preliminary evaluations to back your instinct. In a novel we seek literary quality, originality and contemporary relevance. We rely on the strength of our brand, in the trust that it inspires in readers. In this sense, I am more worried by the damage caused to the brand by negative feedback because we published bad titles, than by promoting the brand through our best books. It's fundamental not to disappoint our readers. We commit ourselves to releasing books whose quality fully convinces us, and promote them for what these books are, rather than for what we think the market might like.

What kind of work did you do on an author like Camilleri, in order to transform his Sicilian-peppered Montalbano series of crime fiction in one of Italy's most important cultural products, loved by millions of people around the world?

I must confess that although Andrea Camilleri is a uniquely talented novelist, I still cannot completely explain his huge success. He writes elaborate plots and frequently relies on Sicilian dialect for dramatic effect, and these are not the typical elements of a bestseller. But Sellerio is more than Camilleri. We always seek to put other authors of standing next to him. In 2015, we placed seven of our books in Italy's Top 100: three are by Camilleri, but there also the novels by Manzini and Malvaldi, authors whom we discovered and launched ourselves.

Italy is a country of writers rather than a country of readers. Does this make the Italian publishing market and your job as publisher different than elsewhere?

Half of the Italian population does not even read one book in the course of a year. In other countries, non-readers range from a minimum of 10% to a maximum of 30%. This is a problem not just for the Italian publishing industry, but for the cultural development of the whole country. Our gap in reading indicators is roughly the same across all income and education levels, so that also our elites are reading less than their European counterparts. It's been proved that reading, even novels, increases productivity: it enables the comprehension of different realities and the understanding of different needs from one's own; it helps one develop a flexible frame of mind. Furthermore, recent research has shown that those who read are happier than those who don't.

For a while, the death knell has been sounding for independent publishers. With the acquisition of Rizzoli by Mondadori, the Italian market has become further concentrated and small publishers are more threatened than ever. How can Sellerio survive in such an environment?

Having strong roots is an asset, as is the fact of being a family company, although our limited size can be a liability. Like many, I am persuaded that financialization is one of the biggest problems plaguing the contemporary economy. Exasperated short-termism is endangering actual business enterprises. All too often, managers have to deliver short-term performance. A healthy family company can bet on the longer term with more ease. In fact, what makes me very proud is to show the youth living in the Southern Italy that even in Sicily it's possible to create a cultural business that can compete with Northern publishing groups without reverential fears.

Both your parents are now deceased. Do you think their founding values (focus on Sicilian fiction, a modern way of reissuing classics, the Italian road to detective fiction, as well as publishing literary and/or crime fiction from distant lands) are still capable of ensuring Sellerio's future?

These are key elements, but in publishing you must start from your roots to do new things. If we are repetitive, the readership notices it, and it also gets boring for us. We are opening to foreign fiction, especially countries like Korea, Japan, and China, whose literature is still underpublished in Italy. In global times, we still know little about how it feels to live in the countries where many of the changes affecting our lives and society originate from.